Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
ELLIE
The problem with having nothing to do was that it left entirely too much room for thinking.
Grandpa’s friend Hector Beaumont had shown up this morning with his big Lincoln Continental and the cheerful authority of a man who’d been waiting for an excuse to be useful.
They’d gone off to PT together and then presumably to whatever retired men did on a Thursday morning.
Probably second breakfast at Kiss My Grits, where they’d likely run into the Three Wise Men, who liked to opine about everybody in Huckleberry Creek.
Which was lovely. It was lovely that Grandpa’s friends showed up and that it gave me a few hours of breathing room, because the last two weeks had been relentless. I genuinely needed a break.
What I did not need was the silence.
The silence was catastrophic. The silence had no agenda, nothing to look at, nothing to manage, and in the absence of all of those things my brain shot straight back to circling the same thing it had circled for three days like water going down a drain.
Daniel’s hands.
That was the problem. I knew what his hands felt like now.
Not in the abstract, not in the way I’d been carefully not-thinking about since the kiss in the hospital room, but concretely, specifically, in the most intimate possible terms. I remembered the weight of his palm spread low across my skin.
The deliberate, devastating patience of his fingers, the way he paid attention with them the way he paid attention to everything—completely, without rushing, like there was nowhere else he needed to be.
And he knew.
That was the other half of it, the half I kept getting stuck on, spinning out on in the quiet of the house with Grandpa gone and no one here to make me perform being normal.
He knew what I sounded like. He knew, with the same terrible specificity that I knew things about him, exactly what sounds I made and when, and what it took to get there, and what my face did afterward in the soft gray of the early morning when I’d stopped being careful about what it did.
We were best friends.
Best friends who were accidentally legally married, fine, yes, but still.
Best friends who’d agreed, years ago, with the clear-eyed certainty of two people who valued their relationship, that this particular door stayed closed.
And yet he’d gone and bought a ring at a flea market four years ago for reasons he couldn’t name, and I’d married him in a hospital room, and we’d shared a bed, and now I knew about his hands, and I had no idea how to go back to being the people we’d been before any of this.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.
That last part was the most terrifying part.
That was the part I kept skidding past and circling back to with the compulsive horror of someone poking a bruise.
Because wanting to go back would have been manageable.
Missing the simplicity of before would have made sense, would have given me something to move toward, a clear direction.
But standing in the kitchen of my own house on a Thursday morning with the silence pressing in from all sides, the honest answer was that I did not want to go back.
I heard his truck.
My brain fuzzed out, like Grandpa’s old TV when the antenna broke.
By the time Daniel’s key turned in the lock, I was in the pantry.
I was reorganizing the canned goods. By category, and then within category by size, and this was a task that urgently needed doing and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t standing in the middle of the kitchen looking like a woman who’d spend the past three days thinking about his hands and what they could do to me.
From somewhere behind me, he said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said to the canned tomatoes. “How was shift?”
“Fine.” A pause. “What are you doing?”
“Reorganizing.”
Another pause, longer. “The pantry.”
“It’s been a mess for months.”
“Ellie.”
“The soups were mixed in with the beans, Daniel, it was a whole thing—”
“Ellie.”
I turned around.
He was leaning in the pantry doorway with his arms crossed and his gear bag still over one shoulder and the look of a man who’d known me since the third grade and was not going to pretend to believe I’d developed an urgent interest in pantry organization.
I looked at him for a moment.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re reorganizing the canned goods.”
“People do that.”
“You don’t. You barely look at them when you’re cooking. You just grab whatever’s in front.” He set the gear bag down without looking away from me. “You’ve been thinking.”
“I think all the time.”
“You’ve been panicking,” he said. “Which is different.”
I opened my mouth.
“Ellie.” Not sharp, not frustrated. Steady, the way he always was, the way that always made me feel simultaneously anchored and slightly unraveled. “Come out of the pantry.”
I came out of the pantry.
He waited until I’d set down the can of chickpeas I’d apparently been holding. “I don’t regret it.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“Daniel—”
“I need you to hear that first before we have whatever conversation you’ve been rehearsing in your head for the last three days.
” He uncrossed his arms. “I don’t regret it.
Not any of it. Not the plan, not the ring, not the license, not the morning.
” He said the last word without flinching, which was more than I could say for myself. “None of it.”
I looked at him. He looked back.
“We said we’d figure it out later,” he said. “It’s later.”
“That’s—” I stopped. “That’s not what later meant.”
“What did it mean?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Or there were too many and couldn’t order them, couldn’t find the thread that would let me say any of it in a way that didn’t expose everything I’d been trying to keep filed away since the hospital room.
Since before the hospital room. Since the cafeteria in third grade, maybe, if I was going to be completely honest, which I was not going to be, not standing in this kitchen with him looking at me like that.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said. Which was the truest thing I could offer.
“Do what?”
“This.” I gestured between us. “Be this. With you. And also still be—“ I stopped again. “What if we ruin it?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he took one step toward me, and another, and I held my ground because I was not a woman who retreated from things even when every nerve ending I possessed was suggesting it strongly. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up to keep looking at him.
“What if we don’t?” he said.
That was all. Just that, offered with the same easy certainty he’d always had, the certainty that had always made impossible things feel possible, and I thought about the ring on my finger and the vows I’d meant more than I’d intended to and the morning and his hands and the fact that I did not want to go back, and I ran out of arguments.
He kissed me.
Not soft and careful, the way he did the first time.
Not brief and managed and appropriate to the circumstances.
This was none of those things. This was three weeks of accumulated want released all at once, his hands in my hair and my hands in his shirt, and both of us making up for every careful, reasonable, well-intentioned decision we’d made since the hospital room.
I kissed him back with everything I had and stopped being afraid of it somewhere in the middle, and his hands slid to my waist and walked me back until I hit the counter, and I grabbed his shirt with both fists and pulled, and he made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my knees.
Daniel must’ve known it because his hands curved around my hips and lifted as if I weighed nothing, plunking me down on the counter in the lone space with room for me to sit.
He stepped between my legs and devoured my mouth as if it was the last slice of pizza at a high school football game.
My hands dove into his hair, my mouth opening under his, and I wrapped my legs around his narrow hips, pulling him closer.
I wished fervently we had powers of—whatever would enable us to be naked right now, nothing between us but skin, because I wanted this man.
I wanted my husband in ways I was only just coming to acknowledge.
“Ellie!” Grandpa’s voice, from the front of the house.
We froze.
“I’m home!” he hollered with cheerful obliviousness. “Hector says I did great, and the PT lady says I’m ahead of schedule.”
Daniel broke the kiss, and we looked at each other. His hair was slightly wrecked from my hands. I was fairly certain my lip gloss, such as it was, hadn’t survived the last few minutes. And the front of Daniel’s cargo pants showed what was clearly front of mind for him.
“That’s wonderful, Grandpa,” I called back, in a voice that was impressively steady given the circumstances.
“Is Daniel home? I wanna tell him about the PT lady.”
“He’s home,” I said.
Daniel pressed his forehead to mine, his hands still at my waist, both of us breathing slightly unevenly in the quiet of the kitchen. “To be continued.”
“To be continued,” I agreed.
He let go of me and stepped back and picked up his gear bag, making for the stairs and our room, presumably so he could make himself more presentable for my grandfather, who would no doubt be ecstatic about this turn of events.
I turned to the counter and put both hands flat on it and took a breath, and then I went to greet my grandfather and hear about the PT lady.
I was smiling when I did it, which was not something I’d planned on but couldn’t seem to stop.