Lights Out on Magnolia Lane
Content note: explicit, consensual sex between adults (she’s 39, he’s 46). 18+ only.
The storm rolled in off the river a little after eight, the kind of late-summer thunderstorm that turns the sky the color of a bruise and sends every dog in the county under a bed. By nine the rain was coming sideways. By nine fifteen the power on my side of town flickered twice and quit.
By nine twenty my phone was ringing.
“It’s Nora,” she said, as if I hadn’t saved her number back in April, when I rebuilt the sagging steps on her front porch at the end of Magnolia Lane. As if I hadn’t found three different reasons since then to drive past her house. “I’m so sorry to call this late. The power’s out, and the basement is making a noise I really don’t like.”
“Sump pump,” I said. I was already reaching for my boots. “It’s got a battery backup, but if it’s the one I’m picturing, that battery’s older than my truck. Sit tight. I’m coming.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Nora.” I pulled my rain jacket off the hook. “Leave the porch light on.”
A beat of silence. Then a soft, startled laugh down the line. “The power’s out.”
“Then light me a candle.”
The whole lane was black when I pulled up, every house dark, rain hammering the hood. All except one window at the very end, where a single candle flickered in the glass like something out of an old song.
She opened the door before I knocked. Nora was thirty-nine, an ER nurse with a laugh you could hear from the sidewalk, dark curls piled on top of her head and a flashlight in one hand. She was wearing an oversized gray cardigan and leggings, and she looked at me standing there dripping on her new steps and pressed her lips together to keep from smiling.
“You’re soaked.”
“It’s raining,” I said. “I read that somewhere.”
The basement was exactly what I’d expected: two inches of water creeping across the concrete and a pump sitting dead in its pit. I’d brought a spare battery from the truck, because I am the kind of man who brings a spare battery. Ten minutes of work by flashlight with Nora holding the beam steady over my shoulder, and the pump coughed, caught, and settled into a low, reassuring hum.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed behind me. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“I’m a guy with a battery.”
“You’re a guy with a battery who drove across town in a thunderstorm at nine thirty at night.” Her voice had gone quieter. “Come upstairs. You’re dripping on my water heater.”
Upstairs she had lit every candle she owned. They were on the mantel, the windowsills, the coffee table, a whole constellation of small gold flames that turned her living room into something soft and close and out of time. She handed me a towel and then, when I just stood there holding it, took it back, stepped in, and started drying my hair herself.
“Shirt,” she said. “Off. I’ll throw it in the dryer.”
“Power’s out.”
She stopped. Then she laughed, that big, warm laugh, and dropped her forehead against my chest. “I’m a very smart woman,” she said into my wet flannel. “I want you to know that.”
“I know it.”
“Take it off anyway.”
So I did. She hung it over the back of a kitchen chair, and when she turned around, I watched her eyes travel over me in the candlelight, slow and frank and unhurried, and something low in my stomach pulled tight.
We sat on her couch with the storm going wild outside. Thunder rolled across the roof like furniture being moved upstairs. She told me about her shift, about the man who’d come in with a fishhook through his thumb and wanted a selfie with it. I told her about the lady on Elm who had me rehang the same picture four times. Somewhere in there her bare feet ended up in my lap, and I started rubbing them without either of us mentioning it, and she let out a long sigh and closed her eyes.
“I could have called the power company,” she said, eyes still closed.
“Power company doesn’t do sump pumps.”
“I know.” She opened her eyes and looked straight at me. “That’s not why I called you either.”
The rain filled the quiet. A candle on the mantel guttered and steadied.
“I didn’t drive over here for the pump, Nora.”
“Good,” she said. And she pulled her feet out of my lap, climbed over me, settled astride my thighs, and kissed me.
She tasted like the peppermint tea cooling on the side table. She kissed the way she laughed, wholehearted and without apology, her hands in my damp hair, her body pressed warm against my bare chest. I let her lead. I’d been wanting this since April, and I could wait as long as she needed me to.
When she finally pulled back, we were both breathing hard.
“Tell me what you want,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“I want you to stay.” She rested her forehead against mine. “All night. I want you to take me to bed. I’ve wanted it since you spent four days on those porch steps, and I spent four days finding reasons to look out the front window.”
I laughed. “I noticed.”
“You did not.”
“Why do you think it took me four days?”
Her mouth fell open, and then she was laughing and kissing me again, and I stood up off that couch with her legs locked around my waist and carried her down the hall by candlelight.
In her bedroom the lightning came every few seconds, throwing the room into sudden silver and then dropping it back into gold. I set her on the edge of the bed and knelt in front of her, and I undressed her slowly, one piece at a time, the cardigan, the thin camisole beneath it, the leggings peeled down her legs. Each flash of lightning showed me a little more of her: the curve of her hip, the soft weight of her breasts, the dark curls loosening around her shoulders. She watched me look at her, and she didn’t hide from it.
“You’re staring,” she whispered.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I laid her back and took my time. My hands know their way around a lot of things, but I’d never wanted to learn anything as badly as I wanted to learn her. I traced every line of her with my palms first, then my fingertips, then my mouth. When I slid my hand between her thighs she was already wet, and she caught my wrist.
“Show me,” I said.
She covered my hand with hers and showed me exactly how she liked to be touched, the pressure and the pace and the small, slow circles, and I followed her lead until her hips started rising to meet me and her breath came apart in my ear. When she came the first time, the thunder broke right over the house, and she laughed through the end of it, breathless and astonished, like the sky had done it just for her.
Then she pushed me onto my back and paid me back in kind. She kissed her way down my chest and unbuckled my belt and took me into her mouth, slow and deep and devastating, her eyes coming up to meet mine in the flicker of the storm. It took everything I had to touch her cheek and stop her.
“Not like that,” I managed. “I want to be inside you when you come again.”
“You prepared for that too?” she teased, as I reached for my wallet.
“I told you. I’m a man who brings a spare.”
She was still giggling when she pulled me down over her, and then neither of us was laughing. I pushed into her slowly, watching her face, and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me deeper and whispered yes, like that, don’t stop. So I didn’t. We moved together to the rhythm of the rain on the roof, slow at first, then not slow at all when she dug her heels into the backs of my thighs and asked me for more. I gave her all of it. I kept asking if she was all right, and she kept answering yes until the word didn’t have room for anything else in it.
She came with her nails in my shoulders and my name on her lips, and I followed her over a moment later, buried deep and shaking, my face pressed into the warm curve of her neck.
We lay tangled together while the storm moved east and grumbled off into the distance. Her head was on my shoulder. My hand was in her hair.
At 1:14 in the morning the power came back on.
Every light in the house blazed to life at once. The ceiling fan lurched into motion. Somewhere down the hall, the refrigerator shuddered and hummed. Nora threw an arm over her eyes and groaned.
Then she reached over, found the lamp on her nightstand, and clicked it off again.
“Leave them off,” she murmured, and curled back into me.
In the morning I made her coffee, and checked the pump one more time on my way out. When I looked back from my truck, the porch light was on, burning pale in the clean blue daylight.
She was standing in the doorway in my flannel shirt, which had finally dried.
“Leave it on,” I called.
She smiled. “I was planning to.”
— Fix It Daddy