Chapter 31
I wake up on Friday to a text from Stewart: Skipped my morning meetings, will land by noon. Come for dinner tonight? Just us
Giddy. It’s not a word I’ve ever used to describe myself, but it’s the one that pops into my head. This dizzy, bubbly feeling that washes over me as I stare at the words “just us.”
Me: I can be there by five
I get off work at four, but I want to come home, shower, and show up like a normal woman. Maybe re-shave my legs.
Stewart: Perfect, can’t wait to see you
Me: Same
There has never been a longer day. Someone took this particular I Get to See Stewart Friday and added eight hours to it.
Tomorrow is the Starlight Gala and my dad is in a frenzy.
I try to plug in to his frenzy to make the day pass more quickly, but it doesn’t work.
When it’s finally four, I take a too-hot shower and decide to wear the blue-and-white ikat dress again.
The gates are open to welcome me in, and I park by the front doors. I ring the bell. It’s absurd, this bell, like the gongs of church bells at eight o’clock.
He opens the door and his smile matches my own. “Hi,” he says. He’s in a crisp white shirt and khaki pants, no shoes.
“Hi,” I say, and take a step inside. It’s overwhelming, this foyer, with its double high ceilings and wide, wide marble staircase.
Also, the way my stomach dips all on its own accord taking him in.
He takes a step toward me and pulls me to him.
I wrap my arms around his neck. The relief I feel in this moment, as if I’ve come out of the cold and someone’s wrapped me in cashmere.
He kisses me and it’s different. It’s more somehow, more tender and heavier with feeling.
I have a brief thought that we could both start to cry.
“I missed you so much,” he says, and my smile cracks open.
He kisses me again and I rest my hands on his chest, feeling both his heartbeat and the muscles under his shirt.
I am taking this kiss someplace that might not be totally appropriate for the family foyer.
I stop and let out a breath, embarrassed.
“Would you like to see my room?” he asks, grinning.
“I would,” I say.
He leads me by the hand upstairs. We walk down a long corridor to a second landing.
This landing has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the bay.
He opens a door to an antique four-poster bed dressed in white linen, two armchairs in green-and-white ticking facing the water view.
Off to the right is a small alcove with a desk and a view of the tip of Whitfield.
Stewart closes the door and pulls me close. His hands strong on my back and the warmth of his chest on my cheek are the things of my daydreams this past week. He says, “In a day, like a regular day with meetings and travel, I have a hard time thinking about anything but you.”
I look up at him. “Oh?” That’s all I can get out, because my body is responding like it’s heard volumes of meaning behind his sentence.
I unbutton his shirt, from the top. I keep my eyes on the buttons as I go, and I can feel him watching me.
“I wanted to know if you felt the same way,” he says.
I pull my dress over my head, drop it onto the floor, and climb onto his bed.
He smiles and climbs onto the bed on top of me, the feel of his bare chest on mine is enough to undo me.
I run my hands down his back, and he rests on my chest, watching me.
I love him, I realize. He’s telling me that he missed me, but I actually love him.
I should tell him this isn’t safe for me.
I should warn him that I’m in too deep already.
He takes both of my hands in his and raises them up over my head.
I am caught. He brushes his lips over mine and my hips respond. “Is this a yes?” he whispers.
“Yes.” I say it so fast, the way you’d say “uncle” to get someone to stop twisting your arm.
“About me taking off the rest of your clothes? Or about you feeling the same way?” He squeezes our entwined hands, intensifying the ache between my legs.
I raise my head to kiss him and the warmth of his mouth on mine spreads throughout my body, down to my legs, which are wrapped around his, holding him to me. He pulls away and lets go of one of my hands. He touches my lips and waits. His favorite negotiation tactic. I smile at him.
“All of it, Stewart.” And it’s like a slingshot pulled so far back that the tension released matches the intensity of what follows.
It’s different, the way we touch each other, it’s as if we’ve removed the last barrier between us.
We make love with eyes and hearts open, and I feel like we’ve told each other something that can’t be taken back.
“Let’s never do that again,” he says afterward. My head is on his chest and he’s running his hand over my hair in a way that makes me feel like I’m in the safest possible place. Then I clock what he said.
“Have you gone crazy?” I ask. I look up at him and he smiles.
“No. Not that. I want to do that again immediately, or maybe just after dinner.” He kisses my forehead and pulls me in closer. “I mean being apart a whole week. It was torture. Let’s not do that again.”
I press my head harder onto his chest. I want to stay here in this exact second. If I had long fingernails there would be blood on his arm. I feel a burning at the back of my throat and I wonder if I might cry.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why?” He laughs. “Because I missed you. I had this weird anxious feeling the whole time, like I’d lost my phone.
I mean, you mean more to me than my phone.
But like everything was off, knowing I wasn’t going to see you at the end of the day.
” He’s quiet for a bit and I lie there with my hand on his heart.
“I love being able to share things with you.”
“Like what?” I say, though I know. Everything.
“My life. My worries. For the first time I feel like I don’t have to handle everything on my own.”
I pull myself closer to him and run my fingers along his neck. “Yeah,” I say.
“Okay, I’m out on a limb here with my feelings. I’m naked and I’m lying here telling you how little I can cope with not being with you. And you’re saying ‘yeah.’ Cue my next panic attack.”
I laugh. I run a hand down his chest to his stomach. He takes a breath, and I let the sound wash over me. “I have all of those feelings too,” I say finally. “But I’m probably more afraid of them than you are.”
“Afraid of what?”
“This. Us. We’re not exactly an obvious couple.”
“Pretty obvious to me.”
“It doesn’t scare you?”
“Dolly, I wake up scared. Everything scares me, like one wrong move is going to topple the house of cards. Dr. Meyers calls me Atlas.” He turns onto his side so he can see my face. “He calls Oscar the spare.”
“My therapist calls me Mom,” I say after a while, and he smiles.
“Lucky,” he says. I don’t react. This is the thing that will keep what’s beautiful between us from blooming into forever.
Stewart wants a baby, and he deserves to have a child.
And while I’m not so great at determining what I want for myself, I know in my heart I don’t want to be pregnant again.
After a complicated pregnancy and an emergency C-section, I would never risk Gus losing his only parent.
We’ll talk about this if we ever start talking about forever.
And I have it in my head that forever starts after the Starlight Gala tomorrow night.
“You’re quiet,” he says after a while, trailing his fingers like silk over my shoulder. “You okay?”
I look up at him and decide not to sabotage this moment for a moment that may never come. “Yes, super okay. You?”
“I’ve been waiting my whole life to feel like this.
” He means it, or at least I hope he does.
“Sometimes Audrey would cancel dinner plans and I would try to feel disappointed. I’d actually talk myself through it, like Oh no I’m going to be alone tonight, because I was dying to feel something.
But I never did. I honestly thought there was something wrong with me.
Then this week I’d be sitting in a meeting, hoping it was getting close to one o’clock so I could text you when you left work at four, and I’d look at my watch and it would only be noon, and I felt gutted. ”
There are tears in my eyes and I don’t want them there.
I wipe them with the back of my hand and roll on top of him so that I can see what he looks like after having just said what he said.
I rest my head atop my hands on his chest. He is so strong to be this vulnerable.
His eyes plead with me, adoring, but he doesn’t say anything more.
“All of that,” I say. “I could barely sleep while you were gone.” He runs his hands down my back, and it’s so familiar.
I could draw a map of his hands and trace a line where the rough parts and the smooth parts meet my skin.
I am truly terrified to feel this happy.
I have left Paris with the Mona Lisa in my checked baggage.
“What if it became impossible?” I ask. “What if there was something unfixable between us and we couldn’t get past it?” I’m thinking of the baby thing, but there are a million more possibilities. “What if the world kept us apart?”
Like it’s nothing, like he’s agreed to go get me a glass of water, he says, “Then I’d change the world.” I believe him because I feel that way too.
“Same,” I say.
His face relaxes and it’s so beautiful. The deep brown of his eyes, his overworked lips. “Okay, I guess we’re on the same page, then.”
I smile at the business talk. “Should we circle back to this after dinner?”
He smiles. “That would be best practices, yes.” He reaches for his phone. “Gladys has been texting, actually. When we’re ready, dinner is served.”