Chapter 28
Maeve
Before Words
It is the second Saturday of January. Nora is in a small wool coat over the dinosaur pajamas because Nora has decided that for this overnight, she’ll travel as the version of herself she travels best as.
Dinosaurs underneath and dignity over the top.
Eleni doesn’t argue. She lovingly puts the wool coat on her granddaughter, shoulders the small overnight bag I have packed, and hands me a tin of ‘kourabiedes’ she’s made fresh this morning.
Because Eleni doesn’t arrive at her son’s house empty-handed, even when she’s leaving with his daughter.
"Maeve."
"Yes, Eleni."
"You will be fine."
"I have been left alone before."
Eleni looks at me with the knowing look of a woman who has raised four sons and has, as a result, learned to identify the version of ‘fine’ that is a question disguised as a statement.
She doesn’t press. She doesn’t tease. She simply puts her hand on my arm and says, "You are home. He’s here.
The two of you have been waiting for an evening to be the people you are when no one else is in the building.
Tonight is the evening. Eat dinner slowly.
Do not look at the clock. I will bring her home tomorrow at 3:00 PM and not a minute earlier. "
"Eleni."
"Yes, Maeve."
"Thank you."
She kisses my cheek. She takes Nora's small mittened hand and turns toward the foyer, where Petrov is holding the door open with the small smile of a man who has not yet returned to the version of himself he was before he went to visit his sister Larissa.
She pauses at the threshold and says, in Greek, very quietly, something I do not catch.
Lex, behind me in the hall, answers in the same Greek. One word. ‘Né.’ Yes.
Eleni nods, satisfied. She and Nora go.
Petrov leaves. The door closes.
The brownstone, for the first time in fifty-five days, contains exactly two people.
? ? ?
Lex makes dinner.
He’s been making dinner for three weeks now.
It started the day after Nora's birthday, when I came home from grand jury prep and found him at the stove with a Greek cookbook open on the counter and an expression I had not seen on his face before.
The expression of a man who had decided to learn a thing in his mid-thirties and was not going to be defeated by it.
The first dinner was edible. The second dinner was good.
By the third week, he was making ‘stifádo’ from a recipe his mother had written out for him on an index card in her cramped Greek handwriting.
The ‘stifádo’ was so good that I made the mistake of saying so, and Lex spent the next five days perfecting it because Lex Konstantinos doesn’t accept a compliment as a stopping point.
Tonight, he makes lamb.
Slow-roasted with lemon, garlic, and oregano, the simple Greek recipe his grandmother used to make on Sundays when he was a child, when she could still see well enough to read the recipe she had carried with her from the village in 1948.
The kitchen smells like a small Greek apartment in Brookline forty years ago.
The kitchen smells like the version of love that is doing instead of saying.
I sit on the kitchen island stool with a glass of red wine.
I am in jeans and one of his sweaters, the dark gray one he wore at the lake house in November, the one I have started wearing on Saturdays because the sleeves are too long and the wool is soft and the smell is the smell that has, in the last fifty-five days, become the smell of safety.
He glances over at me from the stove. He doesn’t say anything.
"What did Eleni say at the door," I ask.
"In Greek."
"Yes."
"She said, ‘Take your time.’"
"Take your time with what?”
Lex looks at me across the kitchen. The gold eyes do what they do when he is, in his interior architecture, deciding how much to say.
"With you," he says.
My pulse moves once in my throat.
I drink my wine. We don’t look at each other. We exist for the next forty minutes in the charged air of a kitchen where two people who have been waiting on each other are both pretending to be doing something else.
There is a candle on the dining table when we sit down.
I didn’t see him light it. The candle is small and white and unscented, the kind he buys by the case at the hardware store on Beacon Street because he doesn’t believe in scented candles in a house with a child who has asthma triggers.
The flame is steady. The candle is in a small, clear glass holder in the center of the table, and it is not a romantic candle, nor is it a casual candle; it is exactly the candle a man lights when he’s trying to mark an evening as something without making a scene about marking it.
Lex plates the lamb.
He’s been plating things carefully for weeks. The plating is not Instagram-careful, but with intention. The lamb is in the center. The lemon potatoes are at one o'clock. The greens are at five o'clock. The plate is warm. He’s warmed the plate.
He sets it in front of me.
"‘Kalí órexi,’" he says, very quietly. The Greek for ‘good appetite,’ the phrase his grandmother said over every meal she ever served him.
The phrase Petrov brought back from Larissa glazed onto a small ceramic plate.
Lex says it the way Greeks say it: not as a flourish, as a blessing in plain clothes.
" Eat, Maeve."
I eat.
The lamb is the best thing he’s made. I tell him. He nods once. He doesn’t deflect the compliment. He doesn’t pretend he’s still learning. He’s reached the point in his cooking that he can hear ‘this is the best thing you have made’ and accept it with a single nod.
We talk about almost nothing.
I have been rehearsing testimony for the third week running, and I am sick of my own voice. Lex tells me he heard me practicing the same paragraph through the door this morning, fourteen times, and I tell him it is going to be twenty by the end of the week.
We talk about Cormac's coat at last Sunday's family dinner, which was a green tweed thing that Eleni accidentally complimented and which Cormac has now decided to wear to every Sunday dinner forever as Eleni's punishment.
We talk about the cloud Nora pointed at on the way home from daycare on Wednesday. Nora informed me it was, ‘a cloud that is trying.’ I had no idea what the cloud was trying. Nora doesn’t know what the cloud was trying. The cloud, presumably, knows.
Lex laughs at the cloud.
It is a real laugh. A small one. A laugh from the back of his chest. The laugh I have heard maybe nine times in the fifty-five days I have lived with him, the laugh that is not for me and not for himself but for our daughter, because our daughter has observed a cloud and decided it was making an effort.
And that observation is the kind of thing that loosens the architecture in Lex Konstantinos's chest in a way I doubt nothing in the previous years of his life has.
I watch him laugh.
I think: ‘this is the man I am going to spend the rest of my life with.’
I think: ‘I have known this since the lake house, but I have not let myself say the sentence in this exact form before, and the sentence has been waiting forty-nine days to be said.’
I think: ‘he’s going to ask me. He’s not going to ask me tonight in words. He’s going to ask me tonight in another language.’
I think: ‘I am ready to answer.’
? ? ?
I clear the table.
I take his plate and my plate, and I walk them to the sink, and as I pass his chair, his hand catches my wrist.
Light. Not stopping me. Just registering.
I stop anyway. He stands up.
The plates are still in my hands. He takes them and sets them on the table. He turns me toward him with both hands at my hips, the bandaged arm now healed but still moving with the small care of a man who has learned to do certain motions slowly.
He looks at me. The candle is between us on the table, a small steady flame at hip height, and the kitchen behind him is still warm from the cooking. The brownstone is still, and the city outside the window is doing what the city does on a Saturday night in January in Boston.
Lex doesn’t speak. He cups my face. He kisses me.
The kiss is slow. The kiss doesn’t start at the lips and travel.
The kiss is the lips and stays the lips, his mouth on mine, full attention, as if there is no other surface in this kitchen worth touching except the surface of my mouth in this moment.
His hands stay on my face. He doesn’t wander.
He doesn’t press. He kisses me the way a man kisses a woman when he’s decided that the kiss itself is what he wanted, and anything that comes after is a bonus.
I lean into him. The kiss deepens. Slow. Slow. The kind of slow that makes you understand the word.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine for one long second. He says, very quietly, "Maeve."
I say, "Yes."
I do not know what I am saying yes to. He doesn’t need me to know.
? ? ?
We walk down the hall.
Slow. He holds my hand. We do not run. We do not rush.
We walk like a married couple at the end of a long evening who has decided that the bedroom is where the next part of the conversation is going to happen.
The hall is dim. The night-light in Nora's empty bedroom doorway is on because we leave it on every night, even when she’s at Eleni's, because the architecture of the brownstone has decided that the hallway light is now a fixed star and we are not going to be the ones who turn it off.
He pauses at the bedroom door.
He looks at me.
He says, "Are you sure?"
And I understand that I have been asked a question all evening.
I have been asked at the door when Eleni left.
I have been asked at the kitchen island when he answered me about ‘take your time.’ I have been asked at the dining table when he set the warmed plate in front of me.
I have been asked when he kissed me with his hands on my face.
The asking is not happening at the bedroom door.
The asking has been happening since 4:47 PM, and the bedroom door is just where he’s offering me the last chance to say no.
I say, "I'm sure."
He opens the door.
The bed is the bed we have been sleeping in for fifty-five days.
The duvet is the white one. The lamp on his side is on, low.
The lamp on my side is on, low. He’s prepared this room.
I didn’t see him prepare this room. The candle from the dining table is somewhere.
I will see it later on the bedside table on his side, the small, clear glass holder, the steady flame.
Right now, I am being undressed, and I am undressing him, and we are not speaking.
He undresses me, and I undress him, and neither of us speaks. My sweater. His sweater. My jeans. His. The undressing is not careful, not theatrical, just two people who have waited all evening to get to skin.
He pulls me flush against him, and there is nothing left between us, and the heat of him knocks the breath out of me.
He is already hard against my belly. My mouth finds the healed ridge of the scar on his arm, and I kiss it, the way I have for fifty-five nights.
He exhales roughly into my hair, his hand fisting slowly in it.
He lays me back on the warm bed, and he does not climb over me.
He kneels. He starts at the gold chain at my throat, kisses it once, the necklace I have not taken off since the day he gave it to me, and then he goes down.
His mouth is at my sternum. The flat of my belly.
The jut of my hip, where he lingers, where his teeth graze, and his breath goes uneven.
And then he settles between my thighs and puts his mouth on me.
I come up off the bed. His hand splays flat across my stomach and holds me down, and he does not stop.
His tongue is unhurried and exact, learning the rhythm that makes my thighs shake around his head, and when he slides a finger into me and curls it I make a sound I have never made, and he groans against me like that sound is the thing he came here for.
He keeps me there, at the edge and just under it, until I am fisting the sheets and saying his name like a question of my own.
Then he comes up my body. Slow. He braces over me and his eyes find mine, and he is in no hurry at all, and I understand what he is asking.
He has been asking it all evening — in the candle, the warmed plate, the way he kissed me without words.
He is asking it now with his weight over me and his eyes on my face, and I am answering with my hands at his jaw and my hips lifting for him.
He reaches between us and notches himself against me and pushes in, slow, one thick inch at a time, my body opening around the stretch of him until he is seated to the root and we are both still.
We do not move. He is buried in me, and his hand is on my face, and he is looking at me the way a man looks at the woman he is asking to spend his life with, and I am looking back like a woman who has already decided.
Then he moves.
Slow. Slower than slow. He drags almost out and slides back to the hilt, and on every stroke, the base of him drags the place still swollen and aching from his mouth.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper.
His breath brushes against my ear. My nails are in his back.
He builds me, patient and certain and relentless, until the whole of me has narrowed to where we are joined.
I am close. Close to release and close to the answer, and they have become the same thing.
His hand grips my hip, angles me up, and drives deeper, and the coil snaps. I come around him in long waves with his name in my mouth, and I say the other word too, quiet, into his hair.
"Yes."
His hand stills on my hip. His whole body goes taut, and then he follows me over, spilling hot and deep, his face pressed to my throat, holding the question and the answer in the same second.
He's heard me. He knows what he asked. He knows what I just answered.
The world is the exact dark of a bedroom on a Saturday night in January, and it has reduced to the two of us and the one word and the warmth of him still inside me, and I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
'Lex.'