Chapter 18
The house was quiet and the candles were still burning and the painting was on the table and she wasn't leaving.
She watched his face when she said it. Not the ballplayer.
Not the man who'd shaken hands with scouts and hit baseballs into the marsh.
The other one. The one who'd taken his hat off before he got out of the truck every time he came to see her, like it mattered, like she was an occasion that required it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Yeah." He reached past her and closed the front door. The latch clicked. The night stayed outside. "Okay."
She kissed him.
Her hands went to the front of his shirt and she pulled him toward her and his back hit the wall beside the door and she felt the breath leave him.
She kissed him harder. Six weeks of porch kisses and goodnight kisses and the careful, patient, measured kisses of two people still learning the shape of each other. She was done learning.
His hands came to her waist. She took them and moved them lower, to her hips, and his fingers pressed into the denim and she felt his grip tighten and the want in it matched hers.
She pulled back just enough to see his face. His eyes were dark and his breathing had changed and there was nothing careful left in him. Good. She didn't want careful.
She pulled his shirt over his head. Her hands moved across his chest, his shoulders, the place where the right shoulder met his neck.
The joint that had brought him to this island.
The injury that had put him in Jon's bar on a Wednesday night seven weeks ago.
She pressed her mouth against the skin where the surgery had gone in and felt him breathe and his hand came up to her hair and his fingers moved through it and he held the back of her head and let her stay there.
She wanted him. The man who baked bread at five in the morning because he wanted her birthday to be right. That was enough. That was everything.
She took his hand and walked him down the hallway. The bedroom door was open. The bed was made. The window faced the trees and the curtains moved in a breeze that smelled like salt and the marsh and the last of the candles from the living room.
She turned to him in the doorway and pulled her shirt over her head.
His hands came to her face. Both hands. Thumbs on her cheekbones, fingers in her hair, the same as that first night on the porch. But his eyes moved down and came back up and what was on his face was not patience. It was a man seeing the woman he loved and not hiding what that did to him.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"Come here."
She pulled him onto the bed.
The sheets were cool against her back. His skin was warm above her.
His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw to the place below her ear and her breath caught and she pulled him closer.
His hands traced lines down her sides, her ribs, her hips.
Every touch was deliberate and every pause was a conversation and she answered all of it with her hands in his hair and her back arching and the sounds she made into the dark that were hers and his and no one else's.
He said her name against her skin. Quiet. Like a prayer he didn't know he was saying.
She said his. Not Beck. Not the name the scouts used and the sportscasters used and the back of the jersey said. The other one.
"Ethan."
His mouth came back to hers and his hands moved over the rest of her and she stopped thinking about anything except him, the warmth of his skin and the catch in his breathing when she touched the side of his neck and the catch in hers when he said her name again, closer, quieter, like he was telling her a secret he'd been holding since the night she'd poured him water at Jon's bar and called him on the shoulder.
She held onto him. The curtains moved. The breeze came through. Somewhere in the house Hudson shifted on the couch and settled and the small noise of it was home, a dog who belonged to both of them, a life building itself around them while they weren't paying attention.
Afterward she lay against his chest. Her leg across his. Her hand over his heartbeat.
The room was dark. The curtains moved. The candles in the living room had burned down to nothing.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
His hand moved through her hair. Slow. The same patience he brought to everything, except now the patience wasn't distance. It was tenderness. There was a difference she hadn't understood until tonight.
"The painting," she said. She pressed her palm flat against his chest. "That's how you see me?"
"That's how you are."
"I don't look like that."
"Yeah, you do."
She closed her eyes. His heartbeat and the breeze and the dark room and the painting leaning against the wall in the other room, the brown paper in a pile on the floor.
The woman in the painting was reading a book and smiling at something private and she didn't know anyone was watching and she was beautiful.
Kirstin had never believed she was that woman.
She was starting to.
"Beck."
"Yeah."
"You close doors when you're scared. I know that because I do too." She traced a line across his chest with one finger. "I haven't closed a door on you since the beach."
"I know."
"I'm not going to."
He kissed the top of her head. His arms tightened around her. She felt his chest expand under her hand and hold and release.
"Goodnight, Ethan."
"Goodnight, baby."
His breathing changed. Slowed. His hand stopped moving in her hair and rested there, warm, still.
She lay against his chest and listened to him fall asleep and she kept her eyes open until the breeze stopped and the curtains went still and the room was quiet enough to hold what she was feeling. She wanted to remember what it felt like to be in a room with every door open.