Chapter 39
Siobhan
Homecoming
* * *
The Heaney is back on the nightstand. The contractors shipped it with the rest of my things from New Hampshire, and I placed it beside the lamp with the particular satisfaction of returning something stolen to its rightful place.
"Scaffolding." The poem is about trust and the structures that hold you up while you build something real.
The scaffolding came down. We're standing on our own now.
Evening. The penthouse is warm. My clothes are in the closet beside his suits. My laptop is on the desk. My tea in the kitchen. The domestic archaeology of a life reclaimed.
Nico comes home from Elysium. I can read something heavy in his posture — a meeting, a conversation, something that costs.
He carries weight in his shoulders the way other men carry it in their faces.
The suit jacket comes off. The shoes. He finds me in the kitchen in his shirt and bare legs with my hair loose, and the look he gives me is the look I've been memorizing since the first morning after the Knock: hunger and tenderness and the particular disbelief of a man who cannot quite accept that this is his life now.
"Hey."
"Hey."
He looks at me. I look at him. The kitchen is quiet. The city outside the windows. The distance between us is six feet of marble floor and nine days of exile and a factory and a chair, and it's also nothing. It's also the thinnest membrane in the world.
"Take me to bed."
Not a question. A decision. The same way I knocked on his door: my choice, my terms, walking toward what I want because I want it.