18. Richard #2
She laughs again, softer, and burrows in closer, and I keep one hand splayed wide on her back and the other wrapped around her thigh where it’s hooked over mine, holding her against me like she might evaporate.
I’m not pushing for her to say anything back.
The whole point tonight is just to put it down in front of her.
Here’s everything I never said. Do whatever you want with it.
At some point she goes quiet and heavy, her breathing evening out, and I realize she’s halfway gone, drooling a little on my collar in a way I will absolutely tease her about later and am committing to memory now.
“Em.” I press my mouth to her temple. “You’re falling asleep on me.”
“Mm. Comfortable.” Her hand tightens in my shirt. “You’re very warm. It’s annoying.”
“I’ll take it.” I shift my grip, get an arm under her knees, and stand with her gathered against my chest, and she loops her arms around my neck on instinct and tucks her face into my throat, trusting, boneless.
It does something to me, the easy heft of her in my arms, how she just lets me have her like this.
I’m not built to be casual about this woman.
Ten years I told myself I could be, and I can’t, and carrying her down a dark hallway at one in the morning has made that permanently clear.
“You’re carrying me,” she mumbles, half-asleep, not opening her eyes.
“Observant.”
“I can walk.”
“You can. You’re not going to.” I tighten my hold, deliberate, and feel her give in and go soft against me, and I’m not going to lie, the fact that she lets me, that she who fought a controlling man for two years lets me carry her and hold her and decide this one small thing, undoes me a little.
“Just let me have this. I’ve wanted to carry you to bed since roughly the eleventh grade. ”
“That’s deeply weird.”
“I’m aware. Go back to sleep.”
I put her in her own bed. Not mine. Hers, the room with the door that locks, the books on the shelf, the life that’s starting to be hers.
I lay her down careful and pull the blanket up, and I let my hand linger at the side of her face longer than I need to, thumb along her cheekbone, because I’m only so strong.
She catches my wrist before I can pull away.
“Stay till I fall asleep?” Her eyes are barely open. “Not, you know. Just till I’m out.”
“Yeah.” I sit on the edge of the bed. “Course.”
So I sit there in the dark with her hand in mine and I watch her go under, slow, her face smoothing out like it did in the car ten years ago, that little crease between her eyebrows letting go.
And I think: I don’t need her to say it tonight.
I don’t need her to say it this week. I’ve gone ten years on a rainy car ride and a girl who wasn’t scared of anything. I can go a while longer on this.
What I’m not going to do is the thing every cell in my body is screaming to do, which is lock it down, make it official, get a ring, build the walls high enough that she can never leave.
Because I know exactly where that road goes.
I watched Henry walk it. The wanting somebody so much you start managing them, deciding for them, keeping them.
That’s not love. That’s just a nicer-looking cage.
So I let go of her hand once she’s fully under. I leave the door open a crack like she likes it. And I go back down the hall to my own room, alone, on purpose, and it’s the hardest easy decision I’ve ever made.
She’s not a thing I get to keep. She’s a person who gets to choose. I just have to be patient enough to let her, and pray to God she chooses me.
In the morning she’s already up when I come down, sitting at the island in one of my shirts with a coffee, looking at me like she’s been waiting.
“I made you a list,” she says, and slides a piece of paper across the counter.
I pick it up. It’s a list. Handwritten. The header says EMILY, THINGS ABOUT, and under it: Hates mornings. Drinks coffee black, will lie and say she likes it with milk to be polite. Reads the last page of books first, sorry. Cannot parallel park. Holds grudges for decades, so be aware.
I look up. “What is this?”
“You gave me all that last night. The cafeteria, the rain. Ten years of stuff you knew about me.” She wraps both hands around her mug, not quite meeting my eyes.
“And I realized I’ve been living in your house for weeks and I never gave you anything back.
We haven’t talked in years. You don’t know small things about me, I don’t know small things about you.
So.” She nods at the paper. “That’s a head start.
Things about me. So you’re not the only one keeping a file. ”
It’s the single most Emily thing she’s ever done, turning a feeling into a bulleted list so she doesn’t have to say the feeling out loud, and it lands harder than any speech could have.
“You read the last page first,” I say. “Of books.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“You read the ending first.”
“I like to know if it’s worth my time, Richard, not everyone has the emotional stability to just trust a...”
I kiss her, because I can’t not, and she makes an indignant noise against my mouth and then stops being indignant, and when I pull back she’s pink and trying not to smile.
“I’m keeping this list forever,” I tell her. “I’m having it framed. It’s going in the office.”
“You absolutely are not.”
“It’s going right next to my degree. Emily, Things About. Cannot parallel park.”
“I will throw it in a lake.”
“That one is so far away I’ll stop you before you could...”
“I’ll find a new lake.”
And that’s the thing nobody tells you about finally getting close to the person you’ve wanted forever.
It’s not the grand stuff. It’s a list on a counter and a fight about parking budgets ten years too late and her threatening bodies of water at eight in the morning.
I’d take this over the fantasy every single day.
The fantasy never once made me coffee or insulted my reading habits. The fantasy was never this alive.
She didn’t say it last night. She might not say it for a while. But she made me a list, and the list is her handing me a piece of herself on purpose, and that’s worth more than the words this morning anyway.
I fold the paper carefully and put it in my shirt pocket, over my heart, which she’d absolutely roll her eyes at if she saw, so I do it while she’s turned toward the coffee maker.
“I saw that,” she says, not turning around.
“You did not.”
“You put it in your pocket. Like a Victorian widow.” She finally faces me, fighting a smile and losing. “You’re so embarrassing. How are you a serious businessman?”
“I’m only embarrassing about one thing. It happens to be you.” I take a sip of the coffee she made me, which is exactly how I like it, which she would know because she pays a lot more attention than her list lets on. “You’re going to be late, by the way. We both are.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours. Entirely. You’re the one who handed me a list of your secrets at eight in the morning and made me have a moment about it.”
She laughs and grabs her bag, and we head out together, late again, and I think about the paper in my pocket the whole drive in.
Ten years I had a file on her and she never knew.
Now she’s started one on me, in her own handwriting, on purpose.
It’s not the words. But it’s her choosing to be known, which from Emily might be the bigger thing.
I’ll take it. I’ll take all of it. However slow she wants to go.
Then she stops at the car door, looks at me over the roof like there’s one more line she almost adds to the list, and gets in without saying it.
Whatever it was, she swallowed it whole.
I spend the entire drive in pretending I don’t know exactly which three words fit in a silence shaped like that.