Exes With Benefits

by Nicole Williams

  Canaan seemed surprised by the suddenness of it and started to move faster, until his cries tangled with mine. Gripping my hips, he buried himself inside me so deeply I could feel his release. I felt a part of him become a part of me. I felt part of me become part of him at the same time.

  A tremor ran through his body at the end of his orgasm, a sheen of sweat covering his forehead. He didn’t roll off of me or collapse on me or pull free. He stayed hovering above, buried inside, staring at me with a look that required no translation.

  It was the way a person looked at the person they loved beyond reason and measure. It was the way he’d been looking at me for years, but I’d only just begun to realize it.

  “I love you, Maggie.” The words fell from his lips before they touched mine.

  My arms curled around his back, not sure I could remove them when the time came. “I know.”

  We waited until the storm was right overhead before we moved. Until the sound of thunder was so loud, it vibrated the soft earth beneath us.

  “I don’t have all of my clothes on yet,” I hissed when he started toward me, him still missing his shirt and shoes.

  He didn’t pay attention to what I said, heaving me off the ground and throwing me over his shoulder. “It’s dark. No one will see.” His voice was light, the closest thing to happy Canaan could sound.

  “Someone will see. Someone always sees.”

  When he shrugged, my body lifted a couple inches. “So what?” He smacked my backside before breaking through the tangle of willow branches and making a run for the house.

  So what?

  My heart sank when I realized what he thought our roll in the grass was. My heart sank a little more when I realized I was still as confused as I’d been before. Given, I felt amazing—really amazing—but sex with Canaan had always done that. Life could have been falling apart around us and one round of sex would give me a temporary reprieve from it all.

  But that didn’t mean it was an answer. Or a compass. Or a glass ball.

  Because we were really good at one part of a relationship didn’t mean we’d been any good at the other parts.

  As Canaan charged across the yard, drops of rain fell across my back, cooling my heated skin. He snagged my canvas in passing, shielding the painted side against his chest as he skirted through the rest of the yard, laughing like we were playing a game of tag like we used to as kids.

  I couldn’t help it. My laugher joined his. This moment was too special not to be happy about. We still had twenty days to do what we wanted without explanation or excuse or reason.

  So what?

  The phrase chimed in my head again. Exactly. So fucking what?

  Canaan’s feet beat up the porch steps right as the storm picked up, dousing the landscape in the freshest rain I’d ever smelled. He set me down once we were on the porch, and he carefully propped my painting against the side of the house. Some water spots had displaced the paint, making it run in a few places, but somehow it added to the overall effect of the piece. Without my knowing what it had been missing, now it was complete.

  Tugging at my shirt in an attempt to cover the majority of my underwear, I moved to the edge of the porch to watch the storm. It was more dark than light and the whole world seemed still, save for the storm. We didn’t get storms like this in Chicago. At least not ones a person could enjoy like this—on their front porch, taking in the scents the rain created when it hit thirsty soil and blooming freesia. Where the grey-swirled sky went from horizon to horizon, uninterrupted by endless spires of buildings jutting into it.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed, my arms folded over my chest.

  “You—you—are beautiful.” Canaan joined me at the edge of the porch, his arm motioning out. “The storm is . . . nice.”

  My mouth moved. “You already got laid. Which means you don’t have to keep dropping lines like that on me.”

  Canaan’s chest moved, his head turning toward me. “Yeah, and I’m hoping to get laid again. Real soon. So I’m going to keep tossing lines at you until one of them works.”

  Damn it anyway, I couldn’t contain my smile, which only made his get bigger. Glancing away from the storm, I looked at him from the corner of my eyes. I turned so I could get a better angle, double-checking.

  “I painted you,” I said, checking my fingers, which were nearly clean.

  Canaan looked down at himself, his brow furrowing when he saw streaks of color scratched all along his bare skin. Bursts of color were even popping through in his dark hair, a bunch of streaks concentrating along his neck.

  “I’m a masterpiece,” he grunted, turning his arms over to check out the rest of the damage.

  “I don’t know. My work looks rushed, sloppy. I could do better.” I felt heat rush through me again when I noticed the concentration of color disappearing into his jeans above his belt.

  “Then I’ll look forward to you cleaning me off. Every inch of me from the looks of it.” He stopped checking out the paint streaks to move behind me. “And redoing it all over again. And again. And however many times it takes until you’re satisfied.”

  “Such a martyr.”

  His chest moved against my back when he chuckled as his arms wove around me. We stood like that for a while, watching the storm pass by. It was the first time I’d felt content, at peace, in such a long time I couldn’t remember the last. I felt safe in Canaan’s arms, but it was more than that. I felt strong in them too. Like the world couldn’t touch me.

  I could have stayed like that the rest of the night, but once the thunder had passed and the rain had ceased, Farmington came back to life. We ducked inside the house when the headlights of the first car shone at the end of the road. I guessed Canaan led me inside not because it was what he wanted, but what he guessed I did.

  He was right. I wasn’t ready for everyone to know about us, temporary as it might have been.

  And he was wrong. I didn’t care then and I didn’t much care now what others knew or thought.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I asked as I headed toward the kitchen. For the first time since arriving in Farmington, I felt cool.

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what?” I said when he added nothing more.

  “How late you have in mind for keeping me up.” He was leaning into the doorway, all freshly sexed and grinning like an idiot at me moving around the kitchen in my shirt and underwear.

  “I think we should take things easy.”

  “Kind of late for that.” Canaan glanced out the window at the willow. I could just make out one of his boots half sticking out from the branches.

  “Fine. Then we should pace ourselves.” I filled the coffee pot with water, trying to distract myself from what I really wanted—him. Again. Already.

  Not good. Especially for the woman who’d shown up with divorce papers in hand for said him less than two weeks ago.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?” he pushed, rubbing at some of the paint on his forearms.

  I paused before replying, actually considering why. “Because it seems like the prudent thing to do, how about that?”

  Canaan gave an overdone frown. “How about not that? And since when have you ever been the prudent type?”

  I muttered under my breath, pouring some coffee grounds into the filter. “I just think, given our situation, we shouldn’t rush into stuff. We should take things slow.”

  “And having crazed sex in the front yard just now was taking things slow?”

  Leveling him with a look, I waved the tablespoon I was measuring coffee grounds with at him. “It was dark. We were hidden from view. And I didn’t plan on that happening.”

  “It was dusk, not dark. You were starting to undress me before I had the levelheadedness to duck into some shelter, and who plans for sex?” Canaan’s mouth twisted. “You carpe diem the hell out of that.”

  My hand went to my hip after I turned on the coffee pot. �
�Kind of like you’ve been carpe diem’ing the hell out of all of those women who’ve been sending out their fuck-me-Canaan-Ford spotlights?”

  His head tipped, but he never looked away. “I’m not looking for sex with just anyone. I’m looking for sex with the one.”

  “Me? I’m ‘the one’?” I motioned at myself, all paint smudged and disheveled.

  “You’ve always been the one. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you the past ten days. What I was too big of a fool to tell you my whole life.”

  The sound of the coffee percolating filled the kitchen as I leaned into the counter to study this man I thought I knew everything about, yet could still be so confused over. “You really haven’t been with anyone since I left?”

  He swallowed, his eyes cutting away. When he nodded once, my stomach gave a sharp twist. Then his finger pointed out the window at the willow. “I was just with this crazy fox, fucked me so good I forgot my damn name.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  His eyes sparked. “So am I.”

  “No one else?” I said after a minute.

  He didn’t pause. He didn’t blink. “No one.”

  “You waited five years?”

  He gave me a funny look, like he doubted my question. “I’d wait forever.”

  I could hear my breaths echoing in my head. This, him, us—it felt right. But experience, and the past, wouldn’t cease reminding me how wrong we were together.

  “Why?” I whispered, the sum total of all my confusion in one word. Why me? Why now? Why try again? Why go back?

  Why not?

  “You know why, Maggie.”

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  Canaan shifted his weight in the doorway. “Because I couldn’t love anyone else but you.” His throat moved as the corners of his eyes creased. “I know there’re more romantic ways to say it, but that’s the truth. I might have made a vow on our wedding day to love you forever, but I’d known that years before saying those words to you. I will love you forever. There’s no changing that for me. You have to decide if you feel the same.”

  I didn’t realize at first I was staring at my left hand. The ring had circled my finger for such a short time, but years later, I still found myself missing it. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer that. I’d like to, but I want to be honest with you. We didn’t work once. In fact, we were a goddamn chaotic mess. Why should we even think we might have a chance at getting it right the second time around?”

  When he saw me reach for the sugar bowl, he went to the fridge to pull out the creamer for me. He knew how I liked my coffee. He knew just about everything one person could know about another.

  “Because you can’t write a great love story without a tragedy to overcome. Because that’s when love’s proved. Not when life’s easy, but when it’s so damn hard you can barely breathe.”

  “I didn’t prove it though. I didn’t overcome our tragedy.” I looked at him, feeling Canaan everywhere though he wasn’t touching me. “I walked away.”

  His fingers laced around my left hand. “You’re standing right in front of me.”

  Like the good martyr he was, Canaan offered to stay over last night. Like the “prudent” woman I was, I told him that wasn’t necessary and sent him packing. To the garage apartment a whole hundred yards away.

  This morning I woke up to blue skies and a lightness inside, as though whatever clouds had been lingering within me had been forced out. I didn’t realize I’d been carrying a heaviness until it was gone.

  I refused to think about why that might have been, because if sex with my ex was the answer I guessed it was, what did that say about me? Canaan might have been a master in that arena, but I couldn’t be one of those people who believed sex was the cure-all to life’s problems. Not that it seemed like such a bad philosophy, now that I’d gone against my warning and was thinking about it. People used pills, alcohol, retreating from the world as cure-alls. Sex, as far as coping mechanisms went, didn’t seem like such a bad thing compared to the alternatives.

  Of course realizing that forced me to accept it wasn’t just sex, but who it had been with. Reed could have given his best performance and I would still feel like the world had lost its shine a moment later.

  Too many thoughts were fighting for space in my head, so I decided to leave Grandma’s house and see what kind of distractions I could find. Harassing Rachel at the bowling alley was a possibility, or I could always check in with John for a rummy rematch. The appeal of driving straight to Canaan’s shop and vying for a repeat of last night was so intense, I actually repeated to myself under my breath that I would not drive straight to Canaan once I got behind the steering wheel.

  As soon as I opened the front door, I froze mid-step. So much for trying to avoid Canaan. I didn’t need a note or a confirmation to know who the flowers on the porch were from. They were all handpicked from the surrounding area, resting in the same old vase he used to bring me flowers in back when we’d been kids and nothing more than friends.

  I couldn’t help contrasting them with the generic red roses Reed had sent me. Canaan knew what I liked, he took the time to find what I liked, and he made an effort beyond the bare basics. It wasn’t enough to say you cared for someone; you had to show them or it was nothing more than noise and wind.

  Once I’d set them inside and taken a moment to admire the mix of flowers, I found myself checking the driveway for Canaan’s truck. It wasn’t there; he’d probably left hours ago for work. The itch to head straight to his shop struck me again, so I went back to repeating to myself I would not hunt him down with the intent of seducing him. Not that Canaan ever required much, if any, seducing before.

  Once I was in my car, I headed in the opposite direction of Canaan’s shop, finding myself pulling into an all-too-familiar cemetery a couple miles later. Most everyone in town had family buried in the Holy Names Cemetery, mainly because it was the only cemetery in a fifty-mile radius. However, for a person as young as I was, I’d spent way too much time huddled graveside while watching a casket lowered into the ground, bearing a body whose life had gone decades before its time.

  It was where my grandma would be laid to rest in a few short days, but something about a person dying at a ripe old age, after they’d gotten to experience and do so much with life, made death easier to cope with. More a celebration somehow.

  Pulling the car over, I took a breath and stared out the window. It had been years since I’d visited my parents’ graves, but there wasn’t a day that passed that I didn’t think about them.

  From the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help noticing the manila envelope containing the stack of papers I’d handed Canaan the first day I arrived. I hadn’t touched them since tossing them back in the car after he refused to sign them, and I found myself wondering in what type of condition they’d be in when I left Farmington in twenty days. Would they remain unsigned? Or would he sign them, letting me go once and for all?

  I wasn’t sure which possibility worried me more, but that was what got me out of the car and moving toward the place my parents had been buried, side by side, much like they’d spent most of their short lives.

  My grandma had visited their graves regularly, I knew that, and I expected to find dried flowers in need of clearing. I did find flowers decorating their graves. But they weren’t dried. They looked almost as fresh as the ones that had been on my porch this morning.

  A ball formed in my throat as I stood in front of their headstones, reading each one half a dozen times, though I’d memorized the words years ago. Someone was still leaving them flowers, probably stepping in now that Grandma wasn’t here to do it. It could have been so many people—the list of friends and loved ones my parents had had in their lives wasn’t short—but I also knew that with time, allegiances and memories faded. For an orphaned daughter, it was different, but for the casual friend, nearly twenty years had passed. Yet still, someone was leaving them flowers.

  I stood the
re for a while before wandering farther into the grounds. There was one more grave I needed to visit. One more loved one gone far before his time.

  Asher Matthew Ford’s headstone was shining in a patch of grass where the sun was poking through the large maple looming nearby. It was fitting, since Asher was one of the happiest, most light-filled people I’d ever been around. Where Canaan was brooding, Asher was carefree. Where Canaan came across menacing, Asher was gentle. For a pair of brothers from the same parents, they couldn’t have been much more different. I thought that was why they’d gotten along so well. Why Canaan had taken his little brother’s loss so hard. Asher had had the type of spirit a person felt almost a sacred duty to protect—to save that kind of unrestrained innocence.

  That was why the world would never be as bright as it had been when Asher Ford had been a part of it.

  As I got closer, I found the same arrangement of flowers on Asher’s grave as I’d found on my parents’. The exact same.

  It was Canaan. He was the one who’d left the flowers. Some for me, some for his brother, and some for my parents.

  The lump returned with a vengeance, so after crouching down to rest my hand on Asher’s grave for a moment, I turned to leave the cemetery. No matter how immaculately the grounds were kept, no matter how many flowers sprouted from the manicured beds, a cemetery could never be a cheerful place. It was where the living came to visit the dead.

  I didn’t waste time starting my car when I crawled inside. I’d be back in a few short days anyway, to bury yet another loved one. Of the people I’d cared for most in my life, I’d lost three of four. It wasn’t until I’d passed through the cemetery gates that I realized who that fourth person was.

  Sure, I had friends in Chicago and friends here. Yes, I’d spent two years with a man I thought I’d shared some kind of bond with—only to be served a rude awakening that I was nothing more than a temporary fixture in his life. But Canaan had been with me—beside me—through the storms in life. He’d stayed beside me. He was still beside me.