Chapter 14 #2
And because there were no sentences left that were going to be adequate, she leaned forward out of the armchair and she kissed him.
"Alexander. Take me to bed. Please."
He made a sound that was not a word and stood up, drawing her up with him, and he led her past the entry console with the Greece photograph, down the long hallway to the bedroom.
The bedroom was dim, the only light the faint amber glow from the city through the floor-to-ceiling glass. She reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it off over her head.
His eyes moved across her the way they had on the cream sofa the night of the gala — her mouth, her throat, her collarbones, the tops of her breasts above the plain cotton — but the looking was different now.
On the night of the gala, the looking had been a man admiring something he believed was his.
Tonight the looking was a man being shown something he understood he had not earned the right to see, and being shown it anyway, and trying very hard not to break under the weight of the showing.
"Your turn," she said.
He pulled the gray sweater over his head.
His chest was the same chest she had loved in hotel rooms in Lisbon and on a sailboat off Hydra and in their bed upstate on a hundred Sunday mornings.
Her hands knew the shape of him the way a musician's hands knew an instrument.
Her hands went to him before her mind had decided whether to allow it.
She pressed her palms flat against his chest. His heartbeat was fast under her left hand. She spread her fingers against it.
He made a low rough sound in his throat and his hands found her waist, and he pulled her against him.
His mouth came down on hers. She got her hands on his belt.
He got his hands on the button of her jeans.
They undressed each other the rest of the way in the half-dark with graceless urgency.
When the last of it was on the floor she stood naked in front of him and he stood naked in front of her, and for a long second neither of them moved.
He kissed her throat. He kissed her collarbones.
He kissed the soft place under her ear where he knew she was undefended, and she made a sound she did not try to contain, because she was done containing sounds in this marriage.
His mouth moved lower — her breasts, the hollow between them, the soft skin below her navel — and she arched up into him and said his name in a voice she had not used in this apartment before, a voice that was not the voice of the woman who had learned to be quiet in rooms where quiet was expected.
"Alexander. Please."
"Tell me what you want."
"You. I want you.”
His mouth found hers again and his hand moved down her body with a directness that was new, his fingers sliding between her thighs. When he touched her she gasped into his mouth and her hips moved against his hand without her permission.
He watched her face, his fingers moving in her with a slow deliberate rhythm, his eyes on hers.
"Don't stop," she gasped.
"I'm not going to stop."
"I want — Alexander, I want you inside me. Now. Please."
He withdrew his hand and she felt the loss of it and then he was above her, his forearms braced on either side of her head, his hips between her thighs, and he paused there — one second, looking at her face in the amber city light.
And then he was inside her. She was looking at his face, and she understood that the man above her was not the man who had stood in a hotel suite and told her she came from very little.
The man above her was the man who had understood what he had broken.
The man above her was the man who had sent her texts titled Reasons I Love You.
The man above her was the man whose voice cracked on her name.
He moved with a raw uncontrolled need that she had not felt from him in the whole of their marriage, as if he had understood, finally, that the control had been part of the problem.
He moved in her and she moved with him, her legs wrapped around him, her hands gripping the muscles of his back, her mouth against his shoulder.
The sounds she was making were the sounds she had not allowed herself to make in the careful restrained bedroom of a woman who had been performing a version of herself.
"Look at me," he said, ragged. She looked at him, and his face was open and beautiful.
The wave started to build, in long slow breaking pulls.
She said his name once, sharp; her back arched off the bed and her hand found the back of his neck and gripped.
Melody came with her eyes open and his name in her mouth and his face filling her whole field of vision.
Alexander followed her. His hips stuttered, his breath broke and he pressed his forehead hard against hers and said Melody, Melody, Melody. The voice he was no longer trying to control.
They stayed like that for a long time. His weight on her. Her arms around his back. Both of them breathing.
After a while he shifted to the side, pulling her with him, arranging her against his chest the way he had arranged her against his chest on a hundred Sunday mornings. His arm settled across her lower back. His lips pressed against the top of her head.
He tightened his arm around her. She pressed her cheek against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow, except this time the pulse under her ear was not the pulse of a man who had said you're mine in the possessive voice of a man who believed ownership was the same thing as love.
This time the pulse under her ear was the pulse of a man who had learned, the difference between holding a woman and holding onto her.
She did not need to tell him the difference. He had found it on his own.
"I love you," he said.
"I love you, Alexander."
Melody lay with her cheek on his chest, his arm around her lower back, and his heartbeat slowing against her ear. She closed her eyes and let herself truly be home … which was in her husband’s arms.