Laugh by Mary Ann Rivers Page B

time, too. I didn’t say that? I must have been too distracted by all the noises you were making while your tongue was in my mouth.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I think you were saying that, too, it was hard to tell with all the wiggling and heavy breathing.”
    She felt the smile soak into her facial bones but schooled it back before it surfaced. “I know you like my legs, and the way I wiggle and breathe and look when I come—”
    “And say my name,” he said.
    “Say your name?”
    “I like how you wiggle and breathe and look and say my name when you come.”
    Then she didn’t feel like smiling. Something was getting in the way of it.
    Hope, maybe.
    “Okay, but besides all that. What do you like about me, Sam Burnside?”
    “How I feel,” he said, again without hesitating. She wondered if he ever hesitated. At anything.
    “How’s that?”
    “Like I’m doing something right for once. When I’m around you, that’s how I feel. It makes me want to give you things, not just help you or fix something, but give you things. Things you don’t need, but that you might want.”
    “Like orgasms?”
    “I want to give you orgasms, Nina Paz.” Sam grinned. “About a million different ways, all of them filthier than the next.”
    “And that makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing?”
    “No, that makes me feel like boning you and getting naked with you. I feel like I’m doing the right thing just by being with you.”
    Nina had to look away then.
    “Look, Nina.” Sam took her hand. Stepped close. “Let me do the farmhand thing this summer, whenever I can. Let me help you with this stuff with Tay, as much as I can. Let me hang you with you, talk to you. I’ll eat your pie, and I’ll clean my plate every time, but don’t make me try to be just friends.”
    “I don’t know why I tried to insist on it.”
    “Well,” Sam said, “I don’t know either. I know why I went along with it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Because this stuff going on between us, the stuff we have going on ourselves, it’s scary.”
    “It is.”
    “Also, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty good at fucking things up.”
    “So you’ve said.”
    “It’s true.”
    Nina looked at Sam, and what she thought of, looking at his gray eyes, noticing the dark flecks through them, was when they took care of Kate’s black-and-white chickens. How he was as out of his element as he could possibly have been but had seriously and gently checked a chicken over for lice and then held it, petted it like a cat, unselfconscious.
    He was someone the entire world would assume shouldn’t have anything to do with chickens, and yet he had taken care of one and charmed her easily.
    Sam, eldest of four, a doctor, opening a clinic for a whole neighborhood, a man who would drop the work of a whole day to hang out with a woman and her friend to be as helpful as he could—he was
underestimated.
    He thought he was a fuckup.
    He wanted to be with her because she made him feel like he was doing the right thing, though as far as she could tell, he was always
doing
the right thing, though she bet that his smart mouth kept him from
saying
the right thing, saying what was really going on in his heart, in his head, most of the time.
    “What if we just told each other?”
    “Told each other what?” he asked.
    “Told each other when the other one was fucking up. Straight up, and then that person had to do something else, without arguing about it.”
    “What’s something else?”
    “Just whatever is not what you’re currently doing.”
    “Does that work?”
    “Calling someone on their bullshit and them actually listening?”
    He laughed. “Yeah. Because I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of magical unicorn myth.”
    “We’re fully grown adults. We’ve both been through a lot. We’re going to go through more. Depending on each other to see us for what we are, and to be the friend to help us avoid more bullshit seems like it’s worth a shot. I’d say