Chapter 15
Lex
Fifteen Years
She arches.
Her name is in my mouth, and her hand is fisted in my hair, and the world is finally what she said it was — not a metaphor. A place. The place I am buried inside, the place I have been waiting years to find, without knowing I was looking for it.
"Maeve."
"Don't stop."
She tightens around me, and I feel all of it — the slick, fierce clench of a woman whose body has decided to come and is doing it, gripping my cock in waves, dragging at me — and I lose the rhythm.
I lose it because I felt this exact grip three years ago, her hand fisting my shoulder after the gala, and the memory and the live feel of her clamping around me land in the same heartbeat, and there is no version of me that survives both.
"Slow," I get out, wrecked. "Wait — Maeve, I'm going to—"
"Then come."
"You first. I want to feel it."
"I am, Lex. I am. With you. Now."
She breaks under me.
It isn't loud. Her spine lifts off the bed, her teeth sink into my shoulder, and her body clamps down around me in long, rippling pulls — and that is the end of every shred of control I have.
I drive in to the hilt and let go. I come harder than I have in my adult life, buried as deep as she'll take me, spilling into her in pulses that go on and on while she shakes apart around me and pulls everything there is to give straight out of me.
I follow her into a place I have not been with another person in eleven years and have never been with anyone in this lifetime — the place a man goes when he is making love to the woman he has carried in his chest for years without permission to want her.
I am saying her name. I say it again. I say it a third time, and the third time is not her name.
I say it into her hair. Low. Three syllables.
"Eísai dikí mou."
Greek. Untranslated. The only form of the claim my body can make that my mouth cannot make in English.
You are mine.
I have meant it since she crossed the room at the consulate and asked me about the music. I am not yet the man who can give it to her in her own language. The Greek is the version she can carry in her ear without yet knowing what she is carrying.
She doesn't ask. Not yet.
She kisses the side of my throat instead. Once. Slow. The kiss of a woman who heard a sentence in a language she does not speak and decided, in the moment, to trust it.
? ? ?
I stay inside her.
It is something I have never done with another person.
The staying — the heart slowing, the warmth of her skin against mine in the aftermath.
I never let myself stay, because staying is the part you cannot turn into a transaction, and staying makes the silence in which a person decides whether they are going to keep being yours.
I stay because Maeve has not let go of me.
Her hand is in my hair. Her other hand is at the nape of my neck. Her legs are still wrapped around me. Her breathing is slowing. So is mine. We are both wrecked in exactly the way. Eventually, I move — carefully, the way you move when you are carrying something made of glass.
I slip out of her, and she makes a small sound at the loss of me that I feel in my own chest. I lie down and pull her against me, and her head finds the place over my heart that it has been waiting to go.
She lays her hand flat on my sternum, and I put my hand in her hair, and for a long time neither of us says anything.
The lake is on the other side of the windows. The wood stove down the hall has gone quiet. Nora is asleep behind a closed door.
And I am, for the first time in a long time in a bed with a woman on my chest, and I am not counting the minutes until she goes.
? ? ?
She speaks first.
Her voice is rough. The voice has just made the sounds it made, and the voice has not yet returned to the voice she uses for the daylight world, and the version of her voice that comes now is the version no one else has heard.
"You said something in Greek."
"I know."
"What was it."
"I will tell you when I know if it is true."
She’s quiet for a long second. Her hand on my sternum has not moved. Her breath against the side of my throat has not changed. She’s doing what Maeve does, which is to let a sentence sit in the room until she’s decided what it is.
"All right," she says.
It is the ‘all right’ she’s been giving me since the door of her apartment three weeks ago.
The ‘all right’ that has, in three weeks, become the most generous word any woman has ever given me.
She’s accepting the deferral. She’s not pushing.
She’s not asking again. She’s decided that the answer will come when the answer comes, and she’s not going to be the woman who demands a man hand her language he’s not yet ready to give.
I tighten my arm around her.
She makes a small sound against my throat. Half pleasure, half the sound a person makes when they have been holding something heavy and have just been told they can put it down.
"Thank you," she says.
"For what?"
"For not lying to me about Theo. For not asking me to forgive you. For not pretending you are different than you are."
"I am not the man who was twenty."
"I know. But you are still the man who did it."
I do not answer that. There is no answer that is not either a lie or a confession, and she’s not asked for either, and I am learning the new register in which we speak, which is the register where what is true between us doesn’t need to be confirmed every time it is said.
"I am not asking you to be different," she says. "I want you to know that."
"I know."
"Then say it back."
"Say what."
"That you know I am not asking. Some men hear ‘I love you the way you are’ and they think it is a thing the woman is saying because she’s not yet seen the worst. I want you to know I have seen the worst. I am still here. I am not asking you to be different."
"I know."
"Say it once more, Lex. So I know you heard me."
"You are not asking me to be different."
"And?"
"And I have heard you."
"All right."
She kisses the side of my throat, slowly.
Once. Then again. The second kiss is a kiss with a question in it, and the question is ‘do you understand what you have just been given,’ and the answer my body gives, with my arm tightening around her and my mouth at her hair and my breath going still, is ‘yes.’
She doesn’t ask again. She doesn’t need to.
I do not answer her in language. I answer her by tightening my arm around her again and putting my mouth in her hair and breathing in the smell of her, which is the smell I have been smelling at the side of her neck since she walked into a green-tiled kitchen three years ago, the smell of her shampoo and her skin and the small, unnamed thing underneath that is just her.
She falls asleep against my ribs.
It happens fast. One minute her hand is on my sternum, and the next minute her hand has gone slack, and her breath has lengthened, and I feel the moment her body releases the day, and I lie still under her so as not to wake her.
I do not sleep. I lie awake for forty-seven minutes.
My eyes are open. The ceiling is cedar paneling, I had a man hang it in the first autumn after the house became mine, and I have known every grain of it for four years. I know it now in a way I didn’t know it before.
It is not ‘I love her.’
It is ‘the version of me that walked into this lake house yesterday is not the version of me lying in this bed.’ He’s gone. There is no return.
I have not yet decided what to call whatever has filled the space he left.
I will. I have time.
Right now, what I have is a woman asleep on my chest, my daughter asleep down the hall, the wood stove ticking as it cools, and a thing I am afraid to lose for the first time in fifteen years.
That is enough for tonight.
? ? ?
At 1:23 AM I get out of bed.
I move slowly. She doesn’t wake. I pull the blanket up over her shoulder. I pull on the trousers I left at the foot of the bed. I do not put on a shirt. I do not put on shoes.
I walk down the hall in the dark.
The smaller bedroom is at the end. The door is half open, the way Maeve closed it before dinner. I push it the rest of the way open with one hand, slowly.
She’s asleep.
She’s on her back. Brontos is under her arm.
The fuzzy white sock with the small pink hearts on it has come off her left foot in the night and is wedged under the bumper of the porta-crib.
Her hair is the dark brown of mine in a baby photograph my mother keeps in her hallway.
Her mouth is open, the small fraction of an inch.
She’s breathing the way a child breathes when she’s decided her room is safe.
I stand in her doorway for thirty seconds.
She doesn’t know I am her father. She knows I am the man named Lex who reads her ‘Goodnight Moon’ and puts her snow boots on her at 4:00 AM and lifts her into a car seat that was the right car seat for her age and weight.
She’s decided I am acceptable. She hasn’t been told yet that I am her father.
She’ll be told. I will be the one to tell her, when Maeve agrees, and the conversation is going to be the most important conversation I have ever had with another human being, and I have no idea how I am going to say it. That’s a thought for another time.
I close the door of her room halfway.
I walk back down the hall.
Maeve has rolled onto her side in my absence. She’s put her hand on the place where I was. She’s still asleep. She’s reaching, in her sleep. I climb into the bed beside her.
She murmurs in her sleep. She finds my chest. She puts her hand back on my sternum. She doesn’t wake.
I pull her against me.
I keep watch until the first light comes in over the lake, and then I will keep watch through the morning, and I will keep watch every night for as long as I have the privilege of being the man in the bed with this woman and the man in the house with this child, and I will keep watch for the rest of my life, because a man who has just been given a thing he had stopped allowing himself to want doesn’t, for any reason, fall asleep on it.
Outside, the lake is black.
Inside, she breathes against my chest.
For now, it is enough.