Chapter Thirteen

That night, a hot flash hit Twyla shortly before three o'clock in the morning. She didn't know it was happening until she woke up in a puddle of her own sweat. She cast off the coverlet and the sheets and lay there steaming on the mattress, her face so hot she was certain she could cook an egg on her forehead. It finally passed, but she knew from experience that she would not be able to get back to sleep anytime soon.

Deeply annoyed, she turned on the bedside lamp and reached for The Rogue of Redwing Ruins and her reading glasses. The latter she knocked off the table, and since she couldn't read without them, she was forced to get out of bed and crawl around on her hands and knees to retrieve them.

Which was when she spotted the bomb attached to the underside of her bed frame.

It took her about three minutes to arrive at the word bomb. At first she thought, simply, What is that? Having been the person who put together the bed frame twenty-seven years ago, she tried to remember if this odd protuberance was some kind of support she had simply forgotten about and failed to notice ever again. That seemed improbable. But she was tired and didn't feel like dealing with it, so she grabbed her glasses and crawled into bed and cracked open The Rogue of Redwing Ruins. It was a boring section between sex scenes, and the presence of that inexplicable thing under her bed nagged at her. So she threw off the covers once again, grabbed the small flashlight out of her bedside drawer, gave it a crank, and turned it on. She directed the light underneath the bed and squinted at the strange object. There were curling wires coming out of it, and there appeared to be a watch involved and a clump of long tubes.

Those look like the tubes Frank and I saw in the cave, Twyla thought.

Oh, this is a bomb, she realized a second later, absurdly proud of herself for figuring it out.

And then it hit her: This is a bomb.

She had no idea why there was a bomb under her bed, and it didn't matter why, because it was there, and she needed to get out of her house in order to not die. Dazed with shock, she stumbled for the bedroom door, and by the time she hit the hallway, she was running. In the three seconds it took her to traverse the parlor, she had convinced herself that she would find a bomb under Frank's bed, too. She didn't know how or why she had come to this conclusion, and again, it didn't matter. There was a bomb under Frank's bed, so she needed to save Frank.

Twyla grabbed his house key off the hook in her entryway and flew across their respective lawns. She unlocked Frank's front door, let herself in, and sprinted down the hall.

"Salt Sea!" he shouted as she crashed into his bedroom. "Twyla, you scared the daylights out of me! What are you doing?"

She did not have time to explain. She flattened herself onto the floor, and sure enough, there was the bomb. Had she been thinking clearly, she would have calmly ushered him out of his house and alerted the local sheriff's office to the extremely dangerous situation. But she was not thinking clearly. All she could think of was the fact that she needed to save Frank, and for some reason, the most logical way that presented itself to her mind was to rip the bomb off the bottom of his bed frame, run it to his front door, and hurl it onto his lawn. This was precisely what she did, with Frank dogging her heels, asking "What the fuck, Twyla?" and "What is that?" and "What in the Salt Sea is going on?"

The second she chucked the bomb outside, she slammed the door shut, which was a good thing since it exploded when it hit the ground, shaking the entire house and half the neighborhood with it.

"Was that a bomb?" he asked in the silence that followed.

Twyla was rattling from head to toe, but her voice sounded calm and detached when she answered. "Yes."

"That was a bomb."

"Yes."

"That was a bomb? You held a bomb in your hands?"

By now, Frank was so worked up he was practically frothing at the mouth. But he was alive, so she didn't care that he was mad. She could watch him fume and rage at her every day for the rest of her life.

"Have you lost your ever-loving mind, woman? You could have blown yourself up!"

He's alive, she thought, and that was all that mattered.

"What were you thinking? I have half a mind to—"

And she was so unspeakably glad that he was alive that her knees gave out, and she collapsed on him, and he tried to catch her, but they wound up tangled against the parlor wall, and then she was kissing him. She was kissing him because he was alive, and so was she, and there were too many emotions to put into words. And his lips moved against hers as she thrust her fingers into his newly shorn hair to pull him closer, and the kiss deepened and slowed and turned tender, and then it was done.

It wasn't until Twyla came up for air that she truly understood what she had done. The horror of it sank in. She backed off, untangling her limbs from his.

"I… I…," she began, but what could she possibly say that would make what she had done to him okay? Because she was definitely the one who had initiated that kiss, even if Frank hadn't stopped her.

And now that she was looking at Frank, she saw that there was something more than shock playing across his face. He gaped at her as he remained flattened against the wall. Because she had flattened him there. He was breathing hard, and his pupils were blown wide with heat. She'd never seen him like this, with a bald hunger traced in every line of his face and coiled in each tensed muscle.

And before she could think or act or speak, they were kissing again, and she couldn't say who had started it this time. The next thing she knew, she was the one flattened against a wall, beside the front door, and even in all that heat, Frank pressed himself against her so that the right side of her back, the part that was bruised, wasn't touching the wall behind her.

She wanted to grab him by his new haircut and shout, I don't give a shit about my back right now! But she was too busy kissing him, and he was too busy pulling her closer. She ran her hands over his chest, his shoulders, his arms, and marveled at the way his body was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time—his living body, softened with time and age but solid beneath her touch. And he was deliciously warm and smelled like Honekian Springs soap and the laundry detergent they both used and a faint spicy-sweet scent that was all his.

She pressed her chest against his chest, her want against his want. And he wanted her. She could feel how much he wanted her. His hand slid along her left side, heading for the curve of her unbruised hip and on to the swell of her generous hind end. His lips broke away from hers, kissing a hot line across her jaw.

"Stop me," he told her, a ragged whisper in her ear before he bit her earlobe.

That bite sent shivering sparks straight down her spine. "Don't stop."

His left hand palmed her breast, and his right hand slid under her hind end to pull her into him. She ground against him in approval, and he growled, a sound that made the tightening pleasure of her core ring like a bell.

Somewhere in the farthest corner of her mind, the voice of good sense screamed, What under the Void Beyond the Sky are you doing? But that voice was so small and insignificant and far away that it was nothing more than a tinny echo drowned out by a much louder Yes! This!

She stroked his back, savoring the breadth and strength of his body.

"Stop me," he snarled into the sensitive skin of her neck.

"Keep going."

He cupped her breasts over the fabric of her nightshirt with both hands, squeezing with the perfect pressure, his thumbs playing over her nipples. He scraped his teeth across her collarbone as he unbuttoned her pajama top.

"Salt Sea, stop me, Twy," he begged her, and she could have eaten his desperation with a knife and fork.

"Don't stop! Do not stop!" she begged him in return, and the shreds of his self-control snapped. He ripped apart the flaps of her pajama top, popping off the last two buttons and sending them skittering across the floor. And then he was smoothing his hands over her bare breasts and latching on to one pebbled tip with his mouth.

"Yes!" gasped Twyla.

There was a pounding at the front door.

"No!" Frank moaned, as if his saying this would inspire the Unknown God to make whoever it was disappear.

"Ellis? Ellis, you in there? Ellis!"

"Go away!"

"Open this fucking door, or I'm opening it for you," said a voice that was alarmingly familiar.

Frank stopped.

Twyla stopped.

The weight of what they had done hovered over them, but it hadn't fallen yet.

"Salt Sea." Frank artfully draped his white T-shirt over his pajama bottoms and opened the door.

"Evening, Ellis," said a rusty voice. Oh gods, it was…

"Sheriff Ralston," said Frank.

"Were you aware that there's a smoking hole in your front yard?"

"I am aware."

"Care to elucidate?"

"Well now, you'll have to ask Twyla about that." Frank glanced over at her as she frantically did up her pajama top with the buttons that remained. "In a minute."

"Salt fucking Sea," Hart Ralston uttered in outraged disbelief.

By the time Twyla stood in the doorframe, clutching the bottom of her pajama top closed, a crowd of onlookers had gathered in the street in their bathrobes, including Wade.

"Mom! Are you all right?" he shouted while a sheriff's deputy held the crowd at bay.

She waved at him. "I'm fine, honey!"

"Banneker," said the sheriff in a tight-lipped greeting.

She grimaced. "Oh, Sheriff, it's your wedding night."

"Yes, I know." He gave her a withering glare with his gray demigod eyes before indicating the damage to Frank's lawn. "Smoking hole?"

Duckers came sprinting up the front walkway, leaving Zeddie to stand with Wade in the street.

"What the fuck is going on?"

Twyla opened her mouth to answer, but the bomb under her own bed detonated, blowing a hole in her roof. A quick series of fireworks shot out of Twyla's bedroom and exploded into the night sky.

"Gods' tits and testicles," Zeddie Birdsall uttered from the street in a voice full of awe.

Resigned, Twyla turned to Hart Ralston. "Why don't you come inside, Sheriff?"

"I'll brew some coffee," said Frank, equally resigned as he let in Ralston and Duckers and headed for his kitchen.