24. Delphine #2
I turned in his arms and looked up at him through the steam. Water ran down his face, dripping from his jaw, making his eyelashes clump together. He looked younger with his hair slicked back, more vulnerable, more real. The man I had fallen in love with in an engineering lab a decade ago.
I pressed my hand flat against his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath my palm. Strong and steady and alive.
“I love you,” I said.
“So much,” he said. “So much it still frightens me.”
I kissed him. Not hungry, not desperate. Just soft and slow and full of everything I had been too scared to feel for months. He responded in kind, his mouth moving against mine with a tenderness that made my chest ache with emotion.
His hands slid down my back, pulling me closer, and I felt him go hard against my hip, and I’ve never in my life been so glad about anything.
I want to be honest about that, because it’s not a decent thing to be glad about.
A woman had held me by the throat on a pier eleven hours earlier.
My husband had thirty-two stitches in him.
And what I felt, standing under that water with him rising against my hip, was pure animal relief.
He was here. He was alive. He was hard against me the way he had been at twenty-four in a stairwell, and every single thing Montana Fairchild had spent three months putting in my head died right there in a hotel bathroom in Newport.
I reached down and wrapped my hand around him. He was hot and thick and pulsing in my grip and I stroked him slowly and he groaned into my mouth, his hips bucking up before he could stop them.
“Del.” His voice was strained. “We don’t have to... if you’re not ready...”
“I’m ready.” I guided him to me, lining him up against me. “I need this. I need you. I need one thing in this world to be happening to my body that I chose.”
He lifted me carefully, mindful of his wounded side, his hands firm under my thighs. I hooked my legs around him and let him take my weight against the warm tile. He held me there, the water running over both of us, and looked into my eyes.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” he said.
“You could never hurt me.”
“Now,” I said against his mouth. “Heath. Now. I do not want to be careful, I want to be full of you.”
He worked into me slowly, one inch at a time, that first stretch that eleven years has never once made ordinary, and I made a sound I would have been embarrassed by on any other day of my life.
My body took him the way it always has. Like it had been waiting all afternoon and knew exactly who it was for.
He filled me with a gentleness that brought fresh tears to my eyes, and a shaky breath went out of me as he settled deep.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Perfect. You feel perfect.”
He rolled his hips into me, unhurried, and pleasure went rippling out through every nerve I had. The water poured over us, steam swirling around our bodies, and I held onto his shoulders and let myself feel everything I had been too afraid to feel.
“I was so scared,” he said against my neck, his lips tracing patterns on my skin. “When I found the bedroom empty. When I saw the blood on the sheets. I thought I had lost you. I thought I had lost both of you.”
“You didn’t lose us.”
“I know. But for those hours when I didn’t know where you were, when I was sitting in that police station trying to hold myself together...” He thrust deeper, and I moaned softly. “I kept thinking about all the time I wasted. All the months I spent hiding from you instead of talking to you.”
“That’s over now.”
“I know. I just keep thinking, if the worst had happened to you, if you had died thinking I didn’t love you...”
“I never thought that.” I cupped his face in my hands, making him look at me. “I was angry. I was hurt. But I never stopped believing that you loved me. That’s what made it hurt so much.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are.” I dug my fingers into his shoulders, and he made a rough broken sound against my mouth.
“So show me. Not carefully. I’ve had enough careful for one day.
A man in a mask put a sweet smelling cloth over my face in my own bedroom tonight and he was extremely careful with me. Show me the other thing.”
He did.
He gave me the other thing. Not gentle. He got a fist in my wet hair and set a pace that had nothing sacred in it at all, and it was exactly right, because I did not want to be handled like porcelain, I wanted to be reminded I was a body that could still want and take and be taken.
“I’ve got you,” he kept saying. “I’ve got you. Nobody is ever taking you out of our house again, do you hear me, not while there’s breath in me.”
“I know. I know you won’t.”
It did not build slow this time. It cracked. I went off with my heel digging into the back of his thigh and my mouth open against his throat, and he followed me almost at once, pinning me to the tile, spilling into me on a groan that came up from somewhere under the stitches.
We stayed there until the water started to cool, my back against the tile and my legs still around him, neither of us in any hurry to be a person again.
“I have thirty-two stitches,” he said eventually, into my neck, “and I regret absolutely nothing.” I felt him smile against my skin.
It was the first time either of us had smiled in a day.
Eventually he carried me to the bed, both of us wrapped in the hotel’s thick white robes, and we lay tangled together in the darkness.
Neither of us could sleep. Neither of us wanted to.
We just talked, our voices low and intimate, sharing all the things we had been too scared or too proud to say before.
“Tell me about Europe again,” I said sometime around two in the morning. “The whole of it this time. Not the version you gave me on a hospital floor.”
So he did. He told me about his father, and the thing his father had started and not lived to finish, and the way it had sat on him like a debt since the funeral.
He told me about the nights he had sat up alone trying to find a version of it that did not cost me anything, and how he had never found one, and how somewhere in there he had stopped talking to me altogether because he could not stand to sit across from me holding a question he was too ashamed to ask.
“I kept thinking about how much you gave up when we got married,” he said. “Your engineering career. Your independence. Your whole identity, really. You became a Fairchild wife instead of Delphine Roux, brilliant engineer.”
“I chose that.”
“I know. But I never gave you the chance to choose anything else. And when Europe came up, I couldn’t stomach the idea of asking you to give up even more. To leave your parents, your friends, your whole country. For me. Again.”
“So you decided for me.”
“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “That was wrong. I see that now. Even with good intentions, making decisions for someone you love without including them is still a betrayal of trust.”
“It is.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it. The silence, the distance, everything. I thought I was protecting you, and instead I almost destroyed us.”
I rolled onto my side to face him, propping my head on my hand.
“What do you want, Heath? What do you actually want for our future?”
“I want to build. The European branch, the expansion, all of it. I want to take what my father dreamed of and make it real.” He met my eyes. “But I want to do it with you. Not for you or instead of you. With you.”
“What does that look like?”
“It looks like asking instead of deciding. It looks like making choices together, as partners. It looks like...” He trailed off, searching for words. “It looks like whatever you want it to look like, Del. I’m done making plans without you.”
I thought about it. Really thought about it, turning the question over in my mind, examining it from every angle.
A few months ago, the idea of moving to Europe would have felt like another sacrifice, another piece of myself I was giving up for Heath’s dreams. But now, after everything we had survived, it felt different.
It felt like an opportunity. A fresh start.
“I want to work,” I said finally. “Real work. Engineering work. If we go to Europe, I don’t want to be the supportive wife who shows up to charity galas and hosts dinner parties. I want to build things again.”
“You could. There’s incredible opportunity for structural engineers in the European market right now. You could consult, or start your own firm, or even work with the Fairchild projects if you wanted.”
“And my parents?”
“We could ask them to come with us.”
“Stop,” I said.
He stopped.
“You’re doing it again.”
It was very dark in that room. I could hear the harbor somewhere under the window and my husband breathing beside me with thirty-two stitches in him, and I made myself say the next part slowly, because it was the most important thing I would ever say to him and I only wanted to say it once.
“You have an answer for everything,” I said.
“You always have. Somebody tells you a problem and you go quiet for eleven seconds and hand back a solution and it’s always, always a good one, Heath, that’s what makes it so hard to explain to you why I want to throw the nearest heavy object at your head right now.
” I sat up. “I said the word work and you had a firm for me before I finished the sentence. I said the word parents and you had them on a plane. You’re trying to build me a version of this where nothing costs anything. ”
“I’m trying to...”
“I know what you’re trying to do. You did it in September.
” That landed. I felt it land. “You sat in that study for three months building a version where I didn’t have to lose anything, and when you couldn’t find one, you didn’t come and tell me.
Because the actual thing, the thing under all of it, is that you cannot stand to be in a room where I’m counting the cost. You would rather leave the marriage than watch me add it up. ”
He did not say anything for a long time.
“Yes,” he said.