Chapter 15 – MADDIE
MADDIE
We were hanging the charity show that Friday night, set to open the next weekend.
Ellie had pulled it together in three weeks.
Local kids, mostly, painters and a couple of photographers from the streets around the youth center, none of them shown anywhere before.
Every piece that sold sent its money straight back to the center.
Ellie had bullied me into putting something in even though I didn't think anything was ready.
I'd dug an old canvas out of storage, a harbor at dusk I'd painted in my twenties.
It was finished, but it wasn't good. I told her so.
She hung it in a corner anyway. I was sure it wouldn't sell, and part of me hoped it wouldn't, because the harbor was who I'd been before I stopped painting and I wasn't sure I wanted to dig her up again.
"Stop looking at it like it owes you money," Ellie said, handing me a level. "It's a fine painting. It's going to a good cause. Hang the kids' wall and leave your sad boats alone."
The kids' wall was the easy part. A boy named Jason had done a whole series of his block at night, streetlights and wet asphalt, and they were better than half of what hung in real galleries downtown.
I leveled his frames with more care than I'd given my own.
That was the work I wanted to be near. Not the harbor.
My phone buzzed against the table while I was straightening Jason's third frame. Damon. I let it sit. I'd gotten good at letting him sit.
A few minutes later it buzzed again, and the second one was enough to make me look.
The first one I read and ignored. Where are you? I'm home. He was home. That was new. It wasn't new enough to move me. The second had come in while I was still looking at the first. I'm sorry about our anniversary. We need to talk.
So he knew. Eight days late, he'd finally realized his mistake. I stood there with the phone and felt the old reflex start up, the pull to drop everything and go smooth it over before it cost me anything. I didn't obey it.
Ellie read my face. "Him?"
"He remembered the anniversary. Over a week late." I put the phone in my pocket. "He's home. He wants to talk."
"You don't have to go."
"I know." I looked at the harbor in its corner, the boats all wrong. "But I won't get another thing done tonight wondering what he's going to say. I'd rather go hear it and stop wondering."
Ellie didn't love it. She helped me into my coat anyway. "Call me if you need a reason to leave. I'll invent a gallery emergency. I'm very good at those."
The Lexus was in the drive when I pulled in. Half past nine on a Friday, in the middle of the worst stretch of his career, and the car was home. In eight years he had never once picked the house over the office during a crisis. We were in a crisis. He was here. I figured that was something.
He stood up too fast when he heard the door.
There were flowers covering the counter, still in their plastic.
The expensive kind, roses that had been hand delivered by some overpriced boutique and probably cost a thousand dollars per bouquet.
I knew before he said a word that he'd planned this, costed it, lined the apology up like a deal he meant to close.
"Maddie." He came around the counter. "I'm sorry.
I missed it. There's no version of this where I didn't, and there's no excuse.
I let the date go and that's on me." He kept talking, fast, the words rehearsed somewhere between the office and here.
"I want to make it right. Properly. I was thinking Amsterdam.
The museum we went to in college is having an exhibition as it turns out, and we can do a tour of Europe while we're at it.
I'll clear a week the second I can. Anything you want. Name it."
I waited for the old leap, the part of me that used to grab at any scrap of his attention.
It didn't come. What came was cold. I stood in my own kitchen looking at the flowers and the booked trip and the word anything, and I felt nothing warm at all.
Then, lower down, under the cold, I felt how much of me still loved him, and that frightened me worse than the cold did.
"You're trying to buy this. Flowers and a trip and name it." I hugged myself. "You think there's a number on the table that erases eight days, and there isn't. You're reaching for your wallet instead of standing here, and that's the whole problem, and it always has been."
"I'm not reaching for my wallet, I'm trying." There was something in his voice I hadn't heard in years, frustration with fear underneath it. "I don't know how to do this. I've never had to. You were always fine. I thought we were good."
"We were never good. I was just quiet."
"I know that now." He closed the distance. "I came home. Do you understand that I came home? I walked out of the worst quarter of my life and left Emily holding the deck because I couldn't sit in that office one more minute knowing what I'd done to you."
He reached up and put both hands against my face. He looked at me, actually looked, the first time in longer than I could remember, and I forgot how to breathe for a second, because that was the only thing I'd ever wanted from him and he'd never once known to give it.
I should have pulled away. I'd spent two weeks deciding I was done, and here was every reason to walk, the flowers, the trip, the apology with a budget. I put my hand flat on his chest to push him off. His heart was going hard under my palm. I didn't push. He felt that, and he kissed me.
The kiss wasn't gentle. Two weeks of cold and eight days of nothing went into it, and the anger didn't leave, it just found somewhere to be. His hands fisted in my hair and pulled. I let my teeth catch his lip, and he made a low sound against my mouth and pressed me back into the counter.
"I'm still furious with you," I said.
"Good." His mouth was at my jaw, my throat. "Be furious. Don't stop."
He pushed my coat off my shoulders and dragged my sweater over my head, and the cold air hit my skin a beat before his hands did.
He knew the route. Eight years, and his hands still knew me, and that undid me more than any of the words had, because his hands remembered me on the nights the rest of him forgot I was in the house.
I got his shirt open and ran my palms up his chest and felt him shudder.
He lifted me onto the counter and stepped between my knees and kissed me until I couldn't hold the anger and the wanting apart, until they ran together into the same heat.
The flowers went off the edge in their plastic. Neither of us looked.
He took me upstairs. Not to the guest room. To our bed, the one I hadn't slept in for two weeks, and he laid me down and took the rest of my clothes off slowly, like he was paying attention, like attention was something he'd suddenly remembered how to do.
When he finally pushed into me I made a sound I hadn't made in years, and he caught it with his mouth and stayed there, forehead against mine, moving, saying my name like it meant something, like it had always meant something.
I dug my nails into his back hard enough to mark him and he didn't slow down.
He took everything I had left to give him and asked for more.
It was good. My body had missed him even while the rest of me was packing to leave.
I came with his name in my teeth and his hand crushed around mine against the sheets, and for a few minutes after, tangled and breathing hard in the dark of a room I'd locked myself out of, I let myself just have it.
Afterward he fell asleep with his arm heavy across me, which he never did. He always got up, checked the phone, took a call, found the work. Tonight he didn't reach for it once.
I lay awake and made myself be honest about the size of it, which was small. He'd bought flowers I didn't want and offered a trip he half-remembered the reason for and put his hands on me, and none of it touched what was actually broken between us. I knew that. I wasn't a fool about it.
But.
He'd left the office. With the board calling at eight and Emily holding his work together and the whole company balanced on a trial that hadn't read out, he'd walked out and driven home and waited for me in the dark. He had never done that. Not once in eight years.
Lying there with his arm across me and his breath slow against my hair, I felt it, small and stupid and impossible to kill. A flicker of hope. Maybe it had taken almost losing me to wake him up. Maybe leaving the office was the first true thing he'd done in years, and maybe he could learn the rest.
I knew better. I held onto it anyway.