Chapter Twenty Sadie
Chapter Twenty Sadie
Once, several years ago, when Jonah and I were still PhD candidates, I gave a paper in the ESU student seminar series about declarations of love.
Essentially, I was arguing that declarations of love in a romance novel were a major step towards the ultimate eucatastrophe of the happy ending and, when executed well, they made the world’s most overused phrase – ‘I love you’ – feel like it was being said for the first time.
Professor Fisher hadn’t bothered to turn up to this particular seminar (a pleasant surprise) but one of his students – a smug prick named Peter – had.
‘I just don’t think the language of catastrophe is useful here,’ he’d said.
‘Isn’t the whole point of romance novels that they’re pink and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens?
’
I’d opened my mouth to speak, but Jonah got in before me.
‘You’re misunderstanding what a catastrophe is, Peter.
’
He was sitting in the second row, tweed-clad arms stretched across the backs of the empty seats on either side of him.
‘It’s not a disaster, it’s a dramatic term.
It’s all through the literature on ancient theatre.
Four stages: prologue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe.
The catastrophe is the moment when it all hangs on the precipice.
If it goes one way, it’s a tragedy, and everyone will probably die; if it goes the other, it’s a comedy, and everyone will get their happy ending.
’
‘If I could answer the question for myself, thank you,’ I said sharply, ‘Peter, there is in fact plenty of rising and falling action in the romance genre. These books are not set in a static world where everything is pink and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens. Eucatastrophe is joy poignant as grief . The joy cannot be truly felt in a world where the grief isn’t possible.
’
‘And the catastrophe is the narrative fork between the joy and the grief.’
‘Fisher, who exactly is giving this seminar paper?’
‘You are, Shaw, of course. But I’m right, though, aren’t I?
’
He was right, but I squared my shoulders for a fight – because of course he’d take me agreeing with him as some kind of victory, and I was not going to let him have it.
The argument we were in the middle of now, though, he had just emphatically won.
‘I love you, Sadie Shaw,’ Jonah said to me, looking me dead in the eyes, one hand twined tight in my hair, ‘and there is nothing you can say or do that will ever make me want to leave you.’
Those words – somehow both words I had heard before and words I had never, ever heard before – were catastrophic.
Two paths were before me, snaking away into the moonlit darkness.
Everyone leaves in the end, whispered the ghost of Chess, a flash of red hair, walking away from me.
But then there was Jonah, arms spread wide, an invitation, an embrace.
You think I’m going to leave you?
Try and make me.
‘Say it again?’ I asked, my voice croaky from crying.
‘Please?’
‘Sadie,’ he said.
‘I love you.’
I was on the precipice.
I could believe the evidence of thirty-two years.
I could run.
He would let me.
Or I could believe him.
I could—
I could—
Jump.
‘Jonah,’ I said, ‘will you please kiss me?’
His breath caught in his throat.
His hand tightened reflexively in my hair.
He leant his forehead against mine and the world narrowed to a single point.
‘You’ve been crying, darling,’ he said desperately, running his thumb along my cheekbone.
‘You… I don’t want to take advantage.
’
I curled my fingers into his lapels, the way I had on our wedding day.
My knuckles rested against his chest, and I couldn’t tell if it was his heart or my heart that was racing.
‘You can’t just tell me you love me,’ I whispered.
‘You need to show me. If you mean it, you need… I need you to prove it.’
His breath was as ragged as mine.
It – he – was the only warm thing in the cold of the night, and his eyes were wild as he tried to find the hole in my argument.
‘Oh fuck,’ he whispered, as he realised he’d lost this time.
‘Oh God, Sadie.’
And then his lips were hot and hungry against mine and his fingers were twined painfully tight in my hair and Jonah Fisher was kissing me like he would never, ever let me go.
I wound my arms around his neck, desperate to feel every line of him pressed against me, real and solid and here, here, here with me.
‘I love you,’ he gasped into my mouth.
‘I love you so fucking much.’
We stumbled towards our apartment, stopping halfway up the stairs so he could press me back against the railing.
‘Hold these,’ he said, taking his glasses off and pushing them into my hand, ‘they’re in the way,’ and buried his face in the curve of my neck, kissing his way up my throat, one thigh between mine.
His hands were at my waist, pulling me into him.
My free hand snaked under his blazer, and when I dug my fingernails into his shoulder blade and he groaned into the place where my jaw met my hairline, I felt the vibrations of it in every cell of my body, goose-bumps rippling up and down my arms.
‘Inside,’ I breathed.
‘Please.’
I gave him his glasses back so I could find the keys, fingers scrabbling in my handbag as his arm banded around my waist, my back against his chest, my earlobe caught between his teeth.
His erection was pressed hard against the small of my back, and his heartbeat thrummed through my body, fast but even, a rhythm that was also a promise.
I nearly dropped the keys three times before I managed to unlock the door.
He was already kissing me again as it slammed closed behind us, one hand snicking the lock shut before it was back on me, palm against the nape of my neck.
I dropped my handbag on the floor and shoved the blazer off his shoulders.
He put his glasses back on so he could help me with the buttons of his shirt, but his fingers were shaking even worse than mine, so, ‘Here,’ he said, ‘let’s try this,’ and took his glasses back off again, putting them on my head and using them to push my hair out of my face like a headband, kissing me once tenderly before pulling his half-unbuttoned shirt off over his head.
I twisted my fingers into the hair that dusted his chest, letting my forehead fall to his shoulder.
I traced the darker line of it that cut down the centre of his body, fading away almost completely as it passed his navel and then thickening again as it disappeared under his waistband.
‘Sadie,’ Jonah said, as I unbuckled his belt.
‘Oh God, Sadie.’
I licked along the line of his clavicle.
His hands tightened on my hips, then slid down to my thighs.
‘ Sadie, ’ he gasped, and hoisted me up against him, lifting me off the ground and pushing me back against the wall.
It was an inherently sexy position and I wrapped my arms and my legs around him instinctively, but the fear that suddenly pulsated through me was just as instinctive.
‘Please don’t drop me.
’
He pressed gentle, featherlight kisses up my throat until he got to my lips.
‘Shaw,’ he said into my mouth, ‘I’ve got you.
’
He kissed the tip of my nose.
‘Do you trust me?’
I let out a long, slow breath.
I love you, Sadie.
There is nothing you can say or do that will ever make me want to leave you.
‘Yes.’
I kissed him, long and slow and deep, tongue licking against his, the tongue with which he’d made that promise to me.
He made a sound, deep in his throat, and I fisted my hands in his hair harder, pulling him closer, grinding myself against him.
‘Oh, shit, I actually might drop you if you keep doing that,’ he choked out, followed by another wordless moan as I did it again.
‘Your room or mine?’
‘Mine’s closer.
’
The difference was all of five steps, but Jonah didn’t argue or hesitate.
He paused only to hit the switch on my fairy lights as he carried me into my bedroom, kicking the door shut behind him and setting me down.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he breathed into my ear.
‘Please.’
He toed his shoes off as I managed to undo the side zipper of my dress, nearly dislodging his glasses from the top of my head as I pulled it off.
He hooked the fingers of his right hand under one of my bra straps and pulled it gently off my shoulder, kissing his way along my collarbone as he sketched a line up my spine with his left hand, fumbling for the clasp.
I undid it for him after a few failed attempts.
He smiled at me sheepishly, that Cardigan Jonah smile that made everything feel warm and golden.
‘Sorry. I can’t really see.
’
I traced my fingertips along the little indentations his glasses had left on his cheeks, drawing his face down to mine so I could kiss them too, one after the other.
Beneath my lips, his beard was soft, just as it had been that night when he’d told his dad I was one of the most brilliant early-career researchers in the country.
‘You can touch, though,’ I said, guiding his left hand to my breast.
He needed no further encouragement.
We fell back onto my bed, his weight almost knocking the wind out of me as we landed, his mouth ravenous against mine but his fingers careful, caring, caressing on my skin.
He kissed his way down the column of my neck, and when his lips fastened on one of my nipples I almost shrieked, heels pressing into his exceptional arse as my legs tightened around him.
He grinned up at me, a brilliant flash, then did the same thing to my other nipple.
The sound it tore out of me was even louder and more high-pitched, and his second grin was even wider.
‘Filing that data point away,’ he said, ‘for significant further exploration.’
Then he blinked, one hand curling around behind him to settle on my ankle.
‘How are you still wearing shoes?’
‘I don’t – ah!
– fucking know, Jonah.
’ I almost sobbed as he bit down lightly on the side of my breast, nuzzling his beard against it.
‘I… just… oh God.’
He pressed a kiss between my breasts, right over my pounding heart.
‘Let me help you with that.’
He drew back, unzipping one of my ankle boots and then the other, pulling them gently off my feet, peeling the socks I was wearing under them off too and dropping them to the floor.
He feathered his thumb over the tattoo on my left foot, once, twice, three times, before he looked me in the eye, gaze not leaving mine as he kissed it.
I knew he couldn’t see it in the dim lighting, but he knew what it said.
He’d seen it many times, as I sat barefoot next to him on the couch.
Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
I nearly burst into tears again.
His hands smoothed up the sides of my legs.
‘Can I?’ he asked, fingertips resting on the waistband of my underwear.
‘Yes. Please, yes.’
I lifted my hips up to help him.
He slid them down slowly, fabric gliding agonisingly over my sensitive skin, before he cast them aside.
I was desperate for him to touch me.
But Jonah just stood there, looking at me, for a long time.
‘What’s wrong?
’
‘Nothing. I just can’t…
Can you give me my glasses, please?
’
I’d forgotten they were still on the top of my head.
I handed them to him, disentangling them from loose strands of my hair.
He put them back on, and he looked at me again, and the strangest sound came out of him – like someone being strangled halfway through the most contented, satisfied sigh of their life.
‘Oh fuck, Sadie,’ he breathed.
He wrapped his fingers around my ankles, bending to kiss my tattoo again before he pulled my legs gently apart.
‘ Oh fuck, Sadie ,’ he choked again.
‘You’re so beautiful.
’
I didn’t know how to process the way he was looking at me.
He seemed stunned, awestruck, spellbound, like some sacred treasure was spread out on the bed before him.
Tears welled in my eyes.
‘Jonah…’
His hands tightened on my ankles.
He yanked me suddenly towards him, falling to his knees at the edge of the bed.
‘Hold these,’ he said, pressing his glasses roughly into my hands again, and then he buried his face between my legs.
My head snapped back and my back arched, but his hands were firm on my thighs, holding me open, holding me down, holding me close.
‘Jonah!’
He smiled against me, his laugh a gentle hum as I only just managed to put his glasses on my bedside table without dropping them.
Then he got to work.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to become an expert at something.
No one knew that better than an academic.
I had let so many things fall by the wayside in my pursuit of scholarly mastery.
But Jonah was clearly better at time management than me, because on top of becoming an expert in his own field, he’d clearly found time to do a second PhD in eating pussy.
He might have looked at me like I was sacred, but the things he did to me were profane.
His beard brushed against my inner thighs as he licked a long line up the centre of me, making me sob.
He nudged my clit with the tip of his nose, making me inhale sharply, and then, when he pulled it into his mouth, sucking gently, then sucking harder, he made me scream, and scream, and scream .
He grinned again, looking up at me.
‘I’m going to use my fingers,’ he said, pressing a chaste kiss to my hip bone, ‘if that’s okay.
’
‘Please, please, please,’ was all I was capable of saying, the thought of it turning my brain inside out.
‘Please.’
His grin widened.
‘When you blush,’ he said, smoothing a hand over my lower belly, ‘it starts right – here.’
He kissed just below my navel.
‘Look at it go,’ he said, kissing his way up my body.
‘Even I can see it. Has this been happening, all this time, under all those pretty dresses of yours?’
I yanked his hair and pulled his face to mine, before he could fasten his lips around my nipple again and completely turn my brain to liquid.
I could taste myself on him as he kissed me, and it filled me with a sense of possessiveness so strong it almost overwhelmed me.
This was my husband.
Mine.
And he wasn’t going to leave.
‘Well, when you blush, Fisher, it all goes straight to your face,’ I said, and grabbed his cock.
Jonah went completely still.
I stroked him through his pants.
He made that half-strangled, half-satisfied sound again.
It was my turn to grin.
‘I’m assuming your little experiment failed,’ he choked out at last, ‘because I definitely don’t have enough blood anywhere else in my body to blush.
’
I undid the button on his pants and slid my hand inside them, wrapping my fingers around the length of him.
‘I didn’t manage the full scarlet special,’ I said, kissing the apple of one cheek, then the other, ‘but I got you to turn a tiny bit pink.’
I stroked him again, and he collapsed onto me with a groan.
‘If you keep doing that,’ he said, voice muffled in my breasts, ‘this is going to be over quickly and disappointingly.’
I stroked him once more and then let go, scratching my nails up the line of hair on his belly.
He panted into my skin for a few seconds, like an athlete at the end of a marathon, before he nuzzled the hollow at the base of my throat and kissed me again, lovingly, lingeringly.
‘This is like co-writing with you, Shaw,’ he said.
‘I lay out a perfectly good plan of attack and then you insist on including a bunch of tangents.’
I was about to protest, but then his fingers dipped between my legs and I forgot every word in the English language except yes and fuck and please and Jonah.
He played me like a violin, coaxing the first orgasm out of me with two fingers, thumb against my clit as the entire world turned white; the second assisted by his mouth, laughing against me as I quaked uncontrollably.
‘It’s not funny,’ I panted, as he chuckled, forehead pillowed on one of my thighs.
‘It’s not fair, that you can completely steal my powers of rational thought like this.
’
‘Shaw, you’ve been stealing my powers of rational thought for fifteen years, every time I look at you,’ he said fondly.
‘Strictly speaking, I think it’s your turn.
’
‘That’s cute, Fisher, but I don’t think you understand the extent of the problem.
’ I tugged lightly at his hair, which I hadn’t managed to uncurl my fingers from yet.
‘You should have tried seducing me before we both applied for this job. If you’d fucked my brains out then, you wouldn’t have had to go to all this trouble.
’
‘Hey.’ His tone was sharp.
‘No. None of that.’
He crawled back up my body, bracing his elbows on either side of my head.
He’d lost his pants at some stage, and his skin was hot against mine, everywhere our bodies were pressed together.
‘There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be than here with you.’
He slid his nose against mine, then kissed me, just once, tenderly.
‘If some angel descended from heaven and told me I could live my life over again, go back, make different choices – I would do everything exactly the same,’ he said, ‘if it meant I could end up here.’
Then he looked thoughtful.
‘Well, maybe not exactly the same. There are a few revisions I’d make.
And—’
‘Jonah,’ I said, ‘shut up.’
I shoved at his shoulders, pushing him onto his back.
I pulled open the drawer of my bedside table, sending up a quick prayer of thanks to whatever higher being had been looking out for me during the move when I’d contemplated throwing out the half-empty box of condoms I had left over from my last partner but had ultimately decided against it.
I glanced at the expiry date as I tore the packet open.
They were still good for a few months.
Thank fucking God.
Jonah tried to swallow his groan as I rolled the condom onto him, but he couldn’t.
It lit something up, deep inside me, and suddenly, of all things, I was thinking about the first time I read ‘On Fairy-Stories’, and how it had struck that chord in me that had never stopped reverberating.
Outside this room, we still had problems.
Problems that would not be solved easily.
The hollow place Chess had left in my heart could not be filled by anyone else.
Jonah would always be his father’s son.
The university would probably always be a cruel, cut-throat, neoliberal institution that would do its best to bleed us dry.
But despite all of that, in here, in the starry glow of my fairy lights, in this tiny world inhabited by just the two of us, something good could happen.
I straddled Jonah, knees on either side of his hips.
I laced the fingers of my right hand through his left and brought it to my lips, kissing the second cheap wedding ring that I’d put on his finger just that morning.
‘Do you know why I asked you to marry me, Jonah?’
He was barely breathing.
‘Tell me,’ he rasped.
‘I didn’t know it, when I asked you.
’ I took his cock in my free hand, rubbing myself against the head of him, feeling him quiver beneath me.
‘I didn’t know it, when I was fighting with Chess about why marrying you was actually a good and sensible and reasonable and not completely insane plan.
I didn’t even know it when Fiona said it straight to my face.
Like, literally, she said it to me, and my brain skated right over it, like it was obscure French theory.
’
Jonah’s face was so white and bloodless he looked like he was about to faint.
‘I don’t know when I figured it out.
What is it that Darcy says to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice ?
“I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun”?
’
Jonah made a choked sound that might have been a laugh.
I slipped the head of his cock inside me and he made a choked sound that was definitely a gasp.
Thank you , Fiona had said to me, that day in Tsundoku.
Thank you for loving my brother enough to do this.
‘I don’t know who I am without you beside me, Jonah,’ I said, sliding all the way down onto him, feeling him long and hard and solid inside me.
‘I love you too.’
He tugged at my right hand, pulling my face down to his.
I rocked my hips against him as he kissed me, the fingers of his other hand tangled in my hair.
‘Sadie,’ he murmured into my mouth, ‘fuck, Sadie… Sadie, darling.’
The endearment made me smile.
He made another choked sound as I rocked against him again, and I drew back slightly.
Then I paused.
‘Jonah, are you crying?’
‘No!’
I dipped my head and kissed the tears off his cheeks.
‘It’s because I’m in pain , Shaw,’ he insisted.
‘I’m so hard it feels like I might die.
’
I laughed.
‘I think we might be able to collaborate on solving that problem.’
I rose up, but he grabbed at my thigh.
‘Wait, wait, wait. Can you give me my glasses again?’
His cock slipped out of me as I reached over for them, but he guided me straight back onto it the second they were on his face.
‘If my beautiful bride is going to ride me,’ he said, fingers digging hard into my hips, ‘then it would be rude not to watch.’
I braced my hands against his chest.
‘Are you ready?’
‘I hope you’re ready,’ he replied, ‘for the fact this might last about nine seconds.’
‘A whole nine?’ I ground down into him and was rewarded with an almost agonised cry.
‘I need to work a bit harder, if you can hold out that long.’
He shifted one of his hands.
His thumb brushed across my clit, and every nerve ending in my body sparked to life again.
‘Don’t think,’ he panted, thumb moving against me as I started moving against him, ‘that I’m going to let you do – oh my God, Sadie, holy fucking hell you feel incredible – all the work.
’
‘Shut the fuck up, Jonah,’ I managed to say, third orgasm already starting to build with the perfect dual pressures of his thumb on my clit and his cock thrusting up to meet me, matching my rhythm, ‘and let me do some of it – oh fuck, yes, yes, there, like that.’
Later, afterwards, when he’d finally managed to get up and get rid of the condom, we lay snuggled in my bed together in the soft glow of the fairy lights, his head on my shoulder.
‘Don’t let me forget to change the sheets before Thursday,’ I murmured, carding my fingers through his hair.
‘We absolutely cannot let the girls sleep in here otherwise.’
He chuckled.
‘You’d better change them on Thursday, because I plan on messing them up several more times before then.
’ He glanced up at me.
‘If that aligns with your plans. Obviously.’
I pressed my lips to his temple.
‘I made my best argument for why we should split up tonight,’ I said, ‘and you dismantled it.’
‘In that case, we better add condoms to the grocery list, because that box isn’t going to get us very – oh God, Sadie, I love you so much.
’
He turned his head suddenly into my shoulder.
His voice was breaking when he spoke again, directly into my collarbone.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you, I love you, I have always loved you, I don’t entirely understand how we ended up here but I love you so fucking much.
’
‘You need to understand who I am, though.’
My voice was cracking too as I tugged at his hair, made him look at me.
‘You might have won the argument, but I made some valid points,’ I said.
‘I’m still all fists.
I’m still all teeth.
And—’
‘I like your fists.’ He found my hand and bit down gently on one of my knuckles.
‘I like your teeth.’
It was hard not to laugh as he strummed his finger over my lips like a guitar string, pulling the bottom one down slightly before leaning in and lining my front teeth with the tip of his tongue.
I bit his lip in return.
‘I mean it, though,’ I said.
‘Some days I’m probably going to be a real bitch to you.
No matter how well and how frequently you dick me down, that’s not going to change.
’
‘I wouldn’t want it to – although that does sound like a challenge I’d be interested in attempting.
’ He kissed me.
‘Do you know Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130?
’
‘Is that Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments ?’
‘That’s 116.
Also very appropriate, my darling, but not the one I mean.
’
He got up, putting his glasses back on and finding his phone in his pants pocket.
‘This is 130,’ he said, settling back in next to me and bringing it up on the screen.
I leant my chin on his shoulder so I could read it.
‘?“ My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun ”.’
‘It goes on like that for most of the poem.’ He gestured briefly down the first three quatrains.
‘There are some pretty sick burns in there about Shakespeare’s dark lady mistress, to be honest – like, “ In some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks” ?
Not terribly romantic.
’
He scrolled to the bottom.
‘But I really like the end. Lines eleven to fourteen.’
I started at line eleven.
‘?“ I grant I never saw a goddess go; / My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground ”.’
‘?“ And yet, by heaven ,”?’ Jonah said, looking at me, not the screen, ‘?“ I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare ”.’
I melted into him.
As far as declarations of love went, it was entirely citational – quite literally someone else’s words – but it was somehow also entirely personal.
Then Jonah snorted with laughter.
I looked up.
‘What?’
‘Van just forwarded us both an academic jobs digest,’ he said.
‘You’ll never guess what they’re recruiting for back at ESU.
’
He showed me.
Lecturer in Literary Studies, Level B.
‘Look who the chair of the hiring committee is.’
Direct all enquiries to: Professor Christian Fisher.
I snorted too.
‘Well, that rules me out,’ I said, ‘unless you wanted to take me on partner hire.’
Then, unbidden, a bolt of fear shot through me.
What if Jonah decided – what if he wanted—
‘Stop,’ he said, flicking my nose with his finger.
‘I see your mind piecing that argument together, Shaw, and I’m here to tell you that it’s completely without foundation.
I’m not going anywhere.
’
He tightened his arm around me and kissed me.
‘When it comes to blithely walking into academic jobs I don’t deserve, I have extremely high standards.
’
‘You do deserve—’ I started, but then he was hitching my leg over his lap, and his fingers were sketching a fiery pathway up my inner thigh, and as he closed his mouth over my nipple again, all the words in the world fell away from me.