Chapter 44 #2
I get her jeans off and go to my knees on my own floor, and when she looks down at me — the question right there, the old reflex to clock who might be watching — I get it out before my mouth’s too busy to: “Not for a camera. Not for the campaign. Just because I can’t breathe when you’re not letting me.
” Then my mouth’s on her before she’s even all the way down on the cushions, because I need it first — the proof, the sound, the thing that says she’s real and back and mine.
She’s wet already, swollen, and she jolts when my tongue lands.
She’s loud like this — loud the way she’d die before being in daylight — and I tell her so against the inside of her thigh, and she grabs a handful of my hair and tells me to shut up and make it worth the drive.
So I make it worth the drive. Tongue flat and slow, two fingers working into her — and I’m not slick about it, I’m greedy, I’ve missed this, I keep losing my own rhythm because she makes a sound and I have to stop and feel it before I can go again.
I stay there through the first clench and the second, until the words are gone, until it’s just my name in the register nobody else gets, until she’s grinding up into my face and pulling my hair hard enough to sting and coming on my tongue — and I love even that, the pull, the mess, the sound she makes when she stops being careful.
I don’t let her come all the way down before I’m moving again. I want the next one with me inside her.
I roll the condom on with hands that still aren’t steady, and when I push into her — all the way, one slow stroke, no catch to it, she’s so wet and so ready I bottom out at once and we both swear — she pulls me down by the back of the neck.
The touchline hold. Ours now. She holds my eyes the whole way in.
No shutter. Nothing filed. Looking at me like there’s no version of this she’s keeping in reserve, and that nearly ends me before the rest of it can.
“Carter.” Not a line. Just my name, the way she says it when there’s no one to perform for.
“I know. I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere — not ever again, you hear me—”
I move in her slow, then not slow. Deep and hard, her legs locked around me, the too-small couch giving us nowhere to go but closer, every stroke driving a sound out of her she doesn’t try to swallow.
She stays right there the whole time. Eyes open.
Saying my name like she means the man and not the campaign.
Telling me harder, telling me there, telling me don’t you dare stop — and I don’t, I couldn’t, I’d sooner stop breathing.
I last about as long as a man does the first time he gets back something he was sure he’d lost. She’s right there with me, clenching around me, my name breaking out of her, and I follow her over buried deep with both arms locked under her, both of us spent and laughing and not laughing on a too-small couch in the after of the worst three weeks of either of our lives.
“Worth the drive,” she says eventually, into my shoulder.
A joke comes up — something about being officially hers now, ruined for all other comms directors — and for once I put it down before it gets out.
“I love you,” I say instead, plain, no grin under it.
“Since the first interview, when you called me on every bit of it. Since you yelled at me in that restaurant. I said it on a stage with the whole league listening and I’ll say it here with nobody listening, which is the version that actually scared me. ”
She’s quiet long enough that a younger, dumber me would have filled it with a bit. I don’t.
“I love you too,” she says. Flat, like a fact entered into the only record she keeps the honest way. “I loved you when you stopped performing in a corridor at midnight. I loved you when you said your brother’s name out loud and didn’t make it a joke.” A pause. “I’m not putting the rest in writing.”
“Noted,” I say. “I’ll circle back.”
“Three-two,” she adds, into my shoulder. “You’re still up.”
“I’m always up.”
Later, the notebook’s already there — on her coffee table in the city, the last time I was up, and on mine here, when she’s down, migrating between us like a third resident who doesn’t pay rent. Still closed, mostly. She’s read some of it.
She hasn’t said which parts. I haven’t asked, because the not-asking was always the most generous thing she did for me, and now I get to do it back.
Her ankle-tape kit isn’t on my shelf yet. Mine’s on hers, in New York, next to the planner with the Post-its, which she pretends is an imposition and hasn’t moved once.
I tape my own ankles at 5:47 the next morning, the ritual, the only prayer I had left for two years — except this time there’s someone asleep in the next room who knows what the tape is for, knows about the brother and the bag and the whole heavy end of it, and the ritual feels less like a prayer now and more like a habit.
Just a thing a man does in the quiet. Not a thing he does alone.
For two years the 5:47 alarm was the loneliest sound I owned — the start of the stretch of day I had to get through before I could go be the bright one for everybody else.
This morning it’s just early. The tape tears the same, wraps the same, and somewhere in the second ankle I notice I’m not bracing for anything; that the ritual isn’t holding a wall up, because there’s no wall anymore, because the thing the wall was built to protect got said out loud to the two people who earned it and the world declined to end.
My hands finish the wrap. They don’t quite know what to do with the leftover time.
I’m fairly sure that’s what people mean by peace. I’m new at it.
***
“Hey, Red,” I say, when she surfaces, hair down, no blazer, the version of her almost nobody gets to see. I’ve called her that in my head since the first weekend. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.
She stops in the doorway. Files it. Weighs whether to give me grief for it.
“Red,” she repeats, like she’s reading it off a chart. “Because of the club, or because you ran out of original thoughts?”
“Because the first time you walked onto my pitch you were wearing it and you ruined every cone I owned.”
“That’s almost a real answer.” She pads past me toward the coffee, and at the counter, with her back to me — which is how I know it’s true — she says, “Okay, golden boy.” Just that.
She’s called me golden boy since the first table read, in the flat contemptuous way that meant media construct, do not engage, and somewhere in the last two months it quietly stopped being an insult and neither of us said a word about it.
Now it just means me. The one she picked.
“Don’t push it, Reinhardt.” But she doesn’t tell me to stop calling her Red, and that, from Sloane Vega, is a standing ovation.
My phone buzzes. Dani. coming to the next home game. bringing a sign. it’s embarrassing. she’s going to love it. tell her I said she’s officially the sharp one now and I’ve been demoted and I’m THRILLED about it.
I read it to Sloane. She doesn’t say anything for a second. Then she takes the gum out of her bag — the pack she never threw away, the one she lied to me about for a month — and puts a piece in, and hands me one, and that’s the whole answer, in the only language either of us has ever fully trusted.