26. Clara
— ? —
Clara
“Stay for dinner.”
The words came out before I could overthink them. We were standing in the stable parking lot as the last light faded from the sky, and I didn’t want this day to end. I didn’t want to go back to my apartment alone and wonder if what had happened by the creek was real.
Quin went still. “Are you sure?”
“Katie will be home by seven. She’d love to see you. And I…” I took a breath. “I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.”
The smile that broke across his face was the one I fell in love with. Bright and unguarded and so full of hope it made my chest hurt.
“Then I’ll stay.”
***
Katie’s reaction when she saw Quin in our tiny apartment was roughly equivalent to a small nuclear explosion.
“DADDY!” She launched herself at him from halfway across the room. “You came! You really came!”
He caught her like he’d been practicing for this moment his entire life. She buried her face in his neck and he held her tight, and I stood there and watched them and felt something shift inside me.
“Come see my room! Come see all my drawings! Come meet…” Katie gasped dramatically. “Daddy, you have to meet Bunbun!”
“I’ve met Bunbun, sweetheart.”
“But you have to meet him PROPERLY. With introductions our teacher taught us. It’s very important.”
Quin shot me a look over Katie’s head, half amused, half terrified, and I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing.
“Introductions it is,” he said solemnly. “Lead the way.”
I watched them disappear into Katie’s room, already deep in discussion about the proper protocol for introducing a stuffed rabbit to visiting fathers. A moment later, Quin’s voice drifted back to me:
“Bunbun, it is an honor to make your acquaintance. I have heard so much about you.”
And Katie’s, in the high-pitched formal voice she used for special occasions: “Bunbun says he missed you. He told me so.”
“I missed Bunbun too. Tell him I’m sorry I was gone.”
I leaned against the kitchen doorway and listened to them, something warm and terrifying blooming in my chest. Something that I couldn’t say out loud to Ana. The hope I’d been so afraid to feel.
I went to the kitchen and started making dinner.
Dinner was nothing special. Pasta with sauce from a jar because that was what I had. Garlic bread from the freezer section. Nothing like the elaborate meals Perla used to make at the ranch, nothing like the dinners I used to plan for weeks.
But Katie chattered through the whole thing, telling Quin about school and her friends and the book Zahra had read her that day, and Quin listened to every word like she was delivering a State of the Union address.
He asked follow-up questions. He remembered details from previous conversations.
He was present in a way I wasn’t sure he’d ever been before, even when we lived in the same house.
After dinner, Katie insisted on showing Quin her bedtime routine. The tooth brushing. The face washing. The very specific order of stuffed animals on the bed (Bunbun in the middle, obviously). He participated in all of it with the same careful attention he used to give board meetings.
“Three stories,” Katie informed him. “And then you have to do the special goodnight.”
“What’s the special goodnight?”
“It’s a secret. Mommy will show you.”
The special goodnight involved kissing each of her fingertips, then her nose, then her forehead, then tucking the blanket in a very specific way that had taken me three weeks to perfect. Quin watched me do it with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Your turn,” Katie said sleepily.
He did it perfectly. First try.
“How did you…”
“I watched,” he said simply. “I was paying attention.”
Katie was asleep before we made it to the door.
***
We did the dishes side by side at my tiny sink, shoulders brushing, the silence comfortable in a way it hadn’t been in years. He washed. I dried. It was domestic and ordinary and it made me want to cry.
“I want to tell you something,” I said, setting down a plate. “Something I should have said months ago.”
Quin turned off the water. Dried his hands and waited.
“When I left, I was so angry. At you, at Eva, at myself for letting things get that bad.” I kept my eyes on the dish towel in my hands, the one with the faded sunflowers that came with the apartment.
“But somewhere along the way, the anger started to fade. And what was underneath it scared me more.”
“What was underneath it?”
“Hope.” The word came out cracked. “I kept hoping you would change. Even when I was filing for divorce. Even when I changed my number and told myself I was done. Part of me kept hoping you would prove me wrong.”
He was quiet, listening. Not trying to fill the silence with explanations or promises.
“And now?” he asked finally.
“Now I think maybe you have.” I set down the dish towel and turned to face him fully. “I’m not ready to move back yet. I’m not ready to pretend the last few months didn’t happen. But I’m ready to try. Really try. Not just coexisting for Katie. Actually rebuilding something together.”
Quin was looking at me like I’d handed him the world.
“Whatever pace you need,” he said quietly. “Whatever terms you want to set. I’ll follow your lead.”
I kissed him then.
I stepped into him in my tiny kitchen with the smell of garlic bread still in the air and put my mouth on his like I meant it, like I was done circling the thing I wanted.
His hands came up and hovered at my waist, waiting, until I closed the last inch myself and felt him exhale against my lips as if he’d been holding that breath for months.
He kissed me back the way a gentleman does when he has been given something he is terrified of breaking.
Careful at the edges and hungry underneath.
I felt the hunger. I felt him put it away for me.
His mouth opened against mine and his hands stayed exactly where I had allowed them, and the restraint of it was more intimate than anything frantic could have been.
When I pulled back, his eyes were still closed. Like he was savoring it. Like he was afraid to open them in case it wasn’t real.
“Stay tonight,” I said.
His eyes flew open.
“Not the couch,” I added, before he could ask. Before I could lose my nerve. “Katie’s asleep. The walls are thin. And I don’t want you twelve feet away tonight. I want you here.”
He didn’t move. He stood there in my tiny kitchen with a dish towel still in his hands and looked at me like the whole of the last three months was sitting in the space between us, and he was waiting to see if I really meant to cross it.
I crossed it.
I took the towel from him and set it on the counter.
I took his hand. I led him through the dark apartment the way I used to lead him through rooms that belonged to both of us, and he followed without a word, his thumb moving once across my knuckles, a quiet I’m here.
My bedroom door stuck the way it always did.
I had to put my shoulder into it. He waited behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him and not close enough to assume.
Then the door gave, and he filled the doorway, and then the room.
My room. My bed, the double I’d bought secondhand, with the quilt from the thrift store and the lamp I’d never gotten around to replacing.
He’d never been in here. I’d never imagined him in here.
Now he stood in the middle of it like he was afraid to touch anything, and it didn’t feel small anymore. It felt like the only room there was.
“Quiet,” I whispered. “She’s right down the hall.”
“I can be quiet.”
“You’ve never been quiet in your life.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Then you’ll have to help me.”
I reached for the buttons of his shirt. He let me.
He stood perfectly still while I opened them one by one, while I pushed the fabric off his shoulders, while I saw what the months had done.
He’d lost weight. I could see it in the new hollows above his collarbones, the sharper line of his ribs.
I put my mouth on the first of those places, then the next, as if I could put back what the months had taken.
His hands came to my hips and stayed there, and they shook.
I had never once in six years felt Quin Fleming’s hands shake.
“Clara.” Barely a sound. His mouth against my hair. “Tell me this is real.”
“It’s real.”
“Tell me you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and…”
“Quin.” I found the hem of the old t-shirt I was wearing. His t-shirt. The one I’d stolen when I packed at two in the morning and never explained to myself. I pulled it off and let it fall. “I took this with me. I’ve slept in it every night since I left.”
He looked at the shirt on the floor. Then at me.
Something in his face broke open and went very still at the same time. He lifted one hand as if he meant to touch my cheek and stopped short of my skin, asking without asking. I turned my face into his palm.
That was when he stopped asking questions.
He kissed me like a man who had been given a second chance and intended to deserve it.
No rush. No claiming for the sake of it.
Just his mouth on mine, then my jaw, then the place beneath my ear that had always undone me, lingering there until my hands fisted in the waistband of his jeans because I needed something to hold.
He made a sound against my throat that he swallowed at once, remembering the thin walls, and the effort of that, the way he went careful for me, for her, for this fragile thing we were trying to build, sent heat rolling through me so slow and so complete I had to close my eyes.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
I did.
He undressed me the way he used to take off my jewelry after galas.
Reverent. As if every layer was something he’d been trusted with.
The rest of my clothes joined his shirt on the floor, and he looked at me in the lamplight of a room that had never held him, and I watched him fight himself. I watched him want.
“You can touch me,” I said.
His hands settled at my waist again, then rose, mapping me as if he were learning the country of my body for the first time.
He drew me in until we were standing skin to skin and I could feel how badly he wanted me in the tension of him, in the careful distance he still kept, in the way his breath left him when I put my mouth to his chest.
He laid me down on the secondhand quilt like I was something precious that had been returned to him slightly damaged, and he intended to be infinitely careful with the cracks.
It was nothing like the tack room. Nothing like the penthouse.
There was no urgency in it and no performance.
He stretched out over me and kissed his way down the line of my throat, my collarbone, the slope of my breast, and every place his mouth landed felt like an apology he was too proud to say out loud and too honest not to make.
I buried my hands in his hair. He looked up once, checking, and I nodded, and he put his mouth on me properly then, devastatingly patient, until I had to press my face into the pillow to keep from making a sound that would carry down the hall.
He didn’t hurry me. He asked with every shift of his mouth, every pass of his hands along my thighs, and I answered him without words, lifting, trembling, pulling him back up because I wanted his face when this happened. I wanted his eyes.
He braced on his elbows above me. Looked, the way he always had. The way he’d never stopped doing even when he’d stopped doing everything else.
“Eyes on me,” he said.
I kept them on him.
He pushed into me slowly, and I felt every inch of it.
The stretch. The fullness. The terrible, exquisite relief of being known by someone who had once forgotten how.
His forehead dropped to mine. Neither of us moved.
In the quiet I could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen, a car passing on the street below, his heartbeat where our chests met.
“Clara.” My name, barely voiced.
I wrapped my legs around him and he began to move.
Slow, deep, a rhythm that had nothing to do with finishing and everything to do with staying.
The bed creaked under us and he stilled at once, listening, then smiled against my mouth, small, incredulous, and started again, even slower, as if the creak were a joke the universe had told just for us.
I smiled back. Then I couldn’t, because he changed the angle and found me, and I had to put my hand over my own mouth.
He took that hand down and replaced it with his own. His palm over my lips, his eyes on mine, the two of us breathing into the same small dark while he moved inside me like he had all night and intended to use it.
I came like that. Shaking. My teeth against the heel of his hand and his name trapped behind it.
He watched me through it, wrecked and reverent, and when he followed it was with his face turned into my neck, his whole body gone taut and then soft, holding me as if the bed might tip and pour him out.
He didn’t pull away.
He stayed inside me, still trembling, and kissed the corner of my mouth, then my cheek, then the damp hair at my temple, and I felt him put himself back together one careful breath at a time so he wouldn’t crush me with what he was feeling.
“I love you,” he said, so quietly it might have been for himself.
My voice was wrecked anyway. “I love you too.”
After, he stayed. Didn’t go back to the couch.
Didn’t ask if he should. He lay behind me with his arm across my waist and drew the quilt up over both of us, and his breath slowed against my hair the way it used to in a much larger bed in a much larger house.
I lay awake in the dark for a long time, listening to it.
Listening to Katie turn over once down the hall.
Listening to the man I had almost stopped believing in fall asleep in a room that had never been his, as if it always had.