Chapter 32 Marry Me

My coat hung on a hook near the bureau, with my crinoline next to it. I had on only the velvet of my dress over the cream-white of my slip. I hadn’t been this naked in front of a man since the last time I saw him. He’d loosened the lacing on my corset. I could breathe. I sat up, and my hair fell around my shoulders. He’d freed it from its pinned curls. I combed it with my fingers. “Were you planning to take advantage of me?” “If I were, I wouldn’t have left your dress on.” He filled with water two chipped vases that had belonged to his late grandmother. “You wouldn’t have been able to sleep in your coat.” I recognized things from where he had last lived, where I had lived with him for a few months. The railroad pocket watch his grandfather had given him was on the bureau. The lamp gave off an apricot glow I knew by heart. I remembered the rosewood table where he set the vases. But this was somewhere else. It was far enough out in the country to see the mesas, instead of right in the city. He slipped the Parma violets and damask roses from the lining of my coat into the water. “You’ve got to stop wearing your corset so tight. You’ll crack a rib.” I wore it that way without thinking. My mother used to tell me, “Better in pain than unkempt.” “It’s a habit,” I told Ezra. “It’s a bad one.” He checked the flowers for crushed petals. “Who’s your grower?” I sat on the edge of the bed, letting the toes of my stockings catch dust from the floor. “I am.” “Where?” he asked. “My sister rents me a half acre on her land.” “Luisa?” He almost laughed. “She never wanted you involved in the first place.” Luisa, like my mother, had never wanted a Reyes woman like me involved with a gringo like Ezra. “Her new husband is a businessman at heart,” I said. It wasn’t exactly the truth. I had stayed with them for a few weeks after I left Ezra. Within a month of seeing me leave my bed only to help Luisa with the housework, my brother in-law suggested that starting a garden might help my mood. He turned a blind eye when he realized the flowers I grew helped produce spirits rather than lift them. Ezra’s mouth was the exact color I remembered it. Once when he was sleeping, I had matched it to the outer petals of a blush moss. I wanted to kiss him so badly it stung between my legs. We had worked together once, taking flowers to the distillery Samuel Arlings had concealed in his barn, and then smuggling the product away. Ezra had worked in the city as a chimney sweep since he was eight years old, so no one thought anything of his going in and out of houses, where he brought the quarter-liter bottles. Our regular buyers furnished him with keys and allowed him in when they weren’t home; he hid the contraband bottles inside the masonry of their unused chimneys, where they would find them, but the authorities wouldn’t. Our friends had asked why we never opened our own operation, but there was an art to making violet and rose liqueur. It took more time and skill than the bathtub-faucet alcohol that had come into vogue since the Ban, so dreadful it needed three parts cream or orange juice to salvage it. Parma and rose liqueur, if made well, could be sipped pure, but the flowers were so delicate they had to be distilled with water instead of steam. Ezra still wouldn’t look at me. He kept his back to me. I slid off the bed and put my hand on his shoulder. How hurt he looked made me unsteady, and I braced my other hand on the rosewood table.