Chapter 15 #3
“I’m going to make some big changes myself,” Theo told me.
He pushed aside the plastic sheeting and we walked back toward his bedroom.
“I’m not going to be like your dad, or my parents, or my grandfather.
I’ll be present and I won’t ever be unfaithful.
I won’t chase my dreams at the expense of my children and I won’t cut people out over stubbornness. ”
“You don’t have to tell me those things,” I said. “I already know.”
“You think that I’m without flaws,” he sighed, but I shook my head and he could tell because he was now holding me so close.
“No, but I think that they don’t count. I love you and it’s not in spite of flaws. I love all of you, flaws included. In the big picture of Theo, they don’t matter at all.”
“You love me like that,” he stated, and now I nodded instead.
“I love you more than…I don’t know how many trillions of Dermatophagoides farinae and Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus used to be in this place, but I love you even more than that number.
And gradually, I’m getting to be a person that you could love back.
If you want to, because I’m not going to force you.
That’s a really difficult thing to accomplish and would involve my former friend Hecuba, and we’re not currently speaking. ”
“You don’t need to involve your former friend. I’m making changes so that I can be the person that you need and that’s why…we should sit down.”
We did, onto the two air mattresses. I’d been thinking more about how we’d spend the night on them together, and how he had unzipped the sleeping bags to use them as blankets so we wouldn’t each be in a separate envelope.
“I’m planning to change my career,” he told me. “I’m want to go back and train to become a pediatrician.”
“Really? Can you do that?”
“There are no laws against it, which you might already be aware of due to your friends on the police force and your prior work for the Mafia. It’s not something that many people take on, but I have heard of it, if a doctor thinks that he or she made a mistake and picked the wrong specialty.
The thing is, it involves me starting back almost at the beginning.
And first, I’ll need to make sure that all my current patients are taken care of.
I won’t leave any of them feeling abandoned. It will be a long, long process.”
“And at the end, you’ll be in the place that you wanted,” I said. “It’s the place that you would have chosen if you hadn’t felt like you had to follow what your grandfather wanted instead.”
“As I’ve watched this cabin improve, I’ve been realizing that I wasn’t honoring him by letting it fall apart more.
I’m not honoring him by staying at a job that I don’t want, either.
I reread all those letters from my mom and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much time they wasted with their dumb intransigence.
I need to be able to alter the course of my life, but it will take a lot of work and a lot of time.
It’s not something that you would need to hang around for. ”
“What?”
“All this will affect you, too,” Theo explained. “That is, if we were together.”
“I’ve always thought that you had really good hearing, but maybe you’re like me and you’ve been covering up a problem,” I answered.
“So maybe you didn’t catch it before when I said that I love you.
I love you so much, Theo. I wouldn’t care if we lived in this cabin just like it is for the rest of our lives and I wouldn’t care if we went off to a cave like my friend Zeno in Antioch.
Not the ancient city in Asia Minor, but the township in northern Michigan,” I explained.
“If you don’t have enough money to support yourself through this change, I do. ”
“Thank you, Grace. Thank you for saying that. Your confidence in me means a lot more than I can express.” There was a moment of silence. Then he asked, “Are you talking your savings in the can buried in your mom’s yard?”
“I also mean my investments. I’ve done really well with those,” I answered.
“And I was thinking that I’d forgotten to pay my taxes but I hadn’t, so that’s all good.
” I explained more about how I’d listened to my former employer’s genius financial advice and had created my secret stash.
I had saved almost everything I’d made and it had grown, so I had enough for a horse. Or a few horses.
“Are you serious?” he asked me when I told him the number. “You didn’t mention that when we discussed how you keep track of your money using the rock method.”
“We were talking about what I keep liquid for everyday expenses,” I answered. “For my investments, I use Addie’s laptop. I listened to Sophie explaining how to create secret files and I made some of those, but I get the feeling that Addie’s husband might have found them. That’s ok.”
“Holy hell, Grace.”
“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it makes sense to me. I’ve always thought that you were smart, and your siblings always talk about how savvy you are.”
“They say ‘sneaky’ and they don’t mean it in a positive way, but that’s not what I was talking about.
I meant that you must think that it doesn’t make any sense how I kept working at my former job and I was living in the flophouse, when I had other resources to draw on,” I explained.
“Even though I felt miserable sometimes, I kept doing the same things because…” I thought.
“I was always moving around but I still felt trapped, like when my head was in the fence or my arm was in the aquarium filter.”
“You were saving an incredible amount of money.” He still sounded stunned by that. “From a financial standpoint, your choices worked out.”
“But it wasn’t working for me, not really. I was the same Grace, messing up and falling into puddles. That’s why the lists are good, because they’ve shown me that I can make changes.”
“As long as you don’t feel like they’re suffocating you,” Theo said.
“Everybody has things they’d like to do better, but you should also know that you were great to start with.
I love you, and it’s not because I’ve suddenly found that you’re an investing genius and it’s not in spite of your flaws, either.
I love every part of you, Grace.” He paused. “You don’t seem too surprised.”
“I thought you might,” I confessed. “I had a feeling and I was hoping I was right.”
“You were right. We fit together, and I want to try to make you as happy as you make me. I want to…I want to kiss you,” he said, and he did.
My heart pounded and I held on tightly as I kissed him back.
“We can do this for the rest of our lives,” he murmured when we broke apart, but I couldn’t catch my breath to talk quite yet.
Maybe he looked calm and quiet, but he wasn’t when he kissed.
He was actually the kind of guy who could make you see stars just with his tongue.
He kept making me see them. “I wish that I’d kissed you months ago,” he said as he brushed his lips down my neck. His lips and his teeth, too…my toes curled inside my boots. “I was worried.”
“Why?” I managed to gasp.
“You had told me about moving on from jobs and from people, and I didn’t want to do anything to scare you off and push you toward the door. You found it anyway.”
“On the night I left, I thought that I was cheating you somehow. I wanted to be good enough for you,” I said, and he froze.
“I hope you don’t believe that anymore.”
“I thought maybe that was why you didn’t like me. You didn’t even do anything when you were sleeping next to me, that first night I came to the cabin.” I tried to pull his mouth back down but he seemed to want to use it for talking.
“What did you think I should have done when I found you sleeping? Did you expect me to grope you when you couldn’t tell me to stop?
I didn’t know you very well and you didn’t know me either, but you had trusted me enough to show up here and then to fall asleep in my bed.
I would have been a relative stranger touching you when you weren’t aware, and I couldn’t have done that. ”
“I guess…no, I can see that you couldn’t.” At the time, I’d been confused by his behavior. Why wouldn’t he have grabbed me in my sleep? “No, that’s not like you at all.”
“The first item on your list, before any of the others, should be realizing that you are good enough for me and for everyone else.” Theo stood up from the stacked air mattresses and then knelt in front of me.
“You should also acknowledge that I’m not so great.
I let myself live in a shack because I was paralyzed by the fear that I would disappoint the person who’d had faith in me, even though he had passed away.
” He worked on opening the buttons on my coat, which had formerly belonged to Juliet and was very nice.
“Also, I’ve recently learned that I have terrible taste in tile. ”
“Don’t listen to Brenna.”
“I was very glad that she and Dion were there at the store to help me pick everything, but they aren’t shy with their opinions.
They told me that I should let them plan the bathrooms and that I had better hurry up and get you to fall for me.
They wanted to keep me in the family, which was nice to hear. ”
“I already fell. In the emotional sense,” I clarified. I held up my legs and he pulled the boots off my feet, which wasn’t easy in the dark. The batteries on his lantern had now failed completely.
“I’m also very bad at planning fun nights with you,” he mentioned as we crawled under the mound of blankets. “It’s freezing, not romantic.”
Yes, I was shivering a lot. “This is so much better than a cave,” I said bracingly.
“Come here,” he said, and I felt him reaching for me. I went gladly and we snuggled under the layers together. After a while, I felt warm. More than warm.
“Now we’re both awake and we know each other very well,” I mentioned. “In my opinion, groping would be great.”
“Like this?” Theo suggested. I still wore most of my clothing due to the temperature, which meant that he was groping over-the-shirt until he helped me remove it. “I should have asked if you had a knife in here…nope, and no bra to hold it.”
“I planned ahead,” I explained. The knife had been in my boot, but he hadn’t noticed when he’d helped me with those. “I’m not wearing underwear either, and it was totally on purpose.”
“Holy…I wish I could see you.”
But he was doing fine with touch. He needed no further encouragement to grope, either, and I was fully on-board with all of it. He liked my groping as well, like when I first removed his clothes (no knives, but I didn’t expect any) and then set to feeling him everywhere. “Grace!” he gasped.
“Are my hands cold? I’ll use my mouth.” I couldn’t see him either, but I could feel the size of his erection and I could hear him moaning as I swirled my tongue and suckled. I scratched my fingernails down his thighs and he said my name again.
“I’m going to get up and find where I left the condoms I brought, and I’m going to try to calm down because…holy…your mouth,” he gasped, and I did let him pull away. He stumbled off the air mattresses and then there was a loud thump and a dim light filled the room.
“Theo!”
“I’m ok. I fell over the lantern,” he said. “I jump-started it.”
And now I could see him, all the wonderful lines of his body and his face which I could have looked at for days. He could see me, too, and his eyes widened.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, and it sounded like he was awed. “Grace, you’re so beautiful.”
I held out my arms and he came back to bed to hold me, and then he touched me again, moving faster and more urgently.
My hips started to rock against his hand as he stroked between my legs, and maybe my immediate reaction was due to his prior study of human anatomy or maybe it was just that I had wanted him so much, for so long.
When he kissed my neck again and then tongued my nipples, my thighs started to shake.
They shook harder and then my whole body did, and I pressed my breasts against him as I came.
He pulled one of my thighs over his hip and slid into me, and his fingers clenched around my butt to hold us tightly together. “Is it good?” he asked me, and I moaned back that it was. He turned me onto my back and I wrapped my legs around him to I could take him even deeper.
It was so good that I was overwhelmed by it.
I looked up into his face and he pushed away some curls so that he could see mine.
“I really love you,” I said, and as he drove into me, I felt myself start to go over the edge again.
“Just like that!” I begged and he kept going, and sugar.
That was so good that I saw more stars, so good that I got lost in pleasure as I heard him say my name and tell me that he loved me, too.
It didn’t feel cold anymore. Both of us lay panting, holding each other and laughing, and it was a while before I noticed that this bed wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be.
“The air mattresses deflated,” he explained when I mentioned that. “A real one would be better.”
“We’ll have one soon enough. Keon is going to finish this cabin and it will be great.”
“Will you live here with me, Grace? Will you stay with me?”
“Yes, always,” I answered.
“I’ll love you always,” he said. He kissed me again and then I reached for the condoms he’d brought, just as the light flickered out.
I hadn’t taken the usual path and maybe I hadn’t gone the way my family had wanted, but I was right in the place that I needed to be: in the dark, on a deflated mattress, in a cabin with no heat. What was better than that?
“I love you,” he told me again.
Nothing was better than Theo.