Chapter 7 #2
I had — I want to confess this — I had been afraid, all afternoon, of this part.
I had been afraid that the saying of it would shift something, that the saying of it would change the kind of evening this could be, that he would do something gallant and step back and say we shouldn't, and I would have to argue with him for an hour.
I had braced for the gallantry. I had not braced for what he actually does.
He does not move for a long moment.
He says, very steady, "Why."
I do not know what he means.
I say, "Why."
He says, "Why now. Why me."
I am so startled by the precision of the question that I laugh — once, soft, almost not a laugh at all.
He has not asked the gallant question. He has not asked the are you sure.
He has asked the question that matters. He has asked the question I have been asking myself for three days on the edge of my bed with the Neruda open in my lap.
I look at him.
I say, "Because I have known for a long time that I would only do this with someone I trusted.
And I have trusted no one. Not the people who taught me to be small.
Not the people who taught me to apologize.
Not anyone who has been in a room with me long enough to think they wanted to be the first. And then you walked into my library. "
I lift my hand. I put my palm against his jaw. His jaw is rough — he has not shaved since the morning — and the rough pulls a little against my palm.
I say, "I want it to be you. I want it to be here. I want it to be in this garden. Because this garden is the place I am strongest. And the first time I am with anyone in this life is going to be in the place I am strongest. Not the place I am smallest."
He closes his eyes for a half-second.
He opens them.
He says, "Okay."
He says, "If at any point you change your mind. If at any point you want to stop. If you want to slow down. If you want to leave. You say the word and we are done. Do you hear me?"
I say, "I hear you."
He says, "Promise me."
I say, "I promise."
He says, "Nora."
I say, "Yes."
He says, "I am going to be very careful with you."
I say, "I know."
He leans forward.
He cups my face with both hands.
He cups it the way you would cup the page of a very old book that you are afraid to fold.
Both hands. His thumbs against my cheekbones.
His fingers spread along my jaw. His palms warm and dry and large enough that they cover both sides of my face entirely.
He looks at me — looks at all of me, my eyes and the line of my hairline and the corner of my mouth and the small constellation of freckles he traced the back of his hand against in the library two weeks ago — and then he leans the rest of the way down and he kisses me.
He kisses me slowly.
He kisses me as if he has been planning the kiss for as long as I have been planning the garden.
He kisses me with his mouth half open and his thumb at the hinge of my jaw, and the kiss is soft and warm and tastes faintly like the spearmint of his toothpaste and the small clean salt of his skin under it.
I have been kissed in my life. Three times.
A boy in tenth grade behind the gym. A fraternity boy at a Christmas party in college.
A man on a third date in Richmond who I do not remember the name of.
Those had been kisses the way reading a back-cover blurb is reading a book.
This is — this is the book itself. This is being read by him as much as I am reading him, his mouth on mine and his thumb tracing the corner of my jaw and the small soft sound he makes in the back of his throat when I open my mouth a little wider, a sound that goes through me and settles somewhere low in my hips and makes me reach up and put my hands on the front of his shirt.
He breaks the kiss. He pulls back, half an inch, no more.
He says, "Stand up."
I stand up.
He stays kneeling.
He puts his hands on the back of my calves.
Not on my thighs. Not anywhere up. On the back of my calves, where the skirt of my dress ends, where the skin is bare.
His hands are big enough that one hand can wrap most of one calf.
He runs his palms up, very slowly, over the back of my knees, up the back of my thighs to where my skirt is, and stops there. He looks up at me.
He says, "Is this all right?"
I say, "Yes."
He puts his cheek against my hip.
Just his cheek. Just resting there. The rough of his jaw against the soft cotton of my dress against my hip bone, his hands on the back of my thighs, his hair where I can see it from above — damp, dark blond, a small whorl at the crown — and the fairy lights overhead spilling down through the wisteria, and a single small wisteria petal falling from the racemes and landing on his shoulder.
I put my hand on the back of his head.
He stays like that for a long moment.
Then he stands up.
He stands up slowly, his hands traveling up the sides of my body as he comes up, not gripping, not greedy, just steady — over my hips, up the small line of my waist, up my ribs to where my arms are at my sides, and then he is at his full height again, looking down at me, and his hands cup my face again, and he kisses me again, and this kiss is the one the first kiss had been clearing space for.
This kiss is — I want to find the language for it slowly, because I want to find the language for it accurately — this kiss is what calligraphy looks like in motion.
This kiss is what the long-tail descender of a careful blue-ink S looks like if you slowed it down into a body.
Slow. Patient. Each press of his mouth on mine a small careful stroke that knows where the next one is going.
He is unhurried in a way I have never been kissed before.
He is in no rush to get anywhere. He has, I realize, no plan to get anywhere unless I make the next move.
I make the next move.
I lift my hands. I find the front of his cut.
I push it back off his shoulders. He lets me.
He shrugs out of it with his arms still around me, and the cut falls behind him onto the stones with the soft heavy sound of leather settling.
Underneath the cut he is in a white henley, three buttons open at the throat, and I can see a little of the dark ink at his collarbone — a piece of a tattoo I have never seen the rest of.
I push my fingers up under his jaw. I get up on my toes.
I kiss him this time. He bends down to meet me, and his hand comes up into the loose of my hair at the back of my neck, and his fingers spread there and the warmth of his palm presses against my scalp and I make a small sound into his mouth that I did not know I was going to make.
His other hand goes to the small of my back.
He gathers me toward him without pulling.
The pressure of his palm is the gentlest gathering I have ever felt.
I step in. The fronts of our bodies touch — my chest against his ribs, my hip against his belt, the long warm line of him through the cotton of his henley pressed against the front of my dress — and I close my eyes for a second because the sheer amount of him is more than I had braced for and I have to take one long second to adjust.
He feels me adjust.
He says against my mouth, "Take your time."
I say against his, "I am."
He laughs. Low. Quiet. The first laugh of his I have heard in a month and the laugh goes into my mouth and I taste it and it makes my knees do something embarrassing. He notices that too — Rhett notices everything — and he keeps one hand under my elbow as I sit back down on the bench.
I sit. He stands. He looks down at me.
I lift my hands. I find the hem of his henley.
I pull it up. He raises his arms. The shirt comes off over his head and his hair falls back into place a little disheveled at the crown and the wisteria petal that had been on his shoulder is gone, dislodged into the air, drifting down between us toward my lap.
I have, by now, seen his chest. The first day, in the gravel yard.
He had been in a kind of unconscious display I do not think he realized he had been making.
This is different. This is him in front of me on purpose.
The ink across his collarbone is the head of a hawk in flight, with the wings extending up over his right shoulder onto his upper arm.
There are more, smaller, on his ribs and across his sternum — words I cannot quite read in the fairy-light dim.
There is a small white scar at the hairline of his left pec, an old one, healed long ago, the kind a knife leaves if it does not go deep.
I do not ask about it. There will be a night for asking. This is not the night for asking.
I put my hand flat on his sternum.
His heart is going. It is going fast. Faster than mine.
I put my other hand over my own heart, and they are roughly the same speed, and the discovery of that — that this man, this man with the river-ice eyes and the hands that have broken bones, has a heart going the same speed under my palm as the one going inside my own ribs — undoes something in me at a place I had not known had been knotted.
I look up at him.
I say, "Lie down with me."
He says, "Yes."
He spreads the wool blanket lengthwise on the cedar bench.
He sits down on it first, his back against the trellis post, and he holds out his hand to me.
I sit beside him. He turns me — gently, his hand on my hip — and he lays me back.
The cedar is warm under the wool. The wool is soft.
The fairy lights are directly above me now.
The wisteria is directly above me. A small lavender petal drifts down and lands at the corner of my mouth.
He brushes it away with his thumb.
He bends down. He kisses where the petal had been.
He kisses my throat.
He kisses the small soft hollow at the base of my throat where the V of my dress opens.
He kisses the line of my collarbone.