Chapter 8
Rhett
I wake before her.
The blanket has slipped off my shoulder in the night and the early light is coming in pale and gray through the small window above the cedar bench, and for a long minute I do not move because she is asleep against my chest with one hand curled small under her chin and her hair is across my collarbone and her breath is slow and even on the place where my heart is, and I have never in my life woken up with anything to lose before.
I lie there and let myself feel it.
The fairy lights are still on overhead. They have gone tired in the dawn, blinking small and pink against the wisteria, and the wisteria has dropped a soft drift of petals onto the blanket and into her hair and along the cedar slats around us, and somewhere down on Main a delivery truck is rolling and somewhere up on the ridge a thrush is starting its morning string of three repeated notes, and her hand on my chest is so light I would not feel it if I were not paying attention.
I am paying attention.
I am paying attention the way I have never paid attention to anything in my life.
She makes a small sound in her sleep and turns her face further into my shoulder, and her hair brushes the underside of my jaw, and I close my eyes for a second because the inside of my chest does the warm shaking thing it has been doing for two weeks now whenever she touches me without thinking about it, and I am not going to get used to it.
I do not want to get used to it. I want every time she touches me without thinking about it to feel like this — like a wing folding inside my ribs, like a door I did not know I had being held open by someone who did not even ask permission to come in.
She wakes.
She wakes slowly, the way she does everything — first the small shift of her shoulders against the blanket, then the slow blink against my collarbone, then the breath that goes in deeper, and then her eyes open and she looks up at me from under her own dark fan of lashes and she smiles like she is not surprised to find me there.
That kills me.
That she is not surprised.
I say, "Morning."
She says, "Morning."
She says it on the warm small puff of breath against my throat and I have to close my eyes again for a second to ride out the shaking thing inside my chest, and when I open them she is still looking at me, and the gray dawn has gotten a little pinker behind the wisteria, and she lifts up onto one elbow and she puts her hand on my cheek and she looks at me the way she looked at me last night under the fairy lights, with the same quiet considering look like she is reading me page by page and finding nothing she wants to skip.
She says, "I want to do that again."
I do not laugh.
I do not because she is not joking. She is saying it the way she says everything — careful, deliberate, weighed, chosen — and it is not a request. It is a small finished sentence laid down on the cedar between us like a stone she has been carrying for a long time and only just put down.
I say, "Where."
She says, "Inside. A bed."
She says it and then she colors a little — the faint pink up under her cheekbones I have learned to watch for — and she says, "Yours."
I say, "Mine."
She says, "I want to know where you live."
She says it small but she says it like it is the most important thing she has said all morning. I want to know where you live.
I have been a man without a place that was mine my whole life.
She wants to know where I live.
I sit up. I pull her up with me with the blanket still around her shoulders, and I tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, and I press my mouth to her forehead for a long second because I do not know what to do with the thing she just said except hold it carefully in both hands and try not to drop it, and then I say, "We have to walk. The bike's at the clubhouse."
She says, "I want to walk."
So we walk.
We walk the long quiet back way up through the alley behind the bakery and across the foot bridge over the creek and up the hill toward the clubhouse, and the town is still mostly asleep — only the bakery has its lights on, only the bakery and the diner and old Mrs. Halpern's kitchen on the corner of Linden where she gets up at five every morning to feed her cats — and the air smells of yeast and wet stone and the green wet smell of late spring grass and the river underneath all of it.
Nora has my hand. She has her library cardigan over her shoulders against the morning cool and she has my hand and she is walking slow on her sandals on the wet brick and she is not saying anything, and I am not saying anything, and the silence between us is the easy kind.
The kind I did not know existed before her.
We pass the hardware store. Tom is inside already — I see his shape behind the front counter, lifting a box. He looks up. He sees us. He does not lift his hand. He just nods, once, slow, and goes back to his box.
That is the closest Tom has ever come to giving me a benediction.
I almost stop walking.
I do not.
I just tighten my hand on Nora's hand and I keep walking, and she looks up at me sideways from under her hair, and she says nothing, but she knows.
The clubhouse comes up out of the dawn at the end of the long gravel drive with its low long roofline and its dark wood and the iron sign over the gate with the thorn and the wheel cast into it, and the bikes are lined up under the awning the way they always are, and the porch light is still on, and Knox is sitting on the porch step with a coffee in both hands looking out at nothing in particular, and he sees us coming up the drive and he sees Nora's hand in mine and he sees her sandals and her library cardigan, and he does not smile.
He just lifts the mug an inch.
He says, "Coffee's on."
He says it the way you say welcome home to a brother who has been gone a long time and just walked back up the road.
He looks at Nora.
He says, "Morning, Miss Ashby."
She says, "Morning, Knox."
She says it like she has known him her whole life and just forgot to mention it.
He nods. He looks back out at the gravel. He lifts the mug to his mouth. He does not get up.
I take her inside.
The clubhouse main room is empty at this hour — just the long bar and the low couches and the pool table under the dim hood lamp and the smell of cold woodsmoke from the fireplace banked the night before — and I take her down the hall past the photographs of the brothers and around the corner to the door at the end where my name is written on the little brass plate Hawk made for everyone the year I got patched, and I open the door and I stand back and I let her go in first.
I have lived in this room for nine years.
It has a bed and a window and a chair and a chest of drawers and a small shelf I built out of crate wood for the books I have started collecting since February, and the walls are the same dark pine they have always been, and there is one framed photograph on the chest of drawers — a black and white of my grandmother on the porch of her house in Tennessee, the only photograph I have of anyone I am related to that I let myself keep — and the bed has a wool blanket and clean sheets and one pillow and that is all.
It is a monk's cell.
I have never let anyone come in here before her.
She stands in the middle of the room with the blanket from the garden still around her shoulders and she looks slowly around — at the bed, at the chair, at the shelf of books, at my grandmother's photograph, at the window with its plain white curtain and the gray dawn light coming through — and she takes a slow careful breath and she says, "It's clean. "
I almost laugh.
I say, "I like it clean."
She says, "I know you do."
She turns toward me. She lets the blanket fall from her shoulders onto the chair.
She is wearing the dress from last night still — the soft pale green one that buttoned down the front — and her hair is loose down her back with a single dried wisteria petal still caught in it, and she walks the three steps from the middle of the room to where I am still standing inside the door, and she puts both hands flat on my chest the way she did last night under the fairy lights, and she looks up at me with that same slow careful considering look, and she says, "I want to do it slow. "
I say, "Slow."
She says, "All morning."
She says it and the inside of my chest does the wing-folding thing again, and I lift my hands and I cup her face — both palms, both cheeks, careful — and I lean my forehead down to her forehead and I close my eyes for a second and I breathe, and she breathes, and somewhere outside the window a thrush is doing its three notes again, and the early sun has come up enough now to put a thin pink line along the bottom of the curtain, and I say, against her mouth, "Yes. "
I kiss her.
I kiss her the way she said it — slow.
I kiss her the way you turn the page of a book you do not want to finish.
I walk her backwards to the bed without taking my mouth off her mouth, and I sit down on the edge of the bed and I pull her between my knees, and I undo the buttons of the green dress one by one from the top, and there are eight of them, and I count them in my head because counting them slows me down, and at the third button she puts her hand on my hand and stops me and she says, "Look at me. "
I look at her.
She says, "I love you."
She says it small but she says it level and she says it without the small careful stutter on the l that sometimes catches her when she is afraid of being heard, and she says it looking right at me, and the morning light has come up enough now to put a pink wash across her cheek and across the place at her throat where I can see her heart beating in the small soft hollow there, and I do not look away.
I say, "I love you."
I say it the way she said it. Level. Without flinching.
I have never said those words to anyone in my life.
I find out they do not break me.
They do the opposite of break me.
She lets me finish the buttons.