Chapter 6 #3
It was the slow long thing we had been promising each other for four months without saying so, and it became, in the gray pre-dawn light of a Saturday in November, the physical truth of what we were.
We found, within a minute, the rhythm of two people whose bodies had — by some accident of fit, by some quiet generosity of God or biology or both — been built to find each other.
She gasped once when I changed the angle.
She made a small sound when I slowed. She made a different sound when I did not slow.
I learned each of the sounds. I filed them away.
I planned, even in the middle of it, to remember each of them for the rest of my life.
She said my name twice — Beckett, and then Beckett again, lower, when there was no doubt — and the second one I will carry in my chest for the rest of my life.
She came undone again.
She came undone with her face turned into my shoulder and one hand fisted in the sheets at her side and the other hand at the back of my neck, holding hard, and her body clenched around mine in the long slow shudder of a woman who had spent four months being careful and was, in that moment, choosing not to be.
The small honest unstrung sound she made into my shoulder was the sound.
It was the sound that, for the rest of my life, I would associate with the morning of the fender.
I held on through it. I held on through it because she had asked me, in the doorway, to be slow, and I was not going to follow her until I knew she was finished.
I waited. I felt her come down. I felt her hand soften on the back of my neck.
I felt her breath even out against my throat.
She said, low, "Now. Now."
I let go.
I followed her with my forehead pressed to hers and my breath caught in my chest and her arms around my back, holding on.
She held me through it the way she had held the fender — carefully, fully, with the small unhurried steady attention that was the most Alma thing about her.
I shook against her for a long second. When I came back to myself, we were both breathing the same air and she was crying a little — silent, not unhappy, the small clean overflow of a woman whose careful interior architecture had just been, by mutual agreement, restructured.
I kissed the tears off her cheeks. I did not ask. The asking would have been wrong. I just kissed them.
She said, against my mouth, "Beckett."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Okay."
I said, "Okay?"
She said, "Okay. That. That. Yes."
I laughed. It came out shaky. She laughed too.
We laughed against each other's mouths in the gray-gold light of the bedroom above her uncle's shop, the bed warm beneath us, the world outside the window doing its quiet Saturday-morning waking-up while we lay together in the small particular aftermath of a thing we had both, by careful pretense, been pretending we did not want.
Afterward, the room was warmer than it had been when we'd come in.
The light through the curtains had turned from gray to the first pale gold of sunrise.
I lay on my back with my arm around her shoulders, and she lay against my chest with her ear over my sternum, and her fingers were drawing slow loops on my skin.
I said, "What are you drawing."
She said, "Numbers."
I laughed.
She said, "Our numbers. The ones that work."
I said, "What numbers work."
She traced a small 1 on my chest. Then a 2. Then a 3. Then she traced a long looping figure that I could not, at first, parse, and then I realized she was tracing infinity. She traced it twice. She said, "These."
I kissed the top of her head.
I said, "Alma."
She said, "Yes."
I said, "I'm not leaving."
She said, "I know."
I said, "I want to be clear. Not at the six-month mark. Not when Diego gives up. Not when the paperwork says I can. Not ever."
She lifted her head. She propped her chin on the heel of her hand on my chest. She looked at me with her hair tangled and her glasses on the nightstand and an expression I had not previously seen on her face — soft, awake, the columns having moved aside for the first time in our acquaintance.
She said, "That's not what we agreed to."
I said, "I'm renegotiating."
She said, "On what terms."
I said, "All of them. Every term. Starting with the one where this ends."
She was quiet. She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, "Counteroffer."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "It doesn't."
I said, "Accepted."
She put her head back on my chest. The morning sun came fully through the curtains. The first delivery truck of the day rumbled down Mill Street outside the window. Below us, the shop was silent — empty, waiting, ready to be opened in another hour by the woman currently lying on my chest.
She said, after a while, "What about the contract."
I said, "Burn it."
She said, "I don't burn paperwork. I file it."
I said, "Then file it under void."
She laughed. It was a real laugh. It was the second real laugh I had heard from her in five months, and it had a low quiet sound, and it shook gently against my chest, and I felt it land in me the way good metal lands when you set it on the anvil for the final hammer-tap and the work is done.
She said, "Beckett."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "I am going to need to get up and open the shop in about forty minutes."
I said, "Okay."
She said, "I'm not going to."
I said, "Okay."
She did not get up. Neither did I. The shop opened, on that one Saturday, an hour and twenty minutes late.
Nobody complained.