by Jo Goodman
Morgan looked at her for a long time before he slowly released the breath he had been holding. There was resignation in the long exhalation. “Tell me about the box,” he said. “Please.”
“I didn’t ask you for it because the case is a luxury. Any little box would have done to hold threads. When we walked through town that first morning, I saw this one in the milliner’s window, and I remembered it later when I realized I needed something like it. Or something exactly like it.”
“You could have asked me.”
“And feel small and foolish for wanting something pretty when I could have something practical?”
Morgan turned his head and looked up. This time he did not stare at the ceiling. This time he closed his eyes. “What a goddamn mess.” He heard himself. “Sorry, damn it. I mean, oh hell, you know what I mean.”
“I do,” said Jane. “It’s the damnedest thing, but I do.”
Morgan’s lips twitched, but he was quiet.
“Would you like a drink? I can pour you a whiskey.”
“Yes, I’d like one. Don’t move. I’ll get it myself.” He stayed precisely where he was, head back, eyes closed, slouched against the sofa. “In a minute.”
Jane let him be. She found the spool she wanted and threaded her needle. It was difficult. Her hands had a slight tremor that only the precise coordination required for threading a needle could reveal. She began mending the rent in Morgan’s shirt with an occasional glance in his direction.
“What are we going to do, Jane?”
Jane almost pricked herself with the needle. “I thought you had fallen asleep.”
“No. Sometimes I just think real quiet.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
“I want you to ask me for things,” he said. “Fancy things, if you are of a mind to have them. I noticed you kept that Wanamaker liniment bottle. It looks real nice sitting on the sill. Come spring, maybe you’ll want to put flowers in it.”
“I was thinking I would.”
Morgan laid a forearm across his eyes. “I could show you some patches around here where they grow wild. Pinks and blues and yellows. Lavender.”
“I’d like to see that.” Jane’s vision blurred. She dashed away a tear. Another followed, and this one landed on Morgan’s shirt cuff. Instead of trying to rub it out, Jane used the cuff to quickly dry her eyes before Morgan lifted his forearm and looked in her direction.
“So you’ll be here in the spring.”
Jane heard the smallest inflection at the end of his sentence that made it seem more question than statement, but if he expected a response he didn’t prompt again for it. Jane was glad for that. Tears were still clogging her throat.
“I noticed you finished your courses,” Morgan said.
That non sequitur dried her eyes, dissolved the lump in her throat, and drove an invisible fist into her diaphragm. Jane hiccupped.
Morgan’s arm fell away as he sat up. “Maybe we could both use a whiskey?”
This time it was clear he was asking a question. Jane nodded. Her breath hitched again and she hiccupped. Her eyes were wide above the hand she clapped over her mouth.
“Yes,” he said. “Definitely whiskey.”
Morgan got up and went to the drinks cabinet, retrieved two cut glass tumblers and a bottle that was three-fourths full. He poured two fingers for himself, then looked over his shoulder at Jane for direction. She held up one finger. He gave her that and a splash.
Jane slipped her needle into the shirt cuff where she could find it easily and accepted the tumbler that Morgan handed her. Her thimble clinked against the glass. Smiling a bit self-consciously, she removed it and dropped it in her sewing box. She moved the box to the table beside her.
“Drink up.”
Jane looked up at him. He was still standing in front of her. When she hesitated, he tapped the bottom of her glass with his forefinger, giving it just a nudge to move it toward her mouth.
“There you go.”
She thought he sounded, if not quite pleased, then at least satisfied. As soon as she took her first sip, he moved back to the sofa. This time he sat in the far corner so that one of his legs could rest on the cushions while the other angled out to the floor.
“Is it going to distress you to talk about your courses?”
Jane hiccupped. Her fingertips tightened on the tumbler until the tips were white.
“I reckon so.” He lifted his glass and knocked back half of his drink. “I only ever had a conversation like this with a woman once before, and she was the one who began it.”
“Was she a . . .” Jane took a sip, hiccupped, and tried again. “Was she a whore?”
“A whore? No, not so anyone ever had to pay her, but that’s probably a fine distinction. I came around to thinking she was.”
“Oh.” Jane understood enough to know she did not want to hear more.
“Whether she was or wasn’t doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that she told me that the goings-on in a woman’s body shouldn’t be a mystery, and to make sure it isn’t a mystery, it needs to be talked about now and again.”
“The goings-on?” asked Jane.
“Too plain? How about the mechanics?”
“Why don’t we simply say the biology?”
“All right. So I’ve been noticing your biology.”
Jane wished she had asked for more whiskey. Would hiding her face in Morgan’s shirt make her distress more or less obvious? “What about it?” she asked, carefully enunciating the t at the end of every word.
“I already said I’m aware that you’re done bleeding.”
“Oh, God,” Jane said. “You did not say that.” She knocked back what remained of her drink, threw off the shirt, and stood. Morgan held out his nearly empty tumbler as she passed, and Jane smoothly took it on her way to the liquor cabinet. She gave him another generous finger and, after eyeing it, poured herself the same. When she went to hand the glass back to him, he caught her wrist and gave it a tug.
“Sit,” he said. “Here.” He patted the space beside him.
Jane looked at her captured wrist, then at Morgan. She realized suddenly that her hiccups were gone. That decided her. She supposed that she had made choices in her life that were influenced by flimsier logic, but she could not recall one of them now.
Her hiccups had disappeared. She sat.
Chapter Eight
With one hand, Morgan carefully pried his drink from Jane’s cold fingers while holding on to her wrist with the other. He was relieved when she did not attempt to pull away. Her wrist was so delicate under his palm, so fragile, that he was afraid that any attempt to hold her would crush her bones.
He waited until he felt her settle onto the cushion before he let her go. Even then, he released her slowly, unfolding his fingers in succession, not all at once. Her hand hovered in the air for a moment, almost as if it were no part of her. He nudged it. It fell into her lap like a stone.
Morgan did not ask Jane to look at him. He was comfortable looking at her profile, and she was obviously comfortable staring straight ahead. “In five days it’ll be a month that we’ve been married.” If he had not been watching her closely, he thought he would have missed her nod. It was that faint. “I don’t guess it ever crossed my mind that you and I would mostly be sharing a bedroom and never a bed. Did it ever cross yours?”
Jane’s lips parted around her answer, but no sound accompanied the word.
“How’s that again?” asked Morgan.
“No.” She used both hands to raise her glass. She sipped quickly. “No, I never thought about it.”
Morgan frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean. You never thought about sleeping with me, or you never thought about not sleeping with me? You can see they’re horses of a different color.” When she did not reply, he said, “All right. I’ll just keep going.” He thought he might have heard her moan softly, but he couldn’t be sure.
“You asked me once if Ida Mae Sterling gave go
od advice,” he said. “I figure that’s because she gave you an earful about me, and you were wondering if you could trust her. Is that about right?”
Jane nodded.
“Well, she was pretty free with her advice to me about you.” Even in profile he could make out the lift of Jane’s eyebrows. “I know. It probably seems strange since she’s known me a spell and you for about a minute, but she’s like that. Maybe I should have taken that more into account, but some of the things she said, I was already thinking. It made them seem truer. More like we had facts instead of just two wrongheaded opinions.”
Morgan paused, waiting to see if Jane would look at him. She did not. He judged her interest by the angle of her chin. At the moment, she was about as alert as anyone could be and still be sitting. If that chin came up another notch, it would yank her right off the sofa.
“When I lifted you off the train, my hands just about circled your waist. Holding you was like holding a flower stem. You had all those red poppies on your hat, so it wasn’t exactly a stretch for me to think like that. You’re so slight. Tiny bones, narrow hands. You can see how I thought I might snap you in two.”
“You were expecting Rebecca.”
“I suppose I knew that would come up. I can’t very well deny it, can I?”
“No. Her photograph is the reason you wanted another day to decide whether or not you’d have me for a wife.”
What had made sense to him at the time, sounded on the other side of appalling when he heard it coming out of Jane’s mouth. “Mostly because I thought I’d been lied to. It struck at my pride. No man likes to think he’s been made a fool.”
“No woman either.”
“No,” he said quietly. “No woman either.”
Jane said, “I am stronger than I look.” For the first time since Morgan drew her onto the sofa, she stole a sideways glance at him. “You are the one with broken ribs.”
“I surrender to your superior argument.”
Jane went on anyway. “Rebecca would not have been able to lay a fire in the dragon.”
Morgan nodded. “I got there on my own.”
“She does not know how to make hotcakes or goulash or honeyed ham.”
“Or fritters, I’ll wager.”
“Or fritters,” said Jane. “She has a fine hand for embroidery, but she has never mended anything in her life.”
“Probably has a personal maid to thread her needles.”
“She does not wash, hang, or fold clothes.”
“I already figured she doesn’t dress herself.”
“She could ride your horses, play your piano, even read to you if—”
“If the words weren’t too big?” he asked.
Jane clamped her mouth closed.
“Jane?”
She shook her head.
“It’s all right. Were you listening to me at all? It was early days yet when I came around to thinking all of those things you just said. You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.” He paused a beat. “Except maybe about the piano.” He glimpsed Jane’s small smile as humor asserted itself. “I’ll bet she’s ham-handed.”
Jane’s smile deepened. “No. She plays beautifully.”
“Oh. That’s a shame.”
“I have always thought so.”
Morgan appreciated her wry tone. “Give me your hand, Jane.” She swiveled a little toward him then, searched his face, and after a moment in which he could not begin to guess her thoughts, she gave him her hand. “Look at it,” he said. “Can you appreciate how impossibly delicate you seem to me?” His thumb made a light pass across her knuckles. “I can be afraid for you with a man like me.”
“I think you are confusing delicate with weak. I will not break if you touch me. You have only to look to your own hand to know that truth. A man like you? You have nothing to fear on my account. See how you hold me. That is the man you are.”
Morgan wished to the God he didn’t believe in that that was true. He stared at their hands and said nothing. When Jane withdrew, he let her go.
Jane rolled the tumbler between her palms. “What advice did Mrs. Sterling share with you?”
The question brought Morgan back to the present. “She told me that a woman like you would need time to adjust to the idea of marriage and—”
“A woman like me?”
“I took it to mean she meant refined. Delicate in your sensibilities.”
“There it is again,” said Jane. “‘Delicate.’ I believe I am beginning to dislike that word.”
“Maybe I should have said she thought you might be easily offended.”
“I am not sure she thought that at all, but you certainly did. And what is it that you thought would offend me?”
“Me, I suppose.” Morgan wondered how Jane had come to occupy the high ground because he certainly felt as if he were no longer explaining things, but defending himself instead. “You are rather particular about your manners, and there’s not an edge on me where you can’t find a rough spot.”
“That is not true.”
Morgan saw Jane’s eyes drop to his mouth. She tore them away, but not soon enough. He touched the crescent-shaped scar at the corner of his lips. “It is true. Even here.” He raised his tumbler and drank. “There I was, already thinking that I could snap you in half if I wasn’t careful, and then I’ve got Ida Mae in my ear telling me I should be real easy with you when I took you home, and to have a care how I introduced you to the marriage bed.”
Jane dropped her head and stared at the glass in her hands. “She did not say that.”
Even though she wasn’t looking, Morgan crossed his chest. “Swear.”
“I am not sure that even a mother would take the liberty of saying that to her son.”
Morgan shrugged. “It’s no good trying to reason out what Ida Mae does or says or thinks. She’s a force of nature. You duck or run or get swept up. I guess you realize now that I got swept up.”
Jane lifted her head again. “Tell me true,” she said, her voice not much above a whisper. “That very first night, did you want to . . . to . . . that is, did you want—”
“Yes.” He smiled a little crookedly as Jane polished off her drink and handed him her glass. He set it on the table beside him and then added his unfinished drink as well. “That first night and every night since. You can’t know how sorely I regret heeding Ida Mae’s advice.”
“No,” she said. “I only know how sorely I regret it.”
She said this so feelingly that it surprised a laugh from Morgan. He took her hand again and squeezed it this time. Jane was right. She did not break. “I left the house that night,” he said, “to keep from going to your bed.”
“Did you suspect you were capable of such noble sacrifice?”
He liked the way her eyes sparkled when she tried and failed to temper her wry humor. She could never quite contain her amusement. “Humor will out,” he said under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Just something I’m realizing.”
“You’re staring again.”
“So I am.” He did not look away. “I’ve been thinking we should start over, Jane.”
“Start over?”
“No, that’s not what I mean exactly. I think we should just start.”
“You are not going to talk about my . . . my . . .” She winced slightly. “That is, you’re not going to—”
“Talk about your biology? No. I’m not going to talk about that.” Jane’s relief was so palpable that Morgan did not point out that he had not promised to never talk about it. He did not believe he had offended her with his plain speaking, but it was clear that he had embarrassed her. He regretted that. He remembered the first time Zetta Lee Welling had explained the goings-on to him. He’d been embarrassed then, too, and Zetta Lee had seen it. She called him an ignorant no-account orphan son of a whore and slapped him so hard that all these years later he could still feel the heat of her palm. The onl
y word that had stung was “ignorant.” He reckoned he couldn’t do anything about the others.
“Morgan?”
He came out of his reverie to find Jane searching his face.
“Are you blushing?”
He wasn’t, but he understood why she thought that. It was the scalding imprint of Zetta Lee’s heavy hand against his cheek that she was seeing. “I guess I am,” he said. “A man can be embarrassed by his rough edges.” She did a surprising thing then, and Morgan was so unprepared for it that he almost reared back. He did not, though. He held himself very still while she laid her cool palm against his cheek and kept it there.
At first he suffered her touch. It was painful before it was healing, like alcohol in an open wound. He withstood it and it passed. She held his eyes. He never thought for a moment that it was the other way around. Curling his fingers around her wrist, he drew her hand to his mouth. He kissed the heart of her palm. He heard her take a sweet sip of air.
She asked, “Shall we go to bed, Mr. Longstreet?”
Morgan folded her hand in both of his and lowered it to his lap. “I think we should, Mrs. Longstreet. I really think we should.”
Jane’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “That’s your biology,” she said.
He grinned, released her hand, and stood. “It certainly is.” Giving her no chance to rise herself, Morgan cupped her elbows, drew her to her feet, and swung her into his arms.
She threw her arms around his neck. “What are you doing?”
“Testing the ribs.” He gave her a little bounce to prove he was better. Her squeak of surprise covered up his deeper groan. With her face buried against his shoulder, she also missed his grimace. He thought he might have pulled something, but he would be damned before he let her know. Better, he was realizing, was not the same as good as new. “See?”
Jane lifted her head. “Put me down.”
“I never carried you over the threshold. I should have done that.”
“We’re not going outside, are we?”
“No. The threshold to our bedroom will do.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She made herself as small in his arms as possible so he could get her through the doorway without banging either one of them against the frame. “I am not so insubstantial as you thought,” she said as he carried her into the room. “Admit it.”