Chapter 38
thirty-eight
Remy
Six weeks ago this refrigerator had beer, hot sauce, and a block of cheese I'd have needed to carbon-date.
Evie stands at the counter slicing tomatoes with the knife she sharpened herself because she told me mine were a disgrace to the concept of cooking, and I lean against the island with a cutting board full of basil I've been tearing, not cutting, because she also told me that bruising it releases more oil, and I believed her because she said it with the same authority she uses to restructure donor databases.
"We're out of the good olive oil." She doesn't look up from the tomatoes. "The one with the green label, not the one you bought that tastes like a parking lot."
"I bought that one on purpose."
"Nobody buys parking lot olive oil on purpose."
"It was on sale."
She does look up then, and the expression on her face is the one she reserves for moments when my competence in every other area of life makes my grocery failures more baffling, not less. "You drive a Range Rover."
"Unrelated."
The laugh is quiet, barely a breath through her nose, but the corner of her mouth twitches, and I've been watching this happen for weeks now, tracking her bottom lip as it catches between her teeth when she's trying not to give me the satisfaction.
The kitchen smells like garlic and the basil under my hands and the tomatoes bleeding juice onto the cutting board, and underneath all of it, her lotion, something with vanilla that lives in the air of this house now. Cedar used to live here alone.
The pantry has pasta in three shapes. There's butter in the door of the fridge and cream cheese she uses for something I haven't identified and a bag of lemons because she puts lemon in her water every morning.
I didn't buy any of it. She did. She made groceries and stocked my kitchen and I don't know when it started feeling like ours instead of mine, but the shift happened somewhere between the second bag of lemons and the night she reorganized the spice cabinet without asking.
She turns to carry the tomato plate to the stove and her weight shifts wrong, the ankle rolling just enough that her hand shoots out for the counter's edge. My body is already moving before the thought forms, one step closing the gap, my palm flat against her lower back, steadying.
"I'm fine." She says it the way she always says it, which means about sixty percent.
"Didn't say you weren't." I don't move my hand. Her spine is hot through the cotton of the shirt she stole from my closet three weeks ago, and her breath presses against my palm.
"Darcy wants us home for Thanksgiving." She sets the plate down, adjusting the tomatoes like their arrangement matters. "She texted me a menu. It's fourteen items."
Us. Home. Thanksgiving. Three words that imply a future, and she dropped them into the sentence the same way she drops lemon slices into water, like it's just what you do, like it doesn't change the composition of everything it touches.
"Odette's gonna make her cut it to ten."
"Odette's going to add three more and pretend they were always on the list."
She's absolutely right, and her knowing my grandmother well enough to predict it lands somewhere in my chest that I don't have clinical language for.
Evie wipes her hands on the dish towel, tosses it over her shoulder, and heads toward the hallway. I hear her footsteps on the hardwood, the slight unevenness where the ankle still favors the left side, the softer sound of her moving through the hall toward the her room.
I wait for the click of the door closing.
It doesn't come.
I cover the pot, kill the burner, leave the tomato plate on the counter. Neither of us is eating tonight. I walk the length of the hall and turn into my room.
The go bag sits where it always sits, black and zipped, but the zipper pull faces the wall now, not the door.
It used to face out, ready to be grabbed on my way somewhere else.
Now it's the bag I'll grab when the phone rings at two AM, after I kiss her forehead on my way out.
At some point my hands moved it, and I don't remember when.
I'm standing at the nightstand unbuttoning my shirt cuffs when I hear her in the hallway.
Not going to the guest room.
My fingers stop on the second button. My chest pulls tight before the thought lands, ribs contracting around a breath I didn't take, and every sound in the hallway sharpens into something I can map with my eyes closed.
The slight unevenness of her gait, left foot landing softer than the right.
The whisper of her palm trailing the wall. The absence of the door clicking shut.
She stops in my doorway.
Not leaning against the frame the way she did that first night, when she was making a point.
Just standing there in the shirt she stole from me and a pair of cotton shorts, her hair down in the waves she doesn't straighten anymore, her weight on her good ankle with one bare foot resting on top of the other.
Brown eyes steady. No armor, no angle, no strategy.
She's done this before. The hotel, Louisiana, when she walked toward me with her whole chest and I was the one who tried to build a wall between us afterward. I'm the one still reaching for a mask every time the air gets thin.
"Your hall light is out." She says it like she's reporting the news.
I look at her. The hall behind her is dark, just the light from my room cutting across the floorboards and catching the edge of her collarbone where the shirt has slipped.
The bruise on her temple has faded to yellow, almost gone, and the stitches behind her ear are hidden by her hair, and she looks like someone who climbed through a window and ran through a field and called my sister, not me, because she couldn't remember my number, and she's standing in my doorway talking about a light bulb.
I open my mouth and reach for charming, for easy.
Steady, Saint.
Nothing comes.
"Evangeline." Her name is all I have, and it comes out low and rough and more Louisiana than I've let myself sound in front of her since the night I couldn't stop.
She doesn't move. Doesn't fill the silence. Just watches me with that calm that costs her nothing because she already paid for it, already showed up.
I cross the room.
My hands find her face before I decide to reach for her, palms against her jaw, thumbs at her cheekbones, and her skin is heated and her heart beats steady under my fingers. I bend toward her and tilt her face up to mine, and I start to say something about the bag and the door and the hallway.
"I—"
The word sits there. Alone. Unfinished.
Her hand comes up and wraps around my wrist, not pulling, not pushing. Holding.
The door stays open.
Her fingers work the remaining buttons of my shirt, and I let her because my own hands have apparently forgotten how buttons work.
She pushes the fabric off my shoulders and it drops, and the air hits my skin, and I'm standing in my own bedroom feeling more exposed than I've ever felt in a combat zone.
"You're staring at me like you've never done this before." Her mouth curves, and the humor in it is gentle, not cruel.
"I've done this before."
"You sure? Because your hands are just kind of. Hovering."
She's right. My hands are at her waist, fingers resting on the hem of the stolen shirt, and they're not moving. I've sutured arterial bleeds in the back of a moving vehicle and right now I can't figure out how to take a t-shirt off a woman who weighs a hundred and twenty pounds.
"I'm strategizing."
"You're stalling."
She's laughing at me. The most competent man in any room, the chameleon who can become anyone, and I can't undress my own girl in my own bedroom with the lights on.
I pull the shirt over her head because if I don't do it now I'll stand here strategizing until the sun comes up.
The cotton catches on her hair and she helps, one hand freeing the waves, and then the shirt is gone and she's standing in front of me in cotton shorts and nothing else and every thought in my head goes quiet.
I've mapped her body in the dark. I know the heft of her breasts in my palms, the exact spot under her left one where a kiss makes her breathing stutter, the geography of her ribs and the dip of her waist and the scar tissue on her inner thighs that I've traced with careful fingers while she slept.
I don't know any of it like this.
The light from the bedside lamp turns her skin golden, and the flush starts at her chest and moves up her throat, and her nipples are already hard, and the bird tattoo on her hip is a single dark line against the glow of her skin, and she's watching me look at her.
She can see me seeing her. No dark to hide behind, no sleep to soften the edges of what my face must look like right now.
"Dove." My voice comes out rougher than I intend, the drawl thick enough that I hear it and don't correct it.
"Remy."
Just my name. Not Tripp, not Saint. Remy.
I drop to my knees.
My knees hit the hardwood and my hands find her hips and I press my mouth to the bird tattoo because it's the closest part of her and I need to be touching her with something other than my hands or I'm going to say something I can't take back.
Her fingers slide into my hair. Her stomach contracts under my lips.
I hook my thumbs into her shorts and pull them down, and she steps out of them with her hand on my shoulder for balance because the ankle still isn't right, and then she's naked and I'm on my knees in front of her and the light is on and there is absolutely nothing between me and the fact of this woman except air.
The scars I've only ever traced in the dark are pale in the lamplight, the older ones on the inside of her thighs, the newer ones higher up where she'd stopped being careful. The medic in me could read the whole timeline. I don't let him.