20. Jillian
— ? —
Jillian
The kitchen held us in golden light.
Trevor’s hands found my hips with a reverence that made my breath catch, not the desperate grabbing from that hotel hallway at Priya’s wedding, not the anger-fueled heat that had nearly consumed us both before he pulled back and left me alone on the floor.
This was different. This was slow. This was a man who understood exactly what he’d almost lost.
“Jillian.” My name in his mouth like a prayer.
I answered by rising on my toes and pressing my lips to his. Soft at first. Testing. His fingers flexed against my hips, drawing me closer, and I felt the tremor that ran through him, felt him holding himself in check, waiting for permission.
I gave it by threading my fingers through his hair and deepening the kiss.
He made a sound low in his throat, a note somewhere between relief and hunger, and then his hands were sliding up my back, pulling me flush against him. But still slow. Still deliberate. Like he was afraid I might dissolve if he moved too fast.
“I’m here,” I whispered against his mouth. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” He pulled back just enough to look at me, and his eyes were wet. “I know. I just…” He swallowed hard. “I need to do this right.”
I understood what he meant. The wedding weekend had been about possession, about staking claims, about two people trying to win a war neither of them should have been fighting. This was about a different thing entirely.
This was about coming home.
His hands found the hem of my sweater, the soft gray cashmere I’d pulled on that morning, and he paused, asking without words. I nodded, and he lifted it over my head with such care that I might have laughed if my heart hadn’t been pounding so hard.
“You’re shaking,” I said.
“I’m terrified.” He traced his fingers along my collarbone, watching their path like he was memorizing the geography of my skin. “I spent two months convinced I’d never touch you again.”
“Trevor…”
“Let me.” He pressed his lips to the hollow of my throat. “Let me show you.”
I closed my eyes as his mouth mapped a path across my shoulder. When his fingers found the clasp of my bra, he fumbled, Trevor, who had always been so sure-handed, and I laughed, really laughed, for the first time in what felt like years.
“Shut up,” he muttered against my skin, and I could feel his smile.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it very loudly.”
The bra fell away, and his hands came up to cradle my face instead of my body, which was so perfectly Trevor that my chest ached with it.
“I love you,” he said. “I have loved you since you rolled your eyes at me over champagne flutes and told me the Monet in my mother’s foyer was actually a Morisot.”
“It was a Morisot.”
“It was. And you were magnificent.” He pressed a kiss to my temple, then my jaw. “You’re still magnificent. And I almost destroyed us because I was too blind to see what was right in front of me.”
“Take me to bed,” I said, because if he kept talking like that, I was going to start crying before we even made it out of the kitchen.
He scooped me up like I weighed nothing, Trevor had always been stronger than his lean frame suggested, and I wrapped my arms around his neck as he carried me through the living room.
I caught a glimpse of the sage-green walls, the afternoon light pooling on the hardwood, and a knot in my chest unlocked.
This was our home. Ours. Not the museum-piece he’d grown up in, not the staging ground for Anderson Foundation events it had become. A home, imperfect and chosen.
The bedroom was awash in blue, the soft twilight shade I’d painted the walls, the white bedding I’d picked, the watercolors I’d hung.
Trevor laid me down like I was precious, like I was a thing he was afraid to break, and then stood at the foot of the bed looking at me with an expression that made my breath stutter.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m memorizing this.” His voice was rough. “I never want to forget what you look like right now. In our room. In our bed. Home.”
He stripped off his shirt, and then he was beside me, above me, around me, and still so careful. Still so deliberate. His hands learned me like new territory, like three years of marriage hadn’t given him an atlas of every sensitive spot, every place that made me arch and sigh.
“Here?” he murmured against my hip.
“Yes.”
“Here?” Lower, gentler.
“Yes.”
But when his mouth finally found mine again and he settled his weight over me, the tears came without warning, hot and sudden, sliding down my temples into my hair.
Trevor froze. “Jillian? What… did I…”
“Don’t stop.” I pulled him closer, wrapping my legs around him, holding on. “Please don’t stop.”
“You’re crying.”
“I know.” I laughed, and it came out broken. “I can’t help it. I just… I can feel you seeing me. I can feel it. And it’s been so long since…”
He pressed his forehead to mine, and his tears mingled with my own. “I’m sorry,” he breathed against my skin. “God, Jillian, I’m so sorry.”
“Show me.” I lifted my hips, drew him deeper, watched his eyes go dark. “Keep showing me.”
He did.
There was nothing frantic about it, nothing desperate. Just the slow, deliberate rhythm of two people relearning each other. Every time I started to close my eyes, to drift into the sensation, he’d whisper my name until I looked at him again. He wanted to watch. He wanted me to watch him watching.
He wanted me to know I was seen.
When I finally came apart, it was with his name on my lips and his eyes locked on mine, and I understood in my bones what he’d been trying to tell me: I see you. I see all of you. And I’m not looking away.
He followed moments later, his whole body shuddering, his face buried in my neck. I held him through the aftershocks, stroking his hair, feeling his heart pound against my chest.
We lay there for a long time, tangled together in the blue-washed light, neither of us willing to move.
Finally, I traced my finger along the line of his jaw, the curve of his lips, the small scar above his eyebrow from a sailing accident when he was twelve. He turned his head to kiss my palm.
“Don’t ever make me invisible again,” I said quietly.
He held my gaze, and there was a solemnity in his expression that I’d rarely seen, the gravitas that emerged when he was making promises he truly intended to keep.
“Never again,” he said. “I swear to you, Jillian. Never again.”
I believed him.
***
The weekend unspooled like honey, slow and golden.
We didn’t leave the house. Didn’t answer emails or return calls. Didn’t perform for anyone but ourselves, and there was no performance in it, nothing polished or practiced. Just two people remembering how to be together without an audience.
Saturday morning, I made waffles while Trevor sat at the kitchen island in his boxers, reading aloud from the novel he’d finally gotten me to start. His impression of the villain was so atrociously over-the-top that I laughed until batter splattered across the stovetop.
“That was your fault,” I said, pointing the spatula at him.
“Worth it.”
Saturday afternoon, I played the upright piano while he stretched out on the sofa with his head propped on his hand, watching me. I fumbled through Debussy I hadn’t practiced in months, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Play our song,” he said.
I shot him a look. “I don’t know the chords.”
“Lies.”
I rolled my eyes, but my fingers found the melody anyway, The Very Thought of You, the song that had been playing at the gala where we’d met, the song for our first dance at our wedding. Trevor closed his eyes and smiled, and I played it twice through before my hands got tired.
Saturday night, we ordered pizza and ate it cross-legged on the living room floor, debating the relative merits of the sage-green paint versus the cream that had been there before.
“The cream looked like a funeral home,” I said.
“It looked elegant.”
“It looked like a very elegant funeral home.”
He threw a spring roll at me. I caught it and ate it triumphantly.
Sunday morning, we stayed in bed until nearly noon, drifting in and out of sleep, trading lazy kisses, saying nothing important and everything that mattered.
“I’m keeping you,” he mumbled into my shoulder around eleven.
“You already have me.”
“I’m keeping you anyway.”
***
The call came Sunday evening, just as the light was turning amber through the living room windows.
Trevor answered, and I watched his expression shift, surprise, then caution, then a reaction I couldn’t quite read. “She wants to come over,” he said, holding his palm over the phone.
I didn’t need to ask who.
“Fine.”
He relayed the message, and twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang. I straightened my sweater, took a breath, and went to the door.
Margot Anderson stood on the doorstep in a dove-gray shawl and pearl earrings, her signature armor softened by an expression I’d never seen on her face before. Not quite contrition. Not quite warmth. But a look that approached both.
In her hands, she held a framed photograph.
I recognized it immediately. Our wedding day, Trevor and me on the steps of the church, laughing at a joke someone had made, looking at each other like we’d won a prize we hadn’t even known we’d entered.
It had hung in Margot’s study for six months before it vanished, replaced by a landscape that matched the drapes.
I’d noticed its absence. I’d never said anything. That was the kind of silence our marriage had grown around.
“I thought this should come home,” Margot said.
I took the frame from her hands, my fingers brushing the edge of the glass. I looked at the woman I’d been that day, hopeful, unguarded, certain that love was enough.
Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe it never had been. But it was a start.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was cool and even, a truce, nothing more. No warmth. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I stepped aside to let her in.
Behind me, Trevor’s hand settled on the small of my back. When I glanced over my shoulder, he was looking at the photograph, at his mother, at me.
A thing long broken finally started to mend.