Chapter 31
EDEN
The third date was a restaurant-equipment auction in an unheated warehouse east of Terre Haute, forty miles from the gate, on the second Saturday in February. I chose it. Ryder drove and didn’t ask what I meant to bid on.
The warehouse smelled of cold concrete, old fryer grease, and the sourness that comes off stainless somebody hosed down without drying.
Eleven feet of proofing cabinets stood along the north wall out of a closed chain kitchen in Vincennes.
I was into the third one with my thumbnail before I found a door gasket that dented and came back.
“The compressor on that one runs,” Ryder said behind me. “It ran while the man ahead of you had the door open. That’s all I know about it.”
“It’s a humidity box, not a truck.”
“I know what it is. You asked me a question with your face.”
I had, and I hated that he could still read it.
I registered a paddle in my own name and made him wait beyond the rope with the men who weren’t bidding, and from there he watched me take the cabinet for four hundred and twenty-five dollars against a buyer from an Indianapolis restaurant group who quit when he saw I wouldn’t.
Ryder loaded it because the yard hand asked him to.
He went up the ramp backward with the weight on his side and his breath showing, and I stood in a freezing lot and wanted my husband so much my jaw ached.
On my porch he stopped a full step short of the boards.
“No,” I said, before he could ask.
“All right.” He put his hands in his pockets. “The cabinet comes off the trailer tonight or Monday?”
“Monday. With the crew, on a work order.”
He waited until my key turned, then went across the road.
I stood in my front hall with my coat still on, furious, and not with him.
The man who could read a question off my face in a cold warehouse was the same man who had known which jacket I would recognize across a clubhouse, who had known that watching him mind another woman’s breathing would make me wonder whether my lungs had finally worn him out.
He hadn’t become a stranger in July. A stranger couldn’t have done it.
I worked that out over nine days at four in the morning with my hands in dough, which is where I have always done my thinking, and at the end of them I stopped waiting to feel finished. There was never going to be a morning when the jacket didn’t come with him.
By late February the shape of it had gone ordinary.
He requested through Mia, I chose the place or approved his, and his truck put me back on my porch before midnight.
He didn’t touch the Civic, didn’t come into the bakery unless I hired him, didn’t ask whether one date meant the next.
I could kiss him on a Friday and refuse his hand on a Sunday, and he lived with the answer he got.
The fourth date was dinner in Hadley Creek, eight blocks from my own building, on the last Thursday of the month, and I spent most of it complaining about Brenda, who had spent eleven years calling the upstairs office windows charming, which is a cheaper word than rotten.
Three of the four sashes had gone soft at the bottom rail.
You could stand up there in February with your hand a foot from the glass and feel the cold coming off it like an open cooler.
“I want them out before another winter,” I said. “She used to tell me the building breathed.”
“It does. Through the windows.” Ryder turned his water glass a quarter turn. “Sashes inside the existing frames are cheap and fast and won’t fix a rotten sill. Full openings cost three times that and tell you what the header looks like, which you may not want to learn in November.”
“Which would you do?”
“I’d want to see the sills wet.” He picked up his fork. “That’s as far as I can go from a chair.”
He had walked that building once, in November, for one hour, under the security review I paid the club to perform. He named the options and their costs and went back to his food, and my question stayed a question instead of a crew and an invoice.
Outside my house he stopped where the porch boards met the top step, in a black henley under his cut, not the coat that had ended our first kiss, and his bare forearms brought back years of him coming through this door with grease on his skin and an apology for another ruined shirt.
In July I’d have given nearly anything to be angry about a shirt again.
“You may come inside,” I said with my key already in the lock, and his attention came off my hand and onto my face fast enough that I knew he had heard everything I hadn’t offered. “The living room. You don’t walk through the house, open anything, or assume you’re staying.”
He waited until I had crossed the threshold and left the door open behind me before he stepped in, and closed it only when I nodded.
There was no house key on his ring; the old one was locked in Mia’s office, marked as surrendered evidence, and useless anyway since I changed every exterior lock in August. “Do you want my cut off?”
“Hang it on the hook.” I watched him put it where it had lived for five years, under the empty hook that used to hold my purse, and hated the flush of relief that came off seeing black leather against my own wall.
I wanted his mouth, his hands, and the body I had spent five years treating as mine, and none of that let him mistake this room for home.
“I invited you inside because I want to have sex with you.”
Ryder stayed by the door. The man who once would have crossed the room before I finished kept both hands where I could see them and made me carry the choice all the way to him. “Tell me what that gives me.”
“Sex.” I set my keys on the entry table, out of his reach, though he hadn’t touched them in seven months. “It doesn’t give you a key, a night in my bed, a drawer, an opinion about my locks, or the right to call yourself my husband when I haven’t.”
“Do you want me in the bedroom?” he asked, and kept his eyes on me and the hallway out of it.
“Eventually.” The word put heat low in my belly, and his gaze followed my hands when I unbuttoned my coat.
He had always watched me take off winter clothes and made it filthy, and months of punishment hadn’t cured him of it, and I was glad.
“You ask before anything new. If I tell you to stop, you stop. You wait until I tell you whether we’re done or whether I want something else. ”
“And if you send me out with my pants around my ankles, I leave.”
“I’ll permit you to pull them up on the porch. I’m not cruel to the women across the road.”
His mouth moved as though the old answer had reached it and died. “Where do you want me?”
I crossed the room, stopped close enough to feel heat through his shirt, and put my hands flat on his chest. He didn’t touch me, and the restraint made me angrier than a grab would have.
For five years I had never had to explain myself in this room; he had turned that certainty into something I have to inspect before I use it.
“Kiss me,” I said, and closed the last of the space myself so he couldn’t mistake the order for hesitation.
Ryder put one hand at my waist and the other against my face and waited until I leaned in before his mouth covered mine.
The porch kiss had been hunger outside a locked door.
This one had the whole house behind it — the couch where he stretched out while I did invoices, the kitchen where he stole frosting and denied it with sugar on his thumb, the hall running back to a bed I had slept in alone since July.
I bit his lip again, not for the jacket this time but because some part of me needed the anger inside every kiss.
He took it and kissed me harder when I pulled his shirt loose.
His hand stopped at the hem of my sweater. “May I take this off?”
“Yes.” I lifted my arms, and he stripped it over my head and kept the wool off my face on the way. His attention dropped to the black bra underneath and his hand stayed at my waist, and he looked at me with every night he hadn’t been allowed near me showing in his face.
“You can touch me,” I said. “That isn’t permission for everything.”
“I heard you.” His fingers closed on my hip, familiar enough to weaken my knees and careful enough to remind me that familiarity no longer made the rules. He bent and kissed the top of my breast and stayed there until I put my fingers into his hair. “Bedroom?”
I almost said no. The bedroom still held the old marriage — his half of the closet, still empty; his nightstand with the books I’d moved off mine and a lamp I never use. Letting him in there felt more dangerous than letting him put his mouth anywhere on my body.
“Yes,” I said, and caught his belt when he started to step back. “You follow me.”
He did, matching my pace down the hall with both hands to himself.
I turned on the bedside lamp before he came in.
The original chessboard sat on the table by the window with every piece where we left it the night before Jess arrived.
Ryder looked at it once and looked away, went near neither the board nor his old side of the bed, and waited in the doorway while I took off my shoes.
“Take off your shirt,” I told him, setting my shoes by the chair, choosing what entered this room before he touched another part of me.
He pulled the henley over his head and laid it on the chair, keeping it out of the pile with my clothes.
His stomach went tight before I had touched him, the way it does when he expects my hands, and the heat was already coming off him into the cold of the room.
No affair had happened. It didn’t make his body innocent.
Those arms carried me off the porch after bad attacks and then stayed around Jess while I watched.
He didn’t cover himself, and didn’t ask me to stop remembering. “What do you want off next?”