Chapter One #2
The party broke up slow, the way good ones do—Tupperware and four false goodbyes and Martha Lucia kissed off to bed by every grandchild in turn. I was helping Diego fold chairs when Lola came to leave.
She found Alonzo first. Of course she did.
She crossed the whole emptying patio to where he was coiling extension cords and put both arms around his neck, and he dropped what he was holding to hold her back, and she said something low against his ear that made him laugh—the real one, the one I fell in love with in this exact restaurant—and then she stepped back and lifted her keys and said something I couldn't hear, and he glanced toward the dark of the parking lot, and I watched him say it.
"I'll walk you out."
You have to understand what kind of town this is.
Marge Tilly leaves the post office unlocked over lunch.
The worst thing that happened all summer was somebody's golden retriever getting into the Hendersons' trash.
The parking lot behind El Colibrí is forty feet of gravel under a security light Rafael keeps too bright, and Lola Marchetti has been walking herself to cars in this town since she was sixteen.
He walked her out anyway.
I'm not going to pretend I timed it. I didn't have to.
I've walked people to that lot a hundred times—it's ninety seconds there, ninety back, two minutes if you're slow about saying goodnight.
I finished the row of chairs. I carried two trays into the kitchen.
I came back out and gathered the cloth napkins and folded them into the basket and asked Diego if his mother wanted the leftover flan sent home, and Diego said which century are you asking about, and we laughed, and I looked at the gate.
He still wasn't back.
I don't know what they talked about out there in the dark, by her car, under Rafael's too-bright light. That's the whole thing. That's the needle. I will never know, and not-knowing is a room you can live in for a long time before you notice the walls.
When he finally came back through the gate he was loose and easy and a little far away, and he picked the last bag of trash up off the ground like nothing, like no time had passed at all, and he said, "God, what a night."
"Long one," I said.
"Good though." He found my waist with one arm and pulled me into his side and kissed the top of my head.
"She's doing so much better, did you see?
Seems like herself again. I worry about her, coming back to this town with nothing.
" He squeezed my hip. "You were so good to her tonight. I love that about you."
He didn't hear it. The flatness, I mean.
He didn't hear anything but his own warm tired contentment, and I let him not hear it, because the orchids were already starting to go—the heat, the hours, the way cut things always know before you do—and I didn't have it in me, right then, to be the one who made the night smaller.
We drove home with the windows down. He held my hand across the console and sang along, off-key, to a song he'd loved since high school, and the wound from the parking lot got quieter and quieter the farther we got from the lights, the way it always did.
By the time we pulled into our own gravel I'd half talked myself out of it.
He worries about her. He's a kind man. You knew that. You love that.
The house was dark and ours and blessedly empty of everyone but us.
I went straight up to the bedroom and kicked my shoes into the corner and reached back for the zip at the top of my dress, working it down one slow inch, and I heard him come up the stairs behind me, and then his hands were on mine.
"Need a hand with that," he said. Not a question.
I laughed before I'd even turned around. "That's not helping. That's the opposite of helping."
"It's a kind of helping." His mouth was already at the side of my throat, his fingers easing the zip the rest of the way down, slow, like he had all night and intended to use it. The dress loosened and slid, and he caught it, and let it fall, and turned me around in the dark.
So I helped him back. I worked the buttons of his shirt apart one at a time, and he stood there and let me, watching my face the entire time the way he had across the patio, except now there was no patio, no family, no gate, no parking lot—just the two of us and the streetlight coming gray through the curtains and the quiet of a house with nobody else in it.
I pulled the shirt off his shoulders. He got the rest. And then there was nothing between us at all, and we went down onto the bed together, and the whole loud night fell away like something I'd only dreamed.
He kissed me like he was answering a question. Then he started down.
His mouth found the hollow of my throat, my collarbone, the soft of me—slow, unhurried, learning me over again the way he had a hundred times and somehow always like the first. He moved lower, and lower, his hands spreading warm and sure over my hips to hold me still, and when his mouth reached the center of me I forgot the orchids and the lights and the dark forty feet of gravel and her name and everything that wasn't this.
There was nothing left in the world but his mouth and the sounds I was making into the dark and the slow unbearable build of it, until it broke over me and I said his name like it was the only word I had left.
He came back up the length of me while I was still shaking, kissing his way home, and gathered me underneath him, and when he finally pushed into me it was all at once—one long sure stroke, the whole of him—and I gasped and he stilled, his forehead dropped to mine, both of us breathing the same breath.
Then he moved. Slow at first, careful, drawing it out until I was the one pulling him closer, faster, yes—and he gave me that too, the pace climbing with us, the bed and the dark and the two of us and nothing, nothing else allowed in the room.
When it took us it took us close, my mouth at his shoulder, his hand fisted in my hair, the world narrowed down to one point of pure light and then gone.
After, we lay tangled and wrecked and breathing, his weight half on me, my fingers in his damp hair.
"I love you," he said into my neck, the words slurred soft. "More than—God. More than I know how to say."
"I love you." I kissed his temple. "I love you so much it's stupid."
"Stupid's good." He smiled against my skin. "Marry me."
"I'm already going to."
"Good." A breath. "Twice, then."
He was asleep inside two minutes. He always was, after—gone heavy and warm and trusting, his hand still curled loose around my hip like even unconscious he didn't want to let go.
I lay there listening to him breathe in the dark of the only room in the world that was ever only ours, and the last thing I thought before sleep took me too was this:
It's so easy when it's just us. Here. Like this. Where nothing can reach in and touch us.
I should have heard the warning in it. How a thought like that is only ever a comfort when there's a list, somewhere just outside the door, of all the things that can.