Chapter 9 #2
“That’s kind,” Mila said. “Roger tells me you’ve been carrying the whole campaign since October. That can’t have been easy, with everything else you were doing.”
The smallest pause. The very smallest.
“We all did what we could,” Bethany said.
“You did,” said Mila. “You were there constantly. I know exactly how much you were there.”
And she smiled, pleasantly, and held the eye contact for one second longer than a pleasant smile requires, and watched a woman with excellent instincts work out that something had just happened and be unable to identify what.
Then she went and talked to a man about a boat.
Her hands were shaking so badly by the time she got to the terrace that she had to put the glass down on the rail.
* * *
They drove back to Greenspring at half past eleven and the house was dark except for the one light in the back hall.
Verity had gone. Larry was asleep with the hiss of the intercom going. Mila stood in the doorway of his room in her coat and listened to him breathe for a minute, and Jason waited behind her in the hall, and neither of them said anything.
Then she went into the kitchen because her truck keys were on the counter and her hands were still going.
“You were—” Jason stopped. Started again. “I didn’t know you could do that. What you did with Ardith. I’ve watched you do it a hundred times and I never once understood that it was a skill.”
“It’s a skill.”
“I know that now.” He was standing in the doorway with his coat over his arm.
“I’m not saying it to get anything. I’m saying it because I’ve spent months going back over things and that’s one of about two hundred, and I’m not allowed to give you the other hundred and ninety-eight, so you’re getting that one. ”
Mila stood with her back to him and her hands flat on the counter.
The whole evening was still on her — the dress, the room, the coat across the room, the seconds she had spent deciding who to be. And under it, three weeks of nights in this house, and a kitchen at three in the morning, and the machine that still worked.
“Say the rest of it,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t get to.” His voice was very level. “That’s what I’ve got, Mila. I’ve got the fact that I don’t get to. It’s the only thing I’ve done right since October and I’m not spending it at midnight because you’re standing in my kitchen in that dress.”
The refrigerator hummed.
She turned around.
He was still in the doorway. He had not come one inch further into the room and it was perfectly clear he was not going to, and that — precisely that, the fact that the whole weight of the next ten seconds had been put in her hands and left there — was what did it.
“Jason.”
“Yeah.”
“Come here.”
* * *
He crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of her and did not touch her. He put his hands on the counter on either side of her instead, not caging her, just holding on to something, and he looked at her from about a foot away with his jaw set like a man bracing for a hit.
“Say it,” he said. “Whatever it is. Say it now, because in a minute I won’t be able to hear it.”
“This isn’t forgiveness.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t change one single thing about November.”
“I know.”
“I’m not coming home.”
“Mila,” he said, “I’m not asking you for anything. I haven’t asked you for anything since the hospital and I’m not starting in a kitchen.”
She put her hand flat on his chest.
His heart was going like something in a trap, and she stood there for a second with her palm on it, the fine cotton of a shirt she had bought him, and she thought with total clarity: I am about to do a stupid thing and I am going to do it anyway and I will pay for it and I know the price.
She fisted the shirt and pulled.
He came into her like weather. His mouth found hers and it was not careful at all, not one bit of it, and she made a sound against him that she had not made in two years and had forgotten she owned.
He tasted the same. That was the thing that undid her — after everything, after the chair and the window and the three seconds in the hallway, he tasted exactly the same, and her whole body had been waiting for it since a kitchen at three in the morning.
His hands were still on the counter.
“Touch me,” she said, into his mouth, “or go upstairs.”
He touched her.
He got one arm around her waist and lifted, and she went up onto the counter with her dress sliding and her legs coming around him, and he put his hand in her hair and held the back of her head the way he had always held it, and the ten years came up through the floor and took the both of them.
She had a moment of pure, cold clarity somewhere in the middle of it: they were doing it in the dark, in the kitchen, forty feet from his father’s room, because neither of them could risk the stairs.
Because the stairs would have taken twenty seconds and twenty seconds was long enough for her to come to her senses.
He knew it too. She could feel him knowing it in how fast his hands moved.
“Wait — the box —” she got out.
“Off. It’s off. I turned it off when we came in.”
“You turned it off when we came in.”
“Yes,” Jason said, “and I have been ashamed of myself about it for two hours,” and she laughed, ruined, into the side of his neck, and pulled his belt open.
Her hands were shaking and it made her furious.
He felt it and stopped, and she said, “Don’t you dare,” and he said, “I wasn’t going to,” and then he took her wrist and moved her hand and did it himself, fast, not making anything of it, which was right and which she would think about afterward for a long time.
Then his mouth was on her throat and his hand was under the dress and the last of her ability to narrate this to herself went out like a light.
He got the dress up over her hips and stopped, for a second, with his hands on the tops of her thighs, and she knew what he had stopped at.
The scars. The long one on the outside of her left thigh where the rail had gone in, and the small round ones from the pins, which she had looked at every day for months in a bathroom mirror and had decided she did not care about.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Jason—”
“I’m not doing sorry,” he said, and his voice was wrecked. “I’m looking at you.”
And he put his mouth on it.