Chapter 9 #3
That was not in the script she had been running since the counter. She made a sound she had no control over at all and got both hands into his hair, and he stayed there far longer than a man in a hurry would have, and by the time he came back up she had stopped being able to think in sentences.
“Here,” she said. “Now.”
“I know.”
“Don’t be —”
“I’m not going to be,” he said, and then he was not.
She had been so cold for four months. That was what she had not known until that second — how cold, and for how long, and how much of her had been spent on getting up off floors.
And now there were hands on her and a mouth on her collarbone and her own husband’s shoulders under her hands, and every nerve she had came up at once, hungry and furious and glad.
It was not tidy. Neither of them wanted tidy.
There was a mug knocked into the sink and the edge of the counter was going to leave a mark on her and she did not care, and somewhere in the middle of it he said her name again, low, and then said, “God, I’ve —” and stopped himself, hard, mid-word, and she understood that he had almost said something he had decided months ago he was not allowed to say.
She could have let him. She could have said go on, and he would have, and she would have had it.
She did not.
She put her hand over his mouth instead, and he kissed her palm, and they left it there, and that was the whole marriage in one second in a dark kitchen: two people who knew exactly what the other one was not saying, and had decided, separately, not to spend it.
“Look at me,” he said.
She did not want to. She looked at him.
His eyes were wet. That was the worst of it. He was looking at her like a man who had been let into a house he had been told he would never see again, and she could not bear it for more than about two seconds, and she pulled his mouth back down onto hers to make him stop.
Then it was just the two of them and the edge of a counter.
He was careful about her back and not careful about anything else.
She got a hand in his hair and held on. When she started to go he said her name into her mouth — not baby, not anything else, her name, the whole of it, the way he had said it across a discharge room in November — and that was what took her over, and she went, hard, with her heels against the cabinet and her face in his neck and both arms locked around him like something recovered from water.
He went a few seconds after her, silently, shuddering, with his hand cupped around the back of her skull.
Then nothing, for a while, but breathing in a dark kitchen.
* * *
She did not stay the night.
She sat on the edge of the counter and put her dress straight and let him hold her for four minutes by the clock on the range, and she let herself have those, because she had decided in the middle of it that she would take four and no more.
He did not talk. He had the sense not to talk. He stood between her knees with his arms around her and his face in her hair and did not say a single word, which was the best thing he had done in four months and possibly in ten years.
At 12:41 she said, “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going home.”
His arms tightened once, involuntarily, and then let go. “Do you want me to follow you and make sure you get in?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
She got down off the counter. Her legs were disgraceful. She got her keys and her coat and at the door she turned around and he was where she had left him, in a dark kitchen, with his shirt open and his hands at his sides, looking at her with everything he had.
“Jason.”
“Yeah.”
“Turn the box back on,” she said, and left.
* * *
She was on the valley road before it started, and she pulled over into a gateway a mile from the farm because she could not see.
It was not guilt. She wanted that to be clear, sitting there in the dark with her hands on the wheel — she was thirty-eight years old and it was her own husband and she was not going to be ashamed of an appetite.
It was arithmetic.
She had asked him to touch her. She had. Nobody had worn her down, no one had pushed, and the man had stood in a doorway with his coat over his arm and refused to come one inch into the room until she called him across it.
Which meant she had just handed him the only thing she had.
For four months she had been the one holding everything — the terms, the lane, the door, the bell, the hours. And an hour ago she had taken all of it off the table in a kitchen because a man in a doorway said the right sentence in the right voice.
Nothing he had done had earned that. Nothing. He had given up a company without asking her, done four stalls in the dark, and been kind to his father. That was the entire list, and she had priced her own marriage at it and paid.
You want him, she thought. Fine. No one ever said you didn’t. That’s not what this was.
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
Then she drove the last mile and let herself into the cottage and sat down on the edge of the bed in her coat, in the dark, with her heart still going, and said out loud, to nobody, in the old voice:
“That was a mistake.”
And heard herself say it, and knew she meant it, and knew equally well that she was going to be thinking about that counter for a month.