5. Rhodes #2
“I’m not romanticizing. I’m recalling.”
“You’re recalling incorrectly. The curry at that first place was terrible. We only went there because it was the only thing open past eleven.”
“Fine. My palate has evolved.”
“Your palate has always been basic. You just have better options now.”
I eat my chow mein on the floor of Bellamy Blooms, back against the counter, watching Maren work on an arrangement that’s apparently for a wedding anniversary. Forty years. She shows me the order form with something like reverence.
“Forty years,” I say. “They must know something we don’t.”
“They probably just talk to each other.”
“Ouch.”
“You walked into that one.”
I did. I walk into most things with Maren. She’s faster than me in conversations, always has been, and I’ve spent a decade running to catch up.
“Pittsburgh,” she says, not looking up from her roses. “You promised.”
I tell her about Pittsburgh. The burst pipe, the flooding, the four hours on a plane while Rachel handled everything. I tell her about the bride who cried and the plumber who tried to gouge us and the way Rachel called me when I landed with just one word: handled.
“She’s good at her job,” Maren says when I finish.
“The best.”
“I’m not threatened by that.”
“I know.”
“I’m threatened by the fact that you have a whole life with her that I’ve never seen.” She cuts a stem clean through. “That’s different.”
“Yeah.” I set down my chopsticks. “It is.”
She works in silence for a while. I watch her hands, the economy of motion, the way she knows exactly where each stem should go without seeming to think about it. This is her genius, the thing she makes look easy that most people can’t do at all.
“Do you remember what you said to me that first night?” she asks. “After I finished the centerpieces?”
“Probably something embarrassing.”
“You said I made you believe impossible things weren’t impossible.”
I go still.
“And I said that was a terrible line and you should work on your material.” A smile ghosts across her face. “But I kept thinking about it. On the drive home, in the shower, while I was trying to fall asleep. This stranger who thought I could make impossible things happen.”
“You could. You did.”
“You didn’t know that then. You just believed it anyway.” She looks at me directly for the first time since I started eating. “When did you stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Believing impossible things.”
The question hits somewhere deep, in a place I don’t let people see.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Somewhere between the third venue and the fifth. Somewhere between making it and having something to lose. I started calculating instead of believing. Playing it safe with everything except work.” I look at her. “I stopped being reckless about the things that mattered.”
“I don’t want reckless.”
“What do you want?”
She sets down her scissors. Crosses the room. Sits down on the floor beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch.
“I want three good days,” she says.
“You told me three good days weren’t enough.”
“They’re not.” She turns to face me. “Three good days just make the fourth one hurt more. That’s what I was trying to say.
It’s not that I don’t want good days, it’s that I can’t survive on them anymore.
I need something sustainable. Something that doesn’t feel like a vacation from our actual lives. ”
“I don’t know how to give you that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to fix us overnight.”
“Neither do I.”
“But I know I don’t want to lose you while I’m figuring it out.”
She’s quiet. I can feel her breathing beside me, steady and careful.
“Then stop living like you already have me,” she says.
“What does that mean?”
“It means stop assuming I’ll be here. Stop acting like the marriage is a done deal that can wait while you handle everything else.
Stop taking me for granted just because I’ve been granted for eleven years.
” She reaches up, touches my jaw, makes me look at her.
“I’m not a backup plan, Rhodes, not the thing you come home to when the real work is done. I’m supposed to be the real work.”
“You are.”
“Prove it.”
I don’t have words for what happens next. She kisses me, and it’s not the soft familiar kiss of a long marriage, it’s the kiss from our first date, desperate and hopeful and terrified of getting it wrong.
I kiss her back.
We end up leaving the flowers half-finished.
The takeout containers go in her mini-fridge; the arrangement can wait until morning.
Right now the only thing that matters is getting home, getting through the door, getting my wife into our bed while she’s still looking at me like I might be worth another chance.
We barely make it to the bedroom.
She’s the one who reaches for the hem of my shirt, and that undoes me more than anything else could. Maren, who’s spent months flinching from my touch, sliding her cold hands up under the fabric, taking back what used to be hers. I let her. Right now I’d let her do anything.
“Slow,” she whispers against my mouth, but her hands aren’t slow, and neither is the way she pulls me down onto the bed we’ve barely shared in a year.
I’ve undressed this woman a thousand times. I know the small scar on her knee, the exact spot beneath her ear that makes her go still. Tonight it’s a first time and a last time at once, both of us relearning each other in case we don’t get to keep this.
Getting her out of the dress takes a while, because I stop at every inch I uncover, and she lets me, her fingers fisting in my hair.
When I get my mouth on her breasts she arches up with a sound I’ve been starving for.
I keep moving down, and her thighs fall open like they’re finally done being furious with me.
“Rhodes.” My name, not a warning this time. Something closer to please.
So I give her what I should have been giving her for years.
I lick into her slow, relearning what she likes, and when I hit the rhythm that bows her spine off the bed I stay there, her heel digging into my shoulder, her hand keeping my head exactly where she wants it.
“That’s it,” I say against her. “Give it to me. Then I’m going to make you forget you were ever angry.
” She unravels against my mouth, thighs shaking around my ears, and I don’t let up until she’s pushing weakly at my head, spent and swearing at me.
“Up,” she pants. “Inside me. Now.”
“Yes, ma’am.” When I finally push into her we both go still, and God, her face, the wall she’s held for months finally down.
She’s slick and clenching around me and I have to breathe through it or embarrass us both.
“There. That’s my girl.” I roll my hips and she gasps.
“You feel that? That doesn’t go anywhere. And neither do I.”
She hooks her legs around me and dares me to prove it, so I do, slow and merciless, until she’s clawing at my shoulders and tipping over again, and I let go with my forehead pressed to hers.
Afterward she’s still trembling, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s crying, silent tears sliding into her hairline. I kiss them away. I don’t ask. Part of me already knows they aren’t only the good kind.
There’s a moment, after, lying in the dark with Maren’s head on my chest and her breathing finally steady, when I think about the ranunculus. It’s still sitting on the workbench at Bellamy Blooms. Left behind in the rush.
“I forgot to bring the bottle,” I say.
“Hmm?” She’s half-asleep, warm against my side.
“The champagne bottle. With the flower.”