15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
Honey
The house closes around us, and we’re both standing in it.
This is the part I didn’t think through. I thought through the dinner: what to wear, what to order, whether to suggest Delia’s or somewhere more neutral. I thought through the drive home, the porch, and asking: do you want to come in?
What I did not think through was the part where he is actually in my living room at nine-thirty on a Thursday night, and we are both aware of the current running under the room, and neither of us has named it.
“Tea?” I ask.
He looks at me with that look he has, the one that isn’t performing anything, that lands and stays and doesn’t pretend it didn’t.
“There’s chamomile,” I say. “Or regular. Or I think there’s something with ginger.”
Apparently I am listing teas. In my grandmother’s kitchen. To a seven-foot orc who just took me to dinner.
I decide not to examine this too closely.
He puts one hand over his stomach. “I think two chicken-fried steaks might tide me over.”
“Right,” I say. “Obviously.”
“The tea sounds good another time.”
“Sure,” I say. “Yes. Another time.”
We stand here for another moment. The kitchen is very quiet. Outside the window, the workshop is a dark shape against the darker oaks, and the crickets are amping up for a boisterous round, and inside this kitchen nothing is happening at a loud volume.
“I’m just going to…” I say, gesturing vaguely toward the living room. The sentence doesn’t fully complete itself, but it’s enough to get me moving.
My grandmother’s dulcimer hangs on the wall where it’s been since before I can remember. I take it down.
I’m not entirely sure why. Protective instinct, maybe, something to do with my hands, something between us, something that is mine and known and steady in a way everything else is not.
As I pull the stool from the corner, it scrapes softly across the floorboards. By the time I settle the dulcimer into my lap and look up, he’s in the doorway watching me with an expression I can’t fully read.
“You said maybe,” he says.
“I did,” I say.
He crosses to the couch and sits. The couch takes him without complaint, old enough and deep enough to have developed a tolerance for whatever gets put on it. He settles in and puts his arms along the back and looks at me and doesn’t say anything else.
I look down at the dulcimer. My grandmother’s hands were here. Mine have been here so many times since that the wood knows the weight of them. I find the first position the way I always find it, by feel, without deciding.
I play.
Not performing. Not demonstrating. Just the first song that comes, which is the one with no name that my grandmother made up and never wrote down, the one that went from her hands into mine through the air across more Sunday evenings than I can count.
It’s not a showy song. It doesn’t have anything to prove.
It just goes where it goes and ends where it ends, and I let it.
Somewhere in the first few bars, I become aware that Kragen has gone completely still.
Not the stillness of someone being polite.
Not the stillness of someone waiting for something to end.
The other kind. The kind I’ve seen in him twice now: once when he looked at the phlox photograph and the velara flowers from home surfaced in him without warning, and once when he stood in front of my grandmother’s photograph and went somewhere else for a moment.
Full-body quiet. Like whatever in him that is always moving has simply stopped.
I looked up StillWater after his first visit.
Quiet, deliberate, internal: the definition was easy enough to find.
The discrepancy between that definition and the male who came into my workshop talking and smiling and taking up every available inch of space was significant enough that I thought about it for several days.
I thought I understood it intellectually.
Watching him right now, I understand it differently.
He ran from this. Spent years running from it: the stages, the crowds, the performance of belonging.
And here it is anyway, arrived through my hands, through my grandmother’s song, and he is sitting on my grandmother’s couch in the house where four generations of women stayed and he has gone completely, utterly still and he is the most StillWater thing I have ever seen in my life.
I play through to the end of the song.
The last note fades. The room is very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the oaks, an owl says what owls say, once, patient as the dark itself.
Both our heads turn toward the window. Then we look at each other.
He stands.
And suddenly he’s very large in this room. With him standing and me sitting, I become aware of how much of the room he takes up against my grandmother’s wallpaper and lace curtains, the lamp throwing amber light across the floor. He crosses toward me, stops in front of me, and holds out his hand.
I look at it. Then up at his face.
He’s not performing anything right now. That’s what I notice first, the absence of the easy smile, the openness that’s always slightly on, the charm that I’ve understood for a while is real, but is also, at least in part, a thing he does. None of that is happening. He’s just here, taking me in.
I put the dulcimer down carefully, on the side table, both points of contact, the way you set down something that matters, and I put my hand in his.
He doesn’t pull me to him immediately. He just holds my hand for a moment, both of us standing here. His hand is huge around mine. His fingertips are callused from the strings. I’ve thought about his hands since the first visit. Thinking about them is nothing like being held by them.
Something goes very warm at the base of my throat and moves downward. I don’t move. I don’t trust myself to move.
Then he steps closer, and I tilt my face up, and he comes down to meet me, and—
The kiss starts careful and becomes something else almost immediately.
His mouth is warm, and he tastes faintly of apple pie. I register that, absurdly, before I register anything else.
He kisses me the way he does everything: present, with patient certainty, like there’s nothing else happening anywhere.
My hand is still in his. His other hand finds my face, and his palm is so large it curves from my jaw to my cheekbone.
I feel impossibly small. The slight angle of his head, the careful placement of it—I understand now what his tusks require, and the fact that he has adjusted for me registers somewhere I don’t examine.
I don’t mind it. I don’t mind it at all.
Then he sits back onto the couch and draws me with him in one smooth motion, and I end up standing between his knees, which is how we manage the geometry of this without either of us having to think about it. We are at eye level, and the careful part is over entirely.
His hands go into my hair, one at my temple, fingers spreading, tilting my face up to his, and my chest cracks open quietly, the way ice does in spring, without drama and without warning. He pulls back just enough to see my face. His amber eyes are dark and very close.
“Okay?” he asks, low.
“Yes,” I say. “Don’t stop.”
He makes a sound, low in his chest, and eases closer.
He kisses me like he has all night and knows it.
His hands move from my hair to my jaw, and I become aware all over again of his fingers, a musician’s hands, the same hands that have been in my head since his first visit.
The fact of them against my face is so different from imagining them that I make a sound I wasn’t planning to make.
His name. I say his name against his mouth before I know I’m going to, and I feel him go still the way the room went still when I played: that full-body stillness, the thing in him that stops when he’s reached somewhere he wasn’t guarding.
Not the stillness of pulling back. The other kind. His hands stay where they are. His mouth finds the corner of my jaw, then just below my ear. He takes his time there, deliberately, as if he is learning something he intends to remember.
I’ve been still for too long in my life.
Still while things passed. Still while I managed and maintained and kept everything running and kept myself small enough to fit inside the life I’d built after the life I’d planned fell through.
I am not still right now. My hands are in his hair and I’m pulling him back to my mouth and he comes willingly, makes that low sound again, and his arm goes around my waist. The weight of it settles heavy and solid against me through my shirt. I want that warmth everywhere.
I understand, in a way I haven’t before, why people do things they know are going to change everything. It’s not recklessness. It’s that the alternative, stepping back, being sensible, saying goodnight, has stopped being imaginable.
“Kragen,” I say. His name sounds important in my mouth, like I’ve been holding it back.
He pulls back. Looks at me. Doesn’t say anything.
He is doing that thing again. Being completely, entirely present. Not managing forward momentum or working toward a destination. Just here, taking me in. I have spent a significant amount of my adult life with people who were always partly somewhere else. He is right here. With me.
That is the thing that undoes me. Not his hands, not the size of him, not the passion of his mouth.
The attention. Eight years of stages and crowds and noise, and he came back to this—to stillness, to listening, to sitting in a woman’s grandmother’s living room at ten o’clock on a Thursday and being nowhere else at all.
Then he kisses me again, and this time I stop keeping track of anything.
The kiss goes on. I let it. I would like it to go on considerably longer, but at some point, we both need to breathe, and we do, pulling back slightly, foreheads almost touching, neither of us moving apart.
Both my hands are gripping his hair, though I have no memory of reaching for it. I tip my face toward him.
He looks down at me.
“Hi,” he says.
The knot in my chest loosens. I almost laugh. “Hi,” I say.
He eases back a bit, but doesn’t let go entirely. His hands stay at my waist. I don’t move away from them. We stand here in my grandmother’s living room in the lamplight, reassembling ourselves.
“That was—” he starts.
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at me. “I wasn’t finished.”
“I know. But yes.”
He almost smiles. Then he does smile, and it’s different from his regular smile, lower-wattage and more real, and I feel it somewhere behind my sternum like a plucked string.
We end up on the porch without quite deciding to.
He pushed open the screen door, and I followed him out.
Now we’re standing in the dark with the summer night around us and his arm around my shoulders, which should be unremarkable and is not because his arm is approximately the size of a small tree and I am five feet tall and the absurdity of this ought to be funny and is instead just… right. Completely, inexplicably right.
The stars are out. Missouri in June, no clouds, the kind of sky that makes you remember the sky exists.
We look at it for a while without talking.
Below the property, the creek is running, and somewhere in the oaks the owl says its one thing again, and the night smells like cut grass and something sweet drifting from the snowball bushes near the mailbox.
“I should go.” He doesn’t move.
“Probably,” I say.
After another minute, he turns his head and looks down at me and says, “If I don’t leave right now, I’m not going to want to.”
I look up at him. “Then you should probably leave right now.”
“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t move for another few seconds. Then he takes his arm back slowly, as if he’s ordering it to obey, and straightens up. I feel the absence of him immediately.
He goes down the porch steps. Stops at the bottom and looks up at me.
“Thank you for Delia’s,” he says.
“You already said that.”
“It bears repeating.”
I lean against the porch post and look at him standing in the dark at the bottom of my grandmother’s porch steps, and I think about the photograph on the wall and my grandmother’s song and his face going still while I played it.
I think about what he said when he saw her face. She looks like someone who stayed.
“Goodnight, Kragen,” I say.
He looks at me with something that isn’t a smile but lives where smiles come from. “Goodnight, Honey.”
He gets in his car. I watch the headlights come on and move down the drive and disappear around the curve in the trees.
I stand on the porch for a while after, in the dark, with the crickets and the creek and the owl doing its one thing somewhere in the oaks.
Then I go inside.