What I Kept Hidden

My name is Leanne, I'm thirty-four years old, and I own the only auction house in Fort Baines. I'm telling you my age up front because it matters for this story. At thirty-four you don't expect a man to walk into your life sideways. You expect the dentist, the water bill, and maybe a slow Tuesday.

I've been the responsible one since I was twenty-six and opened the auction house with money my dad left me. Everyone in town leans on me. The church committee wants me to run their fundraiser for free. My cousin Beth calls me when her car breaks down. The bank calls me when some rancher misses a payment. I say yes to all of it, because saying yes is easier than explaining why I said no.

The last time I was with anyone was three years ago. A man named Ray, thirty-one back then, that I met at a car auction in Tucson. We went out twice. The second night he came home with me, it was quick and efficient, and then he stopped calling, and I decided that was fine. That was the year I decided dating cost more than it paid.

So when the rental next to mine got a new tenant in March, I noticed the way you notice anything on this street, which is barely at all. Same cheap house as mine, same dead lawn, chain-link fence between us. But he had a motorcycle parked in the dirt, and he worked on it every evening when the heat let up.

He was outside a lot. Army boots, short haircut, a tan that said he came from somewhere sunnier than Germany. I learned later he was a staff sergeant, thirty-five years old, on leave between deployments. His name was Dave. For two weeks all we did was nod at each other over the fence while he turned a wrench and I watered a lawn that refused to live.

Here's the part I haven't told anybody. Watching that man work on his bike stirred something in me that three years of being reasonable hadn't. It wasn't the motorcycle. It was his hands, and the way he'd stop and stare off like he was somewhere else, and the plain fact that he wanted nothing from me. He didn't need a fundraiser run. He didn't need a cosigner. He was just there, being thirty-five and taking his bike apart, and I caught myself standing at my kitchen window with a dish towel in my hand like an idiot, more than once.

You can laugh. I did.

* * *

It was a Thursday, middle of April, hot for the season. I came home from calling bids for six hours and my throat was done. I was pulling weeds out of the cracks by the fence because it was either that or think, and Dave looked up from the motorcycle and waved me over.

I went. First time I'd stood on his side of the fence.

"You're the auction lady," he said. He was sitting on a milk crate, forearms dirty to the elbow.

"Leanne. I live right there."

"Dave." He wiped a hand on a rag that was dirtier than his hands. "You're the one I hear yelling numbers at four in the afternoon sometimes. I can hear you from the garage."

"Oh God, you can hear that?"

"Yeah. It's a good voice. Sounds like you could talk a man into anything." He grinned, and I felt that grin in my stomach. "You sound tired, though."

"I am tired." I meant it as a joke but it came out honest. "Everybody in this town needs something from me and half of them don't pay."

"That sounds about right for a small town." He stood up, and he was taller than I'd figured from across the fence. He looked at me plain, no hurry in it. "You know what I see? You look like you need someone to make you forget your name."

I should have laughed it off. That's what I'd have done at twenty-eight, said something polite and gone inside and watered the dead lawn. Instead I stood there on his dirt with weed juice on my fingers and felt my face go hot.

"That's a hell of a thing to say to a neighbor," I said.

"It's a hell of a thing to want," he said. "No offense meant. If I read you wrong, forget it, and we go back to nodding."

He hadn't read me wrong. That was the problem. I walked back across my yard, sat on my couch, and didn't turn on the TV for two hours.

* * *

I didn't sleep much that night. Ceiling fan going, sheets kicked off, and me lying there doing math I hadn't done in years. I'm thirty-four. Ray was the last one, three years ago, and before that it was a stretch of nothing much. My whole adult life I'd been careful. Careful with money, careful with the business, careful with men, because careful men leave and careful women don't get embarrassed.

And I lay there in the dark and thought, what if I stop being careful for one night. Not a relationship, not a promise, nothing the church committee could get its teeth into. Just once, be the woman who wants something and takes it.

Dave was leaving eventually. Army men always leave. That made it safe in a backwards way. He couldn't be my disaster if he was gone before the heat really set in. I turned that over until two in the morning, and somewhere in there I decided. Not decided like a plan. Decided like a woman rolling over and admitting the truth to the ceiling.

I was going to find out.

* * *

It took me two days to work up to it, which is embarrassing to admit. I did auctions. I sold a dead man's cattle herd to a live crowd without blinking. But walking thirty feet to borrow a wrench had me rehearsing lines in the truck.

Sunday evening, sun going down orange behind the base fence, I walked over. He was on the milk crate again and the bike was in more pieces than before.

"Hey, neighbor," I said. "You wouldn't happen to have a socket set? Something's loose under my sink."

He looked at me, and I watched him decide to let me have my lie. "Yeah, I got a socket set. Come on in."

His house was the mirror of mine. Same layout, same cheap cabinets, but his was bare, as if he hadn't unpacked because he knew he'd leave. A duffel by the couch. A cot that looked slept in, no bed frame. He grabbed a toolbox from the kitchen counter and handed it over.

"There you go."

"Thanks." I held it. I didn't move. The kitchen light buzzed a little. "Dave, I'm going to be honest with you, or try to. I don't need a socket set."

"I figured."

"You figured?"

"Leanne, you've been looking out that window at me for two weeks. I don't mind saying I noticed. Question is what you want to do about it now that you walked over here."

My heart was loud but I made myself say it plain. "I want to know if that thing you said was true. About forgetting my name."

"It's true if you want it to be," he said. "But listen. I'm here six more weeks and then I'm gone for a year, maybe longer. I'm not offering you a boyfriend. I'm offering you something with no strings, and you get to say how far and when to stop, every time. That's the whole deal."

Six weeks. No strings. I'd done the math on worse.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. But slow. I haven't done this in three years, so if I seem rusty, that's why."

He put the toolbox on the counter and came around it, unhurried, and stopped a foot away. "Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah," I said, and my voice cracked on it, which he had the grace not to mention.

He kissed me soft first, one hand on my jaw, and I stood there with my eyes shut thinking, this, this is what I put off for three years. Then he kissed me again with more behind it and I grabbed the front of his shirt, because thirty-four years of being careful turns out to weigh a lot, and I was tired of carrying it.

When we came up for air I was against the counter and his thumb was at my hip.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine. I'm better than fine." I laughed. "I'm telling myself I can control how far this goes."

"You can," he said. "You tell me where the line is and it stays there."

I looked at the cot in the other room, then back at him, and the honest part of me, the part that had kept me up until two in the morning, already knew the line was going to move. Not tonight, maybe. But soon.

"Let me kiss you again," I said, "and we'll see."

He did kiss me again, and this time I was the one who pressed closer. My hands found the back of his neck and stayed there. His mouth moved to my neck and I made a noise that embarrassed me, and he laughed against my skin, not mean, just pleased.

"There she is," he said.

"Shut up."

"Make me."

I pulled his shirt up and off before I could think about it. He was built like you'd expect, solid and a little scarred, a pale line along his ribs I didn't ask about. I put my palm flat on his chest and he stood there and let me look. That felt like a gift, somehow. Nobody had let me just look in years.

"Your turn," he said, hands at the hem of my shirt. "Can I?"

"Yeah."

He lifted it over my head slow, like he was unwrapping something he'd waited on, and I stood in my bra in a bare kitchen in a rental house and felt, for once, not careful at all. His mouth went to my collarbone, then lower, and my bra came off and his hands and mouth were everywhere I'd been aching for, and I had to hold the counter because my knees weren't cooperating.

"Dave," I managed.

"Still okay?"

"God, yes. More than okay!"

We didn't make it to the cot. That's the part I never expected about myself. I'd imagined a bed, imagined being arranged and presentable. Instead we ended up half dressed against his kitchen counter, my jeans undone, his hands sure and unhurried even though everything about us felt fast. He asked, plain and simple, if I wanted to keep going, and I said yes before he finished the sentence.

He pulled my jeans down over my hips and I stepped out of them, and then I was naked in a stranger's kitchen except I wasn't a stranger, I was the woman who'd watched him from her window for two weeks like a fool, and he was looking at me like I was something worth looking at. "Come here," I said, and he came.

His mouth found my nipple and I arched into it, my back off the counter, one of his hands spread warm on my stomach holding me there. He worked the other nipple with his fingers, slow rolls, patient, and the feeling ran straight down through me like a wire. Three years. Three years since