34. Nolan
NOLAN
The first night back at the penthouse, Arielle falls asleep on the gray sofa before I have finished making her tea, and I stand in the doorway holding two mugs like a man who has forgotten what he came into a room for, and I let her sleep there for three hours rather than wake her to move twenty feet.
That is the version of me I am now. The one who stands in doorways and waits.
It is the third day of recovery, a Sunday, the leg propped on a cushion she chose, the apartment quiet in the way it only gets when the city has had its first real warm afternoon of the spring and everyone has gone outside to argue with it.
She is in one of my undershirts and a pair of soft pants with the panel at the waist, and her hair is loose and she has not put on the gold cuff because she has not gone anywhere she would need armor for, and she is reading something on her tablet on the bed with the late light coming sideways through the curtains.
"Come here, Nolan. Stop reorganizing the kitchen. I can hear you alphabetizing the spices and it is making me feel like a houseguest."
"I am not alphabetizing the spices. I moved two things."
"You moved the cumin. The cumin has been next to the paprika since December. I noticed. Come here."
I come. I sit on the edge of the bed, careful of the leg, and she takes the tablet out of her own hands and sets it on the nightstand on top of the small paper sleeve of ultrasound photos she has propped against the lamp, and she looks at me with an expression I have learned to read over seven months and have never, until this exact week, seen pointed at me without a layer of self-defense underneath it.
“I want to ask you for something,” she says. “And I need to ask it knowing your instinct will be to manage every inch of it — and I need you not to.”
"Tell me what it is and I'll tell you whether I can keep my hands off it."
"I want you. Tonight. And I want you to let me run it, because I have spent my whole life being careful with my own body in front of men who wanted to be in charge of it, and you are the only one I have ever wanted to hand it to, and I am only able to hand it to you because I finally believe you'll hand it back. Do you understand the difference."
"I understand the difference. I understood it about two months too late, but I understand it now."
"Then take the shirt off and lie down, and don't tell me how I'm doing, and don't ask me three times if I'm sure. I'll tell you. I'm good at telling you. We established that in Miami."
I take the shirt off. I lie down where she points, on my back in the middle of the bed, and she comes over me slowly, one knee at a time, careful of her leg.
She settles with her weight braced on her hands beside my head, her stomach warm against me, her loose hair falling around our faces like a curtain shutting out everything else.
"This is new," I say.
"What's new is you not flipping me onto my back inside of thirty seconds. You're behaving."
"I'm enjoying the view. There's a difference."
"There's always a difference with you, Nolan. You and your differences."
She kisses me. She kisses me slow, the way she has never once kissed me, without anything to prove and nowhere to be at four in the morning, and I keep my hands flat on the bed because she has not told me where they go yet, and she notices, and she takes one of my wrists and moves my hand to her hip and the other to the side of her ribs, under the shirt, against bare skin.
"There," she says against my mouth. "You can use them. I'll move them if I want them somewhere else."
"Tell me what you want."
"I'm going to. Slowly. I'm in no hurry tonight. We have the rest of our lives, apparently, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say to a man, so I am going to take my time saying it."
She sits up. She pulls the undershirt over her head and drops it off the side of the bed, and she is bare above me in the sideways light, the small dark line up the middle of her, her breasts heavy, the curve of her where our daughter is moving even now in the slow turning way she does at this hour.
I do not say anything sentimental. She has not warned me off it tonight, but I know her, and I keep it behind my teeth, and I let my hands say it instead, sliding up the soft sides of her, learning her again the way you learn a building you've already drawn.
"You're staring, Nolan."
"I'm allowed to stare. You told me I could use my hands. You said nothing about the staring."
"Stare, then. I used to hate it. I don't tonight. That's the part I keep tripping over. I don't hate any of it tonight."
She works her soft pants off, and her underwear, taking her time, and she comes back over me and reaches down between us and frees my cock from the rest of my clothes with a sureness she has earned across three nights I will not stop being grateful for.
She is slick against me when she settles her weight low on my hips, and she does not take me in yet.
She rocks against me, slow, watching my face, and the small sound I make is the kind of thing I would never let out of myself in any other room on earth.
"Tell me if I hurt her," she says. "I'll tell you the same."
"You won't. I've got you. Take whatever you want, Arielle. I'm not going anywhere."
"I know you're not. That's the whole reason I can do this."
She reaches down and guides me to her and sinks onto me, slow, an inch and then a breath and then another inch, her hands flat on my chest and her head tipping back and her loose hair sliding off her shoulders, and when she has taken all of me she goes still and breathes, and her pussy is hot and tight around me and I keep my hands loose on her hips and let her have the stillness for as long as she wants it.
"Okay," she breathes. "Okay. This is — Nolan, this is different."
"What does it feel like?"
"Like I'm not bracing for anything. Like I put something down at the door and forgot to pick it back up. I keep waiting for the part where I have to start protecting myself again and it isn't coming."
"It's not going to come. Move when you're ready. I'll follow you."
She moves. Slow at first, finding it, her hands spread on my chest and mine spread on her, and there is no argument in it, none of the heat we used to make out of frustration, none of the jealousy or the unresolved thing that drove every other night we have had.
There is just her, riding me slow in the late spring light, the monitor of her own breath the only sound, and the small steady knowledge between us that neither of us is going to leave the room first.
"I love you, Nolan."
She says it on a downstroke, plain, without the fear that has hidden it in her throat since December, and she does not look away from me when she says it, and she does not let me look away either.
"Say it again."
"I love you. I'm not afraid of it tonight. I was so afraid of it I let you walk out of my kitchen rather than say it, and I'm done being afraid of it. I love you. I have for a while now. I think I have since the trailer, if I'm honest, which I am trying to be."
"Arielle." My voice is gone. "I don't want to run your life.
I want you to know that's what changed. Not the wanting you.
The wanting to manage you. That's dead. I killed it on Wednesdays with a man with a doctorate.
I just want to be in the room. I want to share it. That's all I've got left to want."
"Then share this one. Move with me. Don't take over. Just — be here."
I be here. I find her rhythm and meet it, my hands learning the parts of her that have changed and the parts that haven't, and when she tips over the edge it is with my name soft in her mouth and her forehead dropping to mine and her hand finding my hand and lacing through it on the curve of her own stomach.
I follow her a few strokes later with her name in my throat, and I do not let her move off me right away, and she doesn't try to.
She settles against my chest, careful of both of us, and I gather her in, and the city outside has finally gone quiet, and her hand is flat over my heart.
"This still feels like home," she says into my collarbone. "It did three weeks ago, too, in my own bed, with you not in it. I didn't tell you. I'm telling you now."
"Stay home, then."
"I'm already home, Nolan. You're the one who keeps catching up."