Chapter Thirteen #2
She added gravy to the unwanted pot roast. “Yep.
It turns out people can't resist a rescue with a good story, and thirty animals pulled out of a collapsing roof in the rain is a good story.
" She turned over her fork. "The terrier went first. The little brown one you carried inside your coat because he was shaking. "
His expression warmed. "The one that bit me."
She laughed. "I didn’t know he bit you, but I’m not surprised.
He bit everyone. He bit the vet twice." She smiled.
"A retired couple up in Millbrook took him anyway.
They sent Claire pictures. He has a bed shaped like a hamburger and a sweater for the cold, and he still bites, but only people who aren't them. "
Maddox laughed, and it stopped her with her fork halfway up, because she'd forgotten he could do that.
Two years, and she'd put the sound away with the other things that used to exist. It didn't fit the man who'd read spreadsheets through their anniversary.
It fit this one, the one on the shelter floor, who'd carried a biting dog inside his coat and never mentioned it to anyone because there'd been no one to perform it for.
"What," he said, catching her looking.
"Nothing. I forgot you laughed like that is all."
He didn't try to make anything of it, which was somehow worse, because the old Maddox would have taken the opening and run a play through it. He just let it be true and unclaimed, and picked his own fork back up.
She caught herself watching for the tells, the ones she'd learned to read over two years.
The phone-check, the drift, or the moment his attention slid off her and back onto whatever mattered more.
They didn't come. His phone stayed in his jacket.
When Kelsey banged through with the coffee pot, he thanked her and kept his gaze on Paige, and she noticed it because his full attention had been missing so long she'd stopped expecting it.
He was here. The whole of him was at the table, with her, in the conversation, and it unsettled her more than the confession had, because she could argue with a confession but had had no defense at all against him paying attention.
"You keep waiting for me to look away," he said. He'd caught her. "I did that for two years. I don't blame you for expecting it."
"I'm not expecting anything." It came out sharper than she meant. She softened it. "That's the problem. I stopped expecting things from you a long time ago, and now you keep doing things I'd have given anything for back then. I don’t know what that means now.”
"We can figure that out. I've got nowhere to be."
That, too, was new. The man she'd married had always had somewhere to be.
He spread the shelter drawings across the cleared table, and they walked the plans together.
She showed him where the isolation ward had to go and why.
He asked good questions, builder's questions, and marked her answers on the feasibility sketch without once trying to improve them.
Her world and his hands, pointed the same direction.
The plans lay spread between them, her notes and his measurements filling the same page, and under the table his knee had come to rest against hers, and neither of them moved away from it.
It was late when she made her decision, and she made it out loud, on her terms, because terms were the whole point. "I'm not moving back in," she said. "Not yet. Maybe not for a while. You don't get the marriage back because you had one good night and told one hard truth."
He didn’t seem surprised. "I know."
"You get this. Dinner. Then another one.
You get to show me the man from the shelter floor is the actual man and not a longer campaign, and you get to do it slowly, with me watching.
The first time you try to make me into a deal, I'm gone and don't come back.
" She held his gaze. "I'm choosing to see who you're becoming.
That's not the same as giving you everything back.
The man I left, I already left, and I was right to.
Whether you're really someone new... I’m giving you a chance to prove that at my pace. "
"That's more than I came here with," he said. "I'll take it and I won't push it."
For a while, they just sat there in her father's kitchen, the plans between them, letting the quiet be a thing they could share instead of a thing to fill.
She walked him out to the Templeton driveway when it was time to go, hands in his pockets, carefully keeping the distance she'd drawn.
That was the thing that undid her, in the end.
Not the confession, the plans, or any of the words.
It was that he'd have gotten in his car and driven back to his house and never have once reached for more than she offered.
The man she'd married took. This one waited.
She was the one who closed the distance, then. She caught the front of his shirt, pulled him down, and kissed him. He made a low sound against her mouth like the breath had been knocked out of him. He lifted both hands to her face slowly, as though he still wasn't sure he was allowed.
"Paige," he said against her mouth. "You said slowly."
"The marriage is slow." She pulled back just far enough to look at him. "This is tonight. I know the difference. Do you?"
"Yes." His forehead dropped to hers. "God, yes."
"Good. Take me back to your place."
He drove them back across town. Skipper met them at the door in a fit of joy, and Maddox took him out to the yard, then settled him on the living room sofa before following Paige up the stairs he'd climbed alone for weeks. Skipper didn’t try to follow, as though he had a sense of discretion.
The bedroom was theirs again for the length of one night, the two of them relearning a language that had gone unspoken between them for years.
He undressed her like he was uncovering a thing he'd thought lost for good, moving slowly with his mouth following his hands down, and when she reached for his belt, he caught her wrist and pressed a kiss to the pulse there first, unhurried, as if they had all the time in the world and he intended to spend it on her.
She'd braced, some part of her, for it to feel like surrender, like giving back the ground she'd won.
It didn't. He laid her down and took his time, watching her face, reading her closely, like something he'd forgotten how to do somewhere in the years, adjusting to every sound she made.
When he finally settled between her thighs and entered her, both of them gasped.
He held still with his forehead against her collarbone, letting her have all of it before he moved.
"Look at me," she said, and he did without looking away again.
He moved slowly, then more rapidly and erratically, sliding his hand between them to find her folds. She arched up into the pressure of his fingers on her clit and told him not to stop, and he didn't.
Somewhere in the marriage, even this had become hurried and half-there, just another thing he'd stopped seeing.
Just physical release without emotional entanglement.
Not tonight. He watched her like nothing else in the world existed, chasing every gasp, and when she came apart under him with his name escaping her lips, he followed her over with a broken sound she'd remember for a long time. She hadn’t heard anything like it since their honeymoon, and even then, it had been more polished and less visceral.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the wreck of the sheets with her head on his chest. His heart pulsed rapidly under her ear.
He traced a slow line up and down her back but didn't fill the silence with promises, for which she was grateful.
Unkept promises were the old way, and they needed to build something new and better.
"This doesn't change the terms," she said into his chest.
"I know." His hand kept moving. "Tonight's tonight. The marriage is still yours to give back or not." He pressed his lips to the top of her head. "I meant what I said. I'll take whatever you offer and won't push for more."
She dozed off there, in the house she wasn't moving back into yet, before she could start second-guessing the choice.
Maddox let the silence hold and didn't fill it with a single promise or even mindless chitchat. She was only half-awake a bit later when the bed dipped and Skipper slipped in to join them, taking up the small space between them like he’d always fit there.