Chapter 7 #2
"You don't have to hold them apart," he said, his mouth against my collarbone, his hands mapping the length of me with a care that felt like an apology and a vow at once.
"I stayed alive on the memory of exactly this, Josie.
Every night in that room, this is what I imagined — not the big things, not some grand reunion.
Just this. Your hands on my shoulders. The sound you make right here—" his mouth found the spot below my ear that had always undone me, and I gasped, proving his point entirely "—the exact weight of you under me.
I stayed alive on this. I need you to know that.
You kept me alive without even knowing you were doing it. "
I couldn't answer that with words. I answered it with my hands, pulling him closer, guiding him home in every sense the word could carry, and when we finally came together it was slow at first, both of us adjusting to a closeness that felt both entirely familiar and entirely new, two years of distance dissolving in real time with every unhurried movement.
I felt it everywhere — not just where our bodies met, but in the way his forehead pressed to mine, in the way he said my name like a vow between breaths, in the way the spring air kept moving through the open windows around us like the house itself was breathing along with us, coming back to life in the same slow, overwhelming rhythm we were.
His hands never stopped moving, tracing the length of my spine, my hip, the curve of my thigh where it wrapped around him, every touch deliberate, unhurried, a man determined to memorize every single inch this time instead of trusting memory alone to hold it.
I arched into him, into the exact familiar weight of him settling over me, and felt the low sound he made against my throat vibrate through my whole body, felt my own name break apart in his voice like it was the most important word he'd ever said.
The lamp on the nightstand threw gold light across both of us, catching in the sheen of damp skin, catching in his eyes when he lifted his head to look at me, dark and wrecked open and entirely present.
He moved inside me slow and deliberate at first, every roll of his hips deep and unhurried, his mouth finding mine between breaths like he needed the taste of me as proof alongside everything else his body was already confirming.
I felt every inch of him, the exact weight and heat and pressure of two years compressed into every slow, devastating drag of movement, and I dug my nails into his shoulders and told him so, gasping it against his jaw, and felt him shudder in answer, felt the rhythm between us climb from slow reverence into something hungrier, faster, both of us chasing the same building ache.
His hand slid beneath my hip, angling me closer, deeper, and I cried out at the shift of it, at the exact spot he found and didn't let go of, his own breath ragged and broken against my ear, murmuring my name, murmuring that he had me, that he wasn't going anywhere, every word punctuated by another slow, deliberate thrust that pulled another gasp out of me.
I could feel the tension coiling tighter in both of us, his muscles taut and trembling under my hands, my whole body arching to meet him stroke for stroke, the two of us moving in a rhythm neither of us controlled anymore, just followed, helpless and grateful, toward the same inevitable place.
It built between us like something inevitable, gathering weight and heat until neither of us could hold back the current of it any longer.
I felt it crest first low in my belly and then everywhere at once, my whole body drawing tight around him, his name tearing out of me on a broken cry, and he followed a heartbeat later, burying his face against my throat with a raw, guttural sound that was entirely unguarded, his whole body shuddering through it against mine, the two of us gasping into the same breath as the current finally broke and released, wave after wave of it, the whole house holding us in its old familiar walls like it had been waiting exactly for this, exactly for us, the whole two years.
Afterward, tangled together in sheets that still, impossibly, smelled faintly of the cedar drawer liner I'd used a decade ago, I pressed my ear flat against his chest and listened.
His heart, steady, unmistakable, alive.
"Still beating," he said, quiet, amused, one hand moving slow through my hair.
"Don't you dare stop," I said, only half joking, my voice thick.
"Wasn't planning on it." A pause, and I felt him shift slightly under me, the specific shift that meant he was about to say something ridiculous. "Also, we should probably tell everyone we un-buried me before the town council meeting Thursday. The mayor keeps calling my headstone a 'liability.'"
I laughed into his chest until I cried, the sound and the tears tangled together the way they'd been tangled all week, grief and joy still learning how to share a body without one canceling out the other.
"A liability," I repeated, wiping my eyes. "You're a zoning issue now. That's what two years of forced silence gets you. A municipal complaint."
"I've been called worse."