Chapter 17 #2
"I built a life without you and I liked it," she said, "and I could have kept it, and I want everybody here to know that, because it's the part that matters.
I'm not standing here because I couldn't manage.
I'm standing here because you did the work, and because you gave up every single thing that made you somebody so you could be a person, and because I have loved you the entire time and never once stopped, even when I'd have paid money to.
" She had to wait a second. "You're the best thing in my life.
You will not be the only thing in it, ever again, and neither will I.
That's the promise. That's the whole of it. "
Jake did not have six sentences. He had two.
"I'm here," he said. "I'm not going anywhere else, and I'm going to say so out loud every day until you're sick of it."
Carol cried through the entire thing, standing up, without making any noise at all.
Kevin Barnes was there, and he was fine, and by June he was seeing a woman who taught fourth grade in Cookeville, and Laura liked her enormously.
They put the rings on. Laura had gotten Jake's out of the ring dish in a bedroom in Belle Meade a year and a half earlier without telling anybody she had done it, and had kept it in an envelope in a drawer, and did not mention that until the honeymoon, at which point he had to leave the room for a minute.
Her own was the one from the strip mall in Murfreesboro. She had never once considered anything else.
And then nine hundred people at a high school football field in the Cumberland foothills stood up and made a noise you could hear at the Marathon station, and Tammy Fowler shouted something into a borrowed microphone that got quoted in that county for the next fifteen years.
The honeymoon was five days in a cabin at Fall Creek Falls, forty minutes away, because Laura had patients on the Thursday.
It rained the first two days and neither of them cared.
The cabin had a bad kitchen and a good porch and a bed that took up most of the room, and on the second afternoon Laura woke up from a nap she had not intended to take and found her husband sitting up against the headboard reading a book about coaching youth athletes with his glasses on — he had glasses now, and was vain about them — and she lay there for a while just looking at him.
He noticed. He put the book down.
"What."
"Nothing."
"That's not a nothing face."
Laura pushed herself up on one elbow, and the sheet went where it went, and she watched his attention change completely, which after twelve years remained the easiest and most satisfying thing she knew how to do.
"Put the book down," she said.
"It is down."
"Put the glasses down."
He put the glasses down.
She took her time with him, and he let her, which was the whole shape of them now. There was no hurry in the entire state of Tennessee. Rain on the porch roof and a bad kitchen and nowhere to be until Thursday.
She kissed the fusion scar, which was a thing she did now and had made no announcement about.
She put her mouth on the flat of his stomach — he had gotten the weight back and then some, which she took a professional and personal interest in — and worked her way down, slowly, while he said her name once and then stopped being able to.
She was in no hurry at all. That was the luxury of it: twelve years of knowing exactly what she was doing, and a whole afternoon, and nobody in the world who needed either of them.
She took him in her mouth and felt his hand come down into her hair, not pulling, just resting there, shaking slightly, and she worked him slowly enough that after a couple of minutes he said, in a completely wrecked voice, "You are being cruel to me."
"Mm."
"Laura—"
She stopped and looked up at him with her chin on his hip.
"Ask," she said.
And he laughed, breathless, with his forearm over his eyes, because that was the rule and he had walked into it, and then he took his arm off his face and looked down at her and asked her properly, out loud, in words that made her go hot all the way to her ears.
"Since you asked nicely," Laura said.
Afterward — after he was finished shaking and had said something into the pillow that was mostly her name — he got his hands under her arms and hauled her up the bed like a man moving furniture, and she was still laughing when he rolled her over.
"My turn," he said.
"You don't have to—"
"Laura Bennett Hayes." He propped himself over her. "I have been thinking about this all week. Let me have it."
And he took even longer than she had.
He put his mouth on the inside of her knee first, which was ridiculous, and worked up, and by the time he got anywhere she was already saying things she would not have said in front of a neighbor.
He knew exactly what she needed and he did it and then he kept doing it, unhurried, one hand flat on her stomach holding her down, and when it went through her she heard herself make a noise that echoed off the pine walls of a rented cabin at Fall Creek Falls.
Then he came up her body and she pulled him in with a leg around him and he was inside her before either of them said anything else, and it was slow and unembarrassed and loud in a way that would have been mortifying in a house with neighbors.
"Wait," she said, at one point, and he stopped instantly, all the way, propped over her.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine. Look at me a second."
He looked at her.