13. Greer
Greer
The parking garage at the practice facility is almost empty by the time I leave the building, which is exactly the way I planned it.
I walk slowly to my Subaru.
The sound my heels make on the concrete is the only sound on the level. Somewhere two floors above, the heating system kicks on in the ductwork over the medical wing.
I get to my car. I do not get in.
I stand at the driver's-side door with my keys in my hand and my purse on my shoulder and I look at the far end of the row.
The black SUV is parked exactly where it has been parked every day this week.
Kieran was clear last night that the decision was all mine on where we go from here.
Although I told myself all day I didn’t know, I think I did in fact know.
I decided at three this morning, in the dark of my own bed, and I have not, since then, unmade the decision. I just have not, yet, acted on it.
I look at the SUV.
The driver's-side door of the SUV opens.
He gets out. He has his bag on his shoulder and his coat over his arm. He sees me see him. He stops, halfway to the back of the SUV, with his hand on the rear door.
For a long second neither of us moves.
Then he closes the rear door without putting his bag in it. He walks across the floor of the garage toward me.
When he stops in front of me, he is two feet from the driver's-side door of the Subaru and three feet from me. He sets his bag on the asphalt. He does not move closer.
He says, very low: "Greer."
"Kieran."
"I was just leaving."
He waits, the way he has waited for me every other time this week.
I look at him. My mind has been made up since three this morning. His was made up two days before mine. I have not, until this moment, been able to look at him without a hallway or a treatment table between us.
I say: "I want to come home with you."
He looks at me for a long beat.
He says, just as low: "I would love that. Follow me."
I let out a breath I do not know I have been holding. "Okay."
He picks up his bag. He nods once and walks back across the floor of the garage to the SUV.
We drive through the dark of late November in Boston with the city in between us, in two cars, on streets that are emptier than they have been all week. The heat in my Subaru is up too high. The radio is off.
We park beside the brownstone, his car in the private space and mine at the curb, and we do not speak in the few feet of sidewalk between our cars and the dark blue door.
He unlocks the door, holds it open, and I cross his threshold for the second time.
The deadbolt turns behind me. The brownstone is dark except for the under-cabinet lights in the kitchen, which he must have left on this morning. The staircase on the right has pictures lining the wall.
My coat goes on the hook above the bench inside the door. My purse goes on the bench. His bag goes next to it. He does not, through any of that, look at me directly.
When he turns to look at me, finally, he is standing six inches from me in the small entryway with the under-cabinet kitchen light throwing a soft seam onto the side of his face, and his eyes are the eyes I have been seeing every time I have closed my own eyes since the night at the Bellamy.
He says, "I want to tell you something before anything else happens."
"Tell me."
"This is your call. The whole night. Anything you want me to slow down or stop, you tell me.
Anything you want to do differently than we did the first time, you tell me.
I am not asking you for any of it. I am here because you said follow me to your house, and that is the entire ask I am working from. "
"Okay."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Say it again."
"Kieran. I'm sure."
He leans down and kisses me.
His mouth is the mouth I have been carrying in my head for seven weeks. He kisses me slowly the way he kissed me slowly the first time, except this time we are both already past the part where either of us was pretending we were strangers. He kisses me like a man who has already decided.
He puts both his hands on my hips over the soft cotton of my work pants. He holds. He does not pull. He holds me until my breath has come back to me. Then he picks me up.
He picks me up the way he picked me up in suite seventeen-fourteen, one arm under my thighs and one under my back. He carries me out of the entryway, past the kitchen, to the staircase.
"Your hip."
"My hip is fine."
"Kieran."
"My hip is fine, Greer."
He carries me up the stairs steady and slow. The second floor is dark. The hallway smells of old wood. A radiator hums somewhere in the wall. The door on the right is open. The room beyond it is dark except for a small lamp on the dresser by the window.
He carries me into his bedroom.
He sets me down on the bed.
I have not let myself imagine his bedroom. The bed is large and low and made up with a duvet in a deep navy. The dresser by the window has, on top of it, a framed photograph I do not, in the low light, let myself look at directly. The wall opposite the bed has nothing on it.
He pulls his quarter-zip off over his head. He pulls the long-sleeved tee off underneath.
The old scar at his left side is the scar I have spent seven weeks looking at in his file. The new pink line below it from this fall's flare-up work has gone the soft surgical color flares go when they are healing.
He sits at the edge of the bed and pulls me to stand between his knees. His palms come flat against the sides of my stomach, where the small forward curve has been changing the angle of my favorite jeans for two weeks now. He stays there for a long beat with both hands on me.
He looks up at me.
He kisses the place under my navel. He kisses the inside of my hipbone. He kisses the soft inside of my thigh. He takes the rest of my clothes off slowly, the way he is going to do everything tonight. He guides me down onto the bed, spreads me wide and puts his mouth on me.
I do not, the first time, last long. He works me through it with both his hands on the outside of my thighs and his mouth on my clit and the slow steady rhythm of a man who has, by my read, been rehearsing this in his head for weeks.
When I come, I come with one hand in his hair and the other pressed against the duvet, and the sound that comes out of me is loud in his quiet house.
He works me through it until my hand goes slack in his hair.
He sits up on his knees between my legs and looks down at me. His mouth is wet and his hair is in his eyes and he is looking at me the way he looked at me at the Bellamy. The look is the same but we are not.
He says: "Greer."
"Yes."
"I am going to make this last."
"Please."
He stands. He takes off the rest of his clothes. He is hard and ready and calm in a way he was not calm at the Bellamy. This time, he has come to stay.
He gets back on the bed. He puts his weight on his elbows above me. He kisses me until I cannot, in any useful sense, count.
He pushes in slowly.
There is, this time, nothing between us. I have not, in any of my twenty-six years, felt anything like the feel of him without anything between us. I press my mouth into his shoulder. He stops, halfway. He breathes hard through his nose. His forehead drops to mine.
"Okay?"
"Yes."
"Tell me if it isn't."
"It is."
He moves slowly. He keeps stopping to look at me, as if he is still checking if I am real.
The third time he stops, with his hand on the back of my neck and his other hand braced beside my head, he says, very softly, "I have been imagining this for seven weeks.
I have not, in any one of those imaginings, gotten it right. "
"What did you get wrong?"
"All of it. None of it was this."
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"Keep going."
He keeps going. He talks to me through all of it the way he talked to me in suite seventeen-fourteen, except softer, slower, the dirty parts braided with the tender parts.
He tells me I feel like nothing else he has ever felt.
He tells me he can feel my heartbeat in the line of my throat against his mouth.
I come the second time slower and deeper than the first. He comes after me with my name in his mouth and his hand still flat against the back of my neck.
He stays.
He stays on top of me for a long minute, his forearms holding his weight off me, his mouth at my temple, his heartbeat going through his chest into mine.
He rolls onto his side eventually and pulls me with him. His hand goes flat against the small curve of my stomach. He keeps it there.
He says, quietly, "Sleep, Greer"
I close my eyes.
And finally, I sleep.
* * *
I wake up before sunrise with his arm heavy across my ribcage in the position his arm was in at four AM in suite seventeen-fourteen. The room is dark. He is asleep, breathing slow and deep.
I lie on my side and I watch him breathe.
His face, asleep, is younger than his face awake. The faint vertical line he wears between his brows when he is working is gone. The mouth I have been kissing is at rest. The hand that has been flat against the small curve of my stomach is, in his sleep, still there.
I have not slept this well in seven weeks.
I do not, when I close my eyes again, mind that I do not know what tomorrow looks like.