Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

40. Monday

Monday

On Monday it feels as if nothing has changed and everything has. The marquee is down, the farmhouse is back to normal, the men are out on the farm. Nina is at the Compasses, getting ready for the lunchtime shift.

And I am alone, marooned in the endless cycle of thoughts.

At one o’clock, I snatch up my car keys and drive to Meadowlands before I can change my mind. Park outside the house, ring the doorbell, wait. Gabriel’s face when he sees me holds everything I am feeling myself. Relief, fear, longing.

He pulls me inside, slams the door behind us. “I’m so glad you came. I’ve been going out of my mind.” He takes my face between his hands. “I love you. I never stopped.”

This kiss is different, it is a kiss from before. I can feel my whole body relaxing, as if it remembers the learned patterns of long ago, when this was our normal. Gabriel and me.

We are in a vortex, one that is dragging us back through the years until there is only this. Somehow we end up in the library and that’s familiar too. There is no time to question any of it, the heat rips through us like lava obliterating everything in its path. We are naked, enfolding each other, bones mapping bones, curves meeting hollows, bodies that sigh in relief. Every thrust is like fire. He says my name with the note of wonder I feel myself.

It feels so good, so right, this locking of our bodies, this giving in to the ache. At last. After all this time. It’s more than sex, more than love, the two of us are consumed, flesh and bones and wild hearts, as we drive ourselves harder, faster until we reach white blindness, until I cry out, until he does, all these months of secret longing finally realized.

Afterward we lie on the sofa in shocked silence, my face against his chest, which is damp with sweat and smells the same, of citrusy soap and the aftershave Gabriel has never stopped wearing. The muscles on his chest, the line of black hair running down his stomach, the same. His legs entwined with mine, the scratch of his stubble against my cheek, the same. A time capsule of before, if we could just keep the rest of the world out for a little longer.

“Good thing the dog wasn’t in here,” Gabriel says. “God knows what he’d have made of it.”

I start to laugh and then, suddenly, I’m crying.

I am sick with regret as if, only now, while the heat fades, can I process the cost of this.

I’m going to lose Frank.

“What have we done?” I cry.

“The only thing we could,” Gabriel says, but his voice is gentle and he uses both thumbs to brush away the tears beneath my eyes. “But no one needs to know. And it doesn’t need to happen again.”

“I want it to happen again.”

“So do I. So much.”

I watch Gabriel as he gathers up our scattered clothes. His body has changed in the intervening years, he is broader, the skinniness I remember from before has gone. He passes me each garment in turn, waits while I put them on. Only when I am fully dressed does he turn to his own clothes.

“Do you think,” Gabriel says, “if we are careful, we could have this for a little while? Because, what we had before, you and I, it was more than most people ever have, wasn’t it? And we threw it away. In my wildest dreams I never thought we’d have a chance to get it back.”

I know how this village works. The snooping, the chatter, a whispering undercurrent that blows through the lanes and the churchyard, the school, the shop, filters beneath doors, behind windows. I know how the people watch, how they talk and conspire. Secrets are not safe here. They are harbored and chewed over until the people decide to release them, splintering lives with a perfectly timed, needlepoint precision.

All this I know. But it isn’t enough to stop me. I walk into our love affair with my eyes wide open.