17. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
The room was small.
A queen bed dominated most of the space, covered in a quilt that looked hand-stitched. A fireplace crackled in the corner, casting dancing shadows across the walls. A single window looked out on the storm that was now raging outside, snow swirling against the glass in thick, heavy flakes.
One bed. One room. One night.
“I can sleep on the floor,” Heath said immediately. “Or in the chair. I don’t need the bed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The floor is freezing and that chair would destroy your back.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
I looked at the bed. I looked at Heath. I thought about all the nights I had spent alone in our bed at Fairhaven, reaching for him in the dark and finding nothing but cold sheets.
“We’re adults,” I said. “We can share a bed without it meaning anything.”
He nodded, though a shadow crossed his face that I couldn’t quite read.
We settled in as best we could. I changed into the sweats I had packed in my work bag, grateful for the foresight. Heath stripped down to his undershirt and boxers, and I tried not to notice how good he looked, tried not to remember what it felt like to press my body against his.
The storm howled outside. The firelight danced on the walls. We lay in the bed together, not touching, a careful distance between us that felt both necessary and impossible.
“I can’t sleep,” I said after what felt like hours.
“Neither can I.”
Silence. The crackle of the fire. The wind against the window.
“Del.” His voice was soft in the darkness. “Can we talk?”
“About what?”
“Everything. Anything.” He shifted on the mattress, and I felt the bed move beneath me. “We never actually talked. Not really. Not about what happened, why it happened, how we ended up here.”
I stared at the ceiling, at the shadows moving across the beams.
“You disappeared,” I said finally. “That’s what happened. You were there, and then you weren’t, and I didn’t know why.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what that felt like? Coming home every night to a husband who wouldn’t look at me? Lying awake wondering what I had done wrong, what had changed, why you suddenly couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me?”
“Del...”
“I thought it was my fault.” My voice cracked, and I hated the weakness in it. “I thought I had driven you away somehow. I spent months trying to figure out what I could fix, what I could change, what I could do differently to make you love me again.”
“I never stopped loving you.” His voice was raw, stripped of all its usual polish. “I never stopped for one second. I just... I couldn’t figure out how to tell you what was happening without making it worse.”
“So you made it worse by saying nothing.”
“Yes.” The word came out broken. “Yes, I made it worse. I sat in that study every night for three months solving it, and every single solution ended with you giving a piece of your life up, and I could not make the arithmetic come out, so I just stopped doing the arithmetic in front of you. That’s all it was, Del.
That’s the whole thing. I went quiet because I couldn’t stand to show you my working. ”
I turned my head to look at him. In the dim light from the fire, I could see his profile, the strong line of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.
“I would have gone with you,” I said quietly. “If you had asked me. I would have followed you to Europe, to the moon, to anywhere you needed to be.”
“I know.” He turned to face me, and I saw the tears gathering in his eyes. “That’s what scared me. You’ve already given up so much for me. Your career. Your dreams. I couldn’t ask you to give up your home too.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.”
“I know that now. I know I should have talked to you, should have included you in the decision, should have trusted you enough to let you help me figure it out. But I was an idiot, Del. A coward and an idiot who thought he was protecting you when all he was doing was pushing you away.”
The space between us felt electric. Charged with everything we had said and everything we hadn’t.
“I was so lonely,” I whispered. “I was so lonely in that house, with your mother and Kendall watching me, waiting for me to break. And you weren’t there. You were never there.”
“I’m here now.”
“That doesn’t fix anything.”
“I know.”
His hand moved across the sheet, finding mine in the darkness.
I should have pulled away. That was the entire content of the thought, and it lasted about as long as it takes to read it, and then it was gone and I did not go looking for it.
Because here’s what was actually happening in that bed, underneath the autopsy, underneath every true and terrible thing we had said to each other for two hours in the dark.
I had a hundred and forty-eight days in me.
I had a man four inches away breathing like he had been running.
And my body had made its position extremely clear somewhere around the first hour and had simply been waiting for my mouth to catch up.
“I don’t know how to stop being angry at you,” I said.
“Then be angry.” His thumb traced circles on my palm, the same gesture he had made a thousand times before. “Be angry and hurt and whatever else you need to be. I deserve it.”
“I watched you today,” he said.
The fire moved on the ceiling. I didn’t say anything.
“In the mud. Behind the east wall.” His voice was carrying a weight I had not heard in it in eleven years. “Four people with two engineering degrees between them stood in a warm room for two days looking at paper, and you asked when it rained, and then you went outside.”
“It wasn’t clever. It was just the back.”
“Del.” He said it like a man setting down a load he had been carrying too far. “I know what it was. I’ve spent my whole life around people who are good at this, and I’ve never once watched it happen the way it happened in you today. I know exactly what it was.”
I stared at the ceiling and my eyes were burning and I would not have turned my head for money.
“That’s what I took,” he said.
“Heath...”
“No, let me. I’ve had four hours in a parking lot to get the words in order and they’re not good ones but they’re in order.
” He breathed out. “I’ve spent nine years telling myself you chose it.
And you did choose it, you chose it every time, I never once made you, and that’s the sentence I’ve been hiding behind since I was twenty-six years old.
Because I never asked twice. Not once, Del.
I let you say no to your own life in front of me a hundred times and I never asked twice, because if you kept saying no then I got to keep everything and it wasn’t my fault. ”
The wind hit the window.
“And then today you put your hand in the ground and you came up and your whole face was different. I had never seen it. Nine years and I’ve never once seen my wife’s face do that.
” He was very quiet. “I’ve watched you be beautiful and be funny and be kind to people who did not deserve it.
I’ve never once watched you be masterful.
I didn’t know. I married you out of that lab and I didn’t know. ”
“I don’t want to be angry anymore,” I said. “I’m tired of being angry.”
“What do you want?”
I didn’t answer, because the honest answer was not admissible.
Every part of me was at war. I wanted to hate him and forgive him and forget everything that had happened and I wanted to remember every single wound.
And I wanted him to put his hand between my legs, right then, in the middle of the sentence, before either of us could ruin it by saying anything else true.
I was so wet I could feel it, lying there, hating him.
I turned my head and found him looking at me, his eyes dark in the firelight, his face so close to mine that I could feel his breath on my skin.
He moved slowly, giving me time to pull away. His hand came up to cup my face, his thumb brushing across my cheekbone. I watched him lean in, watched his eyes drop to my lips, watched him close the final distance between us.
His mouth met mine, and the floor inside me gave way.
The kiss was soft at first. Tentative. A question more than a demand. But I had been starving for months, starving for him, and the moment his lips touched mine, I felt the hunger rise up and swallow everything else.
I deepened the kiss, my hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him closer. He groaned against my mouth, a sound that vibrated through my body, and then his arms were around me and he was rolling us so that I was beneath him, his weight pressing me into the mattress.
“Del.” His voice was wrecked. “Tell me to stop. Tell me to stop and I swear to God I’ll stop.”
“If you stop,” I said into his mouth, “I’ll never forgive you for anything, ever, for the rest of your life.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no. Fuck. Heath. It’s not a no.”
He kissed me again, harder this time, his tongue sliding against mine, his hands moving down my body with an urgency that made my pulse race.
He knew exactly where to touch me. He had learned every inch of my body over nine years, had memorized every sensitive spot, every place that made me gasp and arch and beg for more.
His mouth moved to my neck, sucking and biting at the skin there, and I felt the heat building low in my belly. His hands slid under my shirt, pushing it up, his palms rough and warm against my ribs.
“Off,” he muttered against my throat. “I need this off.”
I helped him pull my shirt over my head, and then his mouth was on my chest, kissing down the valley between my breasts, his hands cupping them before he reached behind me and unhooked my bra with practiced ease.
The cool air hit my skin for just a moment before his mouth replaced it. He took one nipple between his lips, sucking gently, and I heard myself moan, my back arching off the bed.
“That’s it.” His voice was low, rough with want. “Let me hear you.”
His hand slid down my stomach, over the low new curve of me that had only arrived in the last two weeks, and lower still. He traced the waistband of my sweats, teasing, making me wait.