Chapter 35 #3
Something old and defensive moves through me. “Did you hire him?”
“Not exactly.”
The answer comes fast. Clean.
Then he adds, “I paid for the structure that made him possible.”
“I’m trying to take care of you,” he continues. “This time they won’t take you away from me.”
It is a promise.
It is also a confession, stripped to the bone.
I want to ask what he knows. I want to ask how much he has spent, who he called, what he threatened, how many doors he opened with that contained that voice and that dangerous patience. I want to know what kind of man loves by building exits in the dark.
Not tonight.
Not yet.
“You’ll be home soon enough,” he says.
Home.
I almost laugh, but there is no humor in me. “Where is home?”
The question is reckless. I know that as soon as it leaves me.
Creed looks at me. “Wherever Liv and you are.”
I stop breathing again.
He says it simply. As if he has had ten years to reduce his theology to one sentence.
Wherever Liv and you are.
Not here.
It’s you.
Her.
I stand because if I stay seated, I might do something unforgivable, like cry in front of him without understanding why.
Creed stands with me.
Our hands separate.
His thumb leaves my wrist last, with a reluctance so quiet it feels indecent to notice. The second he is gone, cold pours into the place where he had been. Not outside cold. Interior cold. Ten years of it, concentrated into one inch of skin.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “we can figure it out tomorrow. Then the rest of the week.”
“Tomorrow,” I repeat.
My voice sounds unfamiliar.
“We will,” he says.
We.
The word enters the room and doesn't ask permission.
I have not had a tomorrow in years. I have had appointments. Medication schedules. Meals observed by staff. Donor breakfasts. Legal meetings. Quiet evenings where my family spoke around me as if I were a painting with a pulse.
Tomorrow is different.
Tomorrow assumes I am still here.
Tomorrow assumes someone expects me.
I take one step toward him.
Creed doesn't move.
I lift my right hand.
I am going to touch his face.
I have not decided to.
I have.
Both things are true.
My hand rises from my side, and his eyes follow it.
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't lean in. He lets me come to him exactly as far as I can.
On the schedule, my body is setting. In the silence of a man who has waited ten years and decided, in this hour, that one more minute will not be what breaks him.
My fingers touch the side of his jaw.
His pulse beats up into my fingertips.
His skin is warm. Real. There is faint scruff beneath my touch, rough enough to remind me he is not a memory. Not a face on a screen. Not a voice through a burner phone. A man. My husband, though the word is still too large to hold without cutting myself on it.
I don't let myself look at his mouth.
I look at his eyes, which is worse.
He is looking at me as if I am something he was told twice not to want and decided to want anyway.
I lean in and kiss his cheek.
Not the center.
The corner.
Where the line of his cheek meets the muscle that runs toward his mouth. Close enough that if I moved a quarter inch, my mouth would be on his.
We both feel the quarter inch.
Neither of us crosses it.
My lips press against warm skin, and I leave them there.
Longer than a kiss on the cheek between two men in any other context would be allowed to last. Long enough for the room to register it. Long enough for Creed’s breath to catch and stay caught. Long enough for my own breath to leave me in a slow, uneven release, I have no intention of taking back.
His hand comes up.
Slow.
His palm settles against the back of my head, at my nape.
He doesn't pull.
He doesn't push.
He only rests his hand there, the pressure small and devastating, as if he is marking the moment inside himself. As if this is enough because it has to be. As if enough has always been a lie, and he is choosing to believe it for my sake.
I don't move my mouth.
I don't let it slide that quarter inch and find the corner of his.
I want to.
I will not.
When I pull back, it is not far. My forehead almost touches the side of his head. His hand stays at my nape for one more second after my mouth leaves his skin, then lowers with the same controlled reluctance, the same careful departure of a man who refuses to take more than he was given.
He says nothing.
I say nothing.
We stand for one breath in the impossible inch between our faces.
Then I step back.
Fully.
Out of his space.
Leaving is torture.
I do it anyway.
At the door, Creed says, “Hal.”
I turn.
His expression is composed again. Almost. The cut at the corner of his mouth makes the composure look more fragile than he probably wants it to.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
I nod once because anything more might undo me.
As I walk to the elevator, all I can think about is what he said.
Tomorrow.
As if it is something I have.
As if my life has been quietly rebuilt beneath me by people I didn't know I still belonged to, and now, somehow, I am expected to walk.
The elevator doors open.
I step inside.
Tomorrow is foreign.
I’m going to learn it.