25. Kevin
— ? —
Kevin
We barely made it inside before I had her against the wall again.
But this time, when she reached for my belt, I caught her hands.
“Wait,” I breathed.
She looked up at me, confused. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just-” I brought her hands to my mouth, kissed her knuckles. “I want to take my time.”
The clinic had been a fire. This was going to be a hearth I could tend.
I’d spent three years learning what it cost to be careless with her, and I wasn’t about to be careless now, not with her breath still coming fast and her eyes searching my face for the catch.
There was no catch. There was just me, and the miracle of her under my hands, and a promise I intended to keep with my whole body.
Careless. That was the whole indictment, wasn’t it.
I’d never been cruel, never once raised my voice to this woman.
Careless was worse. Careless was a man so busy building a monument to how much he could give the world that he stopped noticing the one person who’d asked him for so little.
She’d called me eleven times. I’d seen the screen light up on the white tablecloth and I’d turned it face down and smiled at an investor, and by the time I called her back it was already the worst morning of both our lives.
I wouldn’t turn away from her again. Not ever, not for anything.
I led her to the bedroom. The cottage was small, the furniture simple, but I didn’t care about any of it.
I only cared about her. There was a lamp on the nightstand with a crooked shade, and a stack of her project binders on the dresser, and the window was cracked to the sound of the harbor two streets down.
I noticed all of it and none of it. She filled the room.
I stood her in the middle of the room and started undressing her. Slowly. Deliberately. Button by button, inch by inch.
Her shirt first. I slid it off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
Her bra followed, and I took a moment to just look at her, at the body I’d spent three years dreaming about.
She was thinner than I remembered, and there was a new set to her mouth that grief had put there, and I loved her more for both of those things than I had ever loved anything.
My hands weren’t quite steady. I didn’t try to hide it.
“You keep looking at me,” she said.
“I’m appreciating.”
“It’s weird.”
“It’s worship.”
I knelt to remove her pants, pressing kisses to her stomach, her hips, her thighs.
By the time she was standing naked before me, she was trembling.
I kept my mouth soft against her skin and felt the shiver travel through her, and I understood that some of it was want and some of it was fear, and I meant to answer both.
I stood and stripped off my own clothes.
Shirt, pants, everything. Let her look at me the way I’d looked at her.
It cost me to stand there and be seen. I’d changed too in three years, more gray at my temples, the hollowness of a man who’d stopped eating properly the day his wife left. I let her see all of it.
I’d gotten very good, in those years, at being looked at.
Donors looked at me. Boards looked at me.
The local paper had put my face on the front page under the words visionary and homecoming, and I’d learned to hold still and let them find whatever they were looking for.
This was the opposite of that. There was nothing to sell here and no version of me to perform.
There was only the truth of my body in a small rented room, and the woman I’d failed deciding, inch by inch, whether she could stand to look at it.
I made myself keep my hands at my sides and let her decide.
Her eyes traveled over my body. Lingered on the tattoos. Stopped on the names over my heart.
“I used to hate those,” she whispered.
“And now?”
“Now I understand why you got them.”
I pulled her close and kissed her. Deep and slow, nothing like the desperate frenzy in the clinic.
This was different. This was coming home.
Her skin was warm all along mine and I felt the exact place our chests met, the ink over my heart pressed to the softness of hers, and I had to breathe through the ache of it.
When I pulled back, I kept my forehead against hers.
“Tell me where he touched you,” I whispered.
She stiffened. “What?”
“My poor replacement.” I kissed her jaw. “The one you tried to forget me with. Where did he touch you?”
I wasn’t angry. I had no right to be angry.
But I wanted to replace that memory with a better one.
Wanted to erase every trace of anyone else who had ever touched her.
It wasn’t jealousy, or not only jealousy.
It was penance. She’d gone looking for me in someone else because I hadn’t been there to be found, and I’d spend the rest of my life undoing that particular ruin, inch by inch, if she let me.
She hesitated. Then pointed to one side of her neck. “Here.”
I kissed that spot. Gently at first, then harder, sucking a mark into her skin. She moaned, her fingers digging into my shoulders. I stayed until the skin bloomed under my mouth, until it was mine again, and then I lifted my head.
“Where else?”
“Here.” She touched the space between her breasts.
I kissed there too. Paid equal attention to both breasts, drawing her nipples into my mouth, making her gasp and arch against me. Her hands came up into my hair, holding me to her, and I felt her heartbeat quicken under my lips.
“Where else?”
She hesitated. Her hand moved to her stomach, resting flat against her belly.
“Here,” she whispered, her voice breaking.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were glazing with tears.
My hand found hers. Together, we caressed her belly, the place where our baby had grown and the place where we’d lost everything.
And nobody had touched her there, I understood then.
Nobody could have. That grief was a country only the two of us held passports to, and she’d been living there alone for three years because I’d left her at the border and gone to a dinner instead.
A tear fell down my cheek.
I dropped to my knees and pressed my lips to her stomach.
Butterfly kisses, soft and reverent. My forehead dropped against her belly and I sobbed.
The sound tore out of me before I could dress it up into anything dignified.
I’d built a clinic. I’d built a reputation across two coasts.
And I hadn’t been in the one room that mattered on the one night that mattered, and no amount of anything I’d built since could carry the weight of that.
“I love you, Steph,” I said against her skin. “I think you’re the most extraordinary, amazing, gorgeous, clever person I’ve ever met. The most talented. The funniest. The prettiest.”
She was crying too now. Her hands tangled in my hair, holding me close.
“You make me want to be better,” I continued, the words pouring out unplanned. “Every day since I lost you, I’ve been trying to become someone worthy of you. Someone who deserves a second chance. Someone who would never, ever make the same mistakes again.”
I looked up at her, this woman who was somehow still my whole world after everything I’d done to lose her.
“And it will be a cold day in hell when I stop being in love with you. Even if we die, my soul will still be tied to yours, and I’ll wait for you, then follow you to our next life together. Because there’s no life on this earth where I’m apart from you.”
She was shaking. Tears streaming down her face. I held her hips to steady her, or maybe to steady myself, and I waited. I’d learned to wait. Waiting was the one gift I could still give her that I hadn’t already squandered.
“I’m so fucking sorry for everything,” I whispered. “Please. Please give me another chance. Please.”
I stayed on my knees. Looked up at her with everything I had.
“I’m begging you. Please let me prove myself. Let me make you fall in love like you were. Let me show you I’ve changed, that I learned from my mistakes. Let me prove I’ll try, every single day, to be worthy of you.”
Silence. Her whole body trembling. The tears falling unchecked. The lamp threw a warm crooked light across her face and I memorized it, every second of it, in case it was the last version of her I ever got to hold.
“Damn you,” she whispered. “Damn you, Kevin Coleman.”
Then she grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me.
Against my lips, so quiet I almost didn’t hear it, she whispered: “Okay. You can try.”
Joy exploded through my chest.
I stood and lifted her, spinning her around, making her laugh through her tears. Then I laid her gently on the bed and covered her face in kisses.
“I love you,” I said against her forehead. “I love you.” Her cheeks. “I love you.” Her nose, her chin, her lips. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She was laughing now, pushing at my shoulders. “You’re insane.”
“I’m happy. Not the same thing.”
I pulled her on top of me, settling her so she straddled my hips.
Looked up at her with what I knew must be a ridiculous grin.
Her hair fell around us in a curtain and the tears on her lashes caught the lamplight, and she was, without contest, the most beautiful thing I had ever been allowed to look at.
“I was a good boy for you tonight, wasn’t I?”
She bit her lip. “Yes. You were a good boy.”
“Then sit on my face, Steph.” I slid my hands up her thighs. “Give me my reward.”
She giggled. Actually giggled, the sound light and pure and perfect. I hadn’t heard it in three years. I’d have gotten on my knees in front of the whole island to hear it once more.