Chapter 17 #2
Across the terrace, Alistair was talking to Ronan — something about the Foundation's fall programming, the new artist-in-residence slots Annabel had designed.
She watched him for a moment. He was leaning against the railing, relaxed, gesturing with his wine glass.
Two years ago he would have been scanning the room, calculating sight lines, performing ease.
Now he was just easy. The difference was small from the outside. From the inside it was everything.
He caught her looking. Smiled. Not the boardroom smile.
The one that lived underneath it — crooked, a little shy, the one she'd fallen in love with ten years ago at a gallery opening in Chelsea where she'd been nobody and he'd been Alistair Stirling and he'd asked her about a painting like her answer actually mattered.
She thought, briefly, of Daphne Thiessen.
Not with anger — that had burned itself out months ago, replaced by something quieter, more like understanding from a distance.
Daphne had been a symptom. The disease was the way Alistair had hidden from his own life, from the effort of being known.
He'd been treating that disease for a year now, twice a week on the Upper West Side with Dr. Chen and every day in the way he moved through the world.
He was not cured. He would never be cured.
But he was trying, and the trying was not a performance, and she could tell the difference now.
She could always tell the difference now.
#
The guests began leaving around seven. Hugs on the gravel driveway. Corinne held her for a long time and said, "Call me tomorrow," and Annabel said, "I always call you tomorrow," and Corinne laughed and got in her car and pulled out with her headlights cutting across the lawn.
Dorothea was the last to leave. She kissed Annabel on both cheeks — once more than usual — and then turned to Alistair and held his face in both hands.
"Don't waste it," she said. Quiet. Not a threat. A benediction.
"I won't," he said.
She got in the car. Miriam was driving her back to the city. Annabel watched the taillights disappear down the driveway, and then it was just the two of them and the house and the sound of the ocean.
#
Inside, the rooms looked different now. Not because the furniture had changed — some of it had, but that wasn't the point.
Her art was on the walls. Not expensive art, not investment pieces.
Her choices. A Tomás Reyes sculpture on the mantel — a small one, made from driftwood and copper wire, a gift after his Philadelphia show sold out.
A Priya tile piece in the hallway. Three of Seo-yun's prints going up the staircase.
The Sara Koh painting — the winter landscape Alistair had bought nine years ago and kept in storage — hung in the bedroom now, above the dresser, where she could see it every morning.
The house was hers in a way it hadn't been before. She took up space in it. Her books on the shelves, her shoes by the door, her coffee mug — the chipped blue one Corinne had given her — in the cabinet next to his.
Alistair came up behind her in the kitchen. His arms circled her waist, careful, settling just above the slight curve of her belly.
"Mrs. Stirling," he said against her hair.
"I kept the name," she said. "Don't make it weird."
He laughed. The sound rumbled through his chest and into her back. She leaned into him. Let herself lean.
"Are you happy?" he asked. Not performing the question. Asking it.
She turned in his arms. Looked up at him — six-two, dark eyes, the silver at his temples catching the kitchen light.
The scar below his ribs from the sailing accident at twenty, hidden under his shirt but there.
She knew every inch of him. That was the terrifying thing.
She knew every inch, and he had broken her heart with those inches, and she had chosen to come back anyway.
"Yes," she said. "I'm happy."
He kissed her. Slow. His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck, fingers threading into her dark hair where it had come loose from its pins. Wine and salt air and the specific warmth of his mouth, which she had spent months trying to forget and failing.
"Take me upstairs."
He did.
#
The bedroom was half-dark, the curtains open to the last blue light over the ocean. He undressed her slowly — the zipper at her back, the silk sliding off her shoulders, his fingers tracing the line of her collarbone where her skin flushed pink.
"Still," he said, touching that spot. "You still do that."
"Shut up."
He smiled. Kissed the flush. His mouth traveled down her throat, along the ridge of her shoulder, and she let her head fall back, the last knot of self-consciousness dissolving.
There had been a time — in the early weeks after the reconciliation — when his hands on her body had made her flinch.
Not from fear. From memory. Every touch had carried the ghost of the question: did he touch her like this? Was this the same?
That ghost was gone now. Not because she'd stopped caring but because he had replaced it, patiently, thoroughly, over months of learning her again.
He had learned what was different about her body now — the new sensitivity of her breasts, the way her breathing changed when he touched the inside of her wrist, the specific pressure along her hip that made her gasp.
He'd learned all of it as if it were new, because it was.
She was not the same woman he'd married eight years ago.
She was not the same woman he'd betrayed.
And his willingness to learn the woman she was now, instead of reaching for the one he remembered, was the thing that had finally convinced her he'd changed.
He unhooked her bra and cupped her breasts, his thumbs drawing slow circles.
She arched into him. Her own hands worked the buttons of his shirt, pushing it off his shoulders, finding the familiar breadth of him — broad-shouldered, warm, the scar below his ribs a thin raised line under her fingertips.
"Come here," she said, and pulled him down onto the bed.
He stretched out over her, bracing his weight on his forearms. She hooked one leg around his hip. The contact was electric — the press of his body against hers, the friction of skin on skin, the heat building between them.
"I want to look at you," he said.
"So look."
He did. His gaze moved over her face, her throat, her breasts, the barely-there curve of her stomach. His hand followed. He traced the line of her belly with his fingertips, reverent, and the tenderness in his face made her chest ache.
"Don't get sentimental," she said. "I'm trying to have sex with my husband."
"Our second wedding night."
"Technically our first. The first one we were both drunk and you couldn't get the zipper — "
He kissed her to shut her up. She laughed into his mouth. Then the laughter dissolved because his hand had slid between her thighs, fingers parting her, stroking with a pressure that was exactly right — because he knew, he had spent a year relearning her, and he knew.
She gasped. Gripped his shoulders. "There."
"Here?" His thumb circled and she stopped being able to form words. Her hips rocked against his hand. His mouth found her breast, and the dual sensation — his tongue against her nipple, his fingers working between her legs — sent heat flooding through her. She dug her nails into his back.
"Alistair — "
"I know." He did know. He slid two fingers inside her and curled them, pressing up, and the sound she made was not dignified or careful or controlled. It was raw, and she didn't care. She was done being careful with this man.
He built her up slowly. His mouth moved to her other breast. His fingers found the rhythm that made her breath stutter — long strokes inside, his thumb circling her clit in time, unhurried, relentless.
The orgasm built from the base of her spine, tightening through her thighs, and she let it come.
No resistance. No checking. She let it crash through her and cried out and he held her through it, his mouth against her throat, murmuring her name.
When she came back to herself, he was hard against her hip.
"Now," she said. "I want you now."
He reached for the nightstand. Stopped. Looked at her.
She almost laughed. "I'm already pregnant, Alistair."
His grin was sudden and real and boyish, and she loved him so much it terrified her, and she was done being terrified by love.
He settled between her thighs. Pressed into her slowly. She inhaled, adjusting to the stretch, to the fullness of him. His forehead rested against hers. Their breath mingled. For a moment, neither of them moved.
"Hi," he whispered.
"Hi," she whispered back, and it was absurd, the smallness of the word against the enormity of what they'd rebuilt, and it was exactly right.
He moved. Slow, deep strokes that made her back arch off the mattress.
She wrapped both legs around his hips, pulling him closer, deeper.
His rhythm was unhurried but deliberate — not performing stamina, not trying to impress.
Just moving with her, reading her body, adjusting when her breath changed.
When she gasped, he slowed. When she pulled him closer, he gave her more.
"Harder," she said.