WOS Gen Flashfic Challenge 22: And nail me to a lightning tree
She has this way of laughing with her whole body. Her face lights up and all the hard edges and sharp angles soften, but it’s the way her body relaxes that makes her truly beautiful at times like these. All her tenseness, her attitude, her defensiveness are completely gone, and she curls up on the couch like a kitten, snuggling delightedly into the cushions. She looks loose-limbed and happy and safe and utterly charmed.
Of course, they’re not on the couch right now. They’re sprawled soaking wet in the lush green grass, sun pounding down on them. The hose is spilling water onto the lawn next to them, a miniature swamp slowly encroaching on their position, and the car is…
… well, it’s not washed, that’s for damn sure.
She’s nestled against him, half on top of him, legs entangled, and probably the neighbours are staring but she’s never given a damn about what people think of her anyway and it’s far too late to start now. Her shirt clings appealingly to all her curves, softer and rounder than ever. She never did bother trying to get the lean sharp lines back that made up her body when he first knew her.
The source of her amusement is over by the garage door, a blond-haired tyrant in the form of a two-year-old human boy, Peter Pan himself, jumping up and down and tugging vainly at the tap that will turn off the hose and stop wasting its water. Not to mention ruining the lawn. He’s in shorts and a T-shirt, wet like their own, straining up on dirty tip-toes, little fingers hauling at the stiff tap.
She stands up, still laughing, tosses her hair out of her face, long blonde locks that slap wet and heavy against her back.
“Here, darling boy. Let me.”
“I can do it!” her darling boy says petulantly. There’s a set to his mouth and a look in his eyes that his father views with a touch of trepidation. Gonna be a handful.
Already is.
Little shudders of laughter still running through her, smile wide and bright. Her own hands look too long and delicate to turn the tap, pale and graceful; he’s one of the few who know how far appearances deviate from truth with her. No one else sees that far inside her; she doesn’t laugh like this for anyone but him.
In a way, that lovely free happy laugh of hers is her telling him I love you, over and over, louder and stronger than any words.
The water hissing out of the hose by him subsides, but he can feel his jeans soaking up even more of the stuff.
“I loosed it,” His Majesty the King says, still sulky.
She snatches him up and kisses his wet face, starting to pink with sunburn; they’d better get him inside.
“Yes, darling. You loosed it. Now, why don’t you drag Daddy out of the grass? Lazy sod.”
His turn to laugh, and she watches him the way he was watching her, open admiration and love with a side of pure sex, but he doesn’t notice that anymore than she notices the way he looks at her, each of them too wrapped up in the other and the little boy they made between them. His laughter is like home and safe and loved to her, coaxing her own out of her as His Majesty makes his way through the puddles to his Daddy. Fresh wave of merriment when he splashes through the swampy lawn, her head thrown back for just an instant, long lines of her neck exposed, right hand hovering at her chest as if to press it to her skin.
*********
It’s long gone midnight. The pressing heat of the day is replaced with a humidity that promises a thunderstorm in the near future, a heavy blanket laid over the world. She stands at the window to their bedroom, staring into the distance. Thin nightgown that clings to her the way her wet clothes did this afternoon. She’s biting on her lip, the bottom left corner. Sometimes, that means mischief.
This time, it means trouble. Worry.
But he’s asleep, sprawled out naked across their big soft bed, aching muscles recuperating. She wants to tell him not to work so damn much, God knows they can afford it, but he likes it. He likes knowing that he’s earned the money they spend with his own hands.
She has no such scruples. In fact, she’s got pretty few scruples full stop.
Whisper of a breeze drifts in the open windows, over her face. Maybe it’s her imagination, but it seems to carry a whiff of scent with it, something sharp and spicy and strange that beckons and tantalizes. She shudders in the heat. Deep deep in her gut where not even he will ever see, something twists and reaches out for that scent, for the smell of new places and the sight of the open road. It whispers of past pain and future hurt and the freedom of the open road, and her fingers clench a little around the window-sill.
It’s the rotting heat of a Louisiana graveyard that surrounds her, the smell of decay. Come come come whispers that tiny spicy little breeze, come come come.
For one terrible endless moment, she wants to. She wants to turn from the window and leave the house, leave her child for God’s sake, and run. But motherhood hasn’t made her a different person; why would it? The siren song of freedom doesn’t go away just because she’s been through labour.
But in the bed behind her, he shifts, sits up, remembering another night in a heat like this one, and calls out to her.
“Hey. Starin’ at that storm ain’t gonna make it come any faster. Kinda the opposite, actually.”
She laughs, a brief soft noise of wry amusement and as she does, she knows she’ll never go. She has a son, a job, a home. She has him, who can coax a laugh out of her with no more than a look and doesn’t really care about the parts of her he’ll never see. He’s seen enough, just as she’s seen enough of him. Everything else is trust.
She’s made her bed, and it’s perfect. That storm can wait forever as far as she’s concerned.