“It wasn’t up to you.”

Chance’s eyes were inexplicably sad, his voice low, nearly a whisper. “You don’t know that.”

“You skirt heresy, brother.”

“I know.”

* * * *

In the bedroom they shared in Malia’s house, the wool blankets Chance had nightly spread onto the floor where he slept by himself each cool night were now folded inconspicuously on the bed so no one would know the difference. The baby they’d been raising together all these months lifted her head, stuck her fist in her mouth, drooling. Calliope hadn’t known she was going to say it until the words were coming out. She reached for Chance’s stiff arms, looked carefully into his eyes. “Come back with me.”

He groaned softly with something like apprehension mixed with desire, mirroring her own, and slid his arms around her waist, now cinched and curvy, no longer swollen with baby weight, her body flat against his, clicking into place between his hips and thighs. She pressed her forehead against his chest, breathing rapidly at their nearness, after so many months of nearness. He smoothed back the hair curling around her neck, then kissed her neck, shoulders, collarbone, the warmth of his breath tightening her breasts into rose-shaped knots. He hardened against the folds of her dress, gathering at her thighs. He pulled her closer, though they were already locked together, as if he could shape them into one creature, connected like clay to each other.

Sundown filtering through their bedroom window, Chance’s limbs tangled with Calliope’s own, he kissed her mouth, kissed her with the thirst of a man in a desert and she, finally, no longer mirage but coconut water, she was breaking open for him. She slid the sleeves of her dress down her shoulders, slipped it along her waist and hips, shimmied it to the floor. From a string around her neck dangled the wooden coyote he had whittled for her. He met her eyes, smiled, then peeled off his shirt, revealing his muscular chest, a coyote tattoo across his left pectoral, over his heart; it howled at the moon. Calliope had seen him undress countless times over the past several months, had watched his sunbaked skin, the coyote skulking, by lamplight. She’d often been aroused by his rugged beauty, his gentleness. This evening, she dared put her mouth to his skin, roll her hands down the masa of his chest and stomach, unclasp his jeans, the same jeans she had washed for him again and again since she was his Zuni wife.

He spread a wool blanket on the floor beside the bed. The corn girl had rolled onto her back in the center of the mattress and was busily kicking toward the ceiling and sucking on her fists. She paid her mother and Chance no notice.

They knelt on the blanket facing each other, breathing heavily into each other’s skin.