Chapter 8 #2
"I think you're right," I said, and meant it — understood, kneeling on our kitchen floor at two in the morning with my wife wrecked and open and finally, fully honest in my arms, that this was the true center of everything, deeper than the doorway, deeper than the vows we'd eventually renew, deeper than any single moment of relief.
This was what coming home actually meant.
Not the absence of pain. The presence, together, through all of it.
"I think I need to talk to someone," Josie said, after a while, her voice steadier now, thoughtful.
"Actually talk to someone. A professional.
I've been doing all right on my own for two years, but two years of doing all right on my own doesn't mean I've actually processed anything.
I just got very good at surviving without processing. "
"I think that's a good idea," I said. "I'd like to come with you, if you'll let me.
Not because I think you need me there to be brave enough.
Because I think I need to learn how to sit in that room too.
I've spent two years believing the only way to protect the people I love is to carry things alone.
I don't actually know how to do the other thing yet.
The out loud thing. I could use the practice. "
"You want to go to therapy with me."
"I want to go to therapy with you," I confirmed.
"I recognize that's not a sentence I ever pictured myself saying, back when I was twenty-five and thought carrying everything alone was the same thing as strength.
Two years in a locked room taught me otherwise.
I'd like the chance to actually learn the lesson instead of just surviving long enough to say I learned it. "
She laughed, wet and startled. "That might be the single most attractive thing you've ever said to me, and it's about scheduling a therapy appointment. I don't know what that says about either of us."
"It says we've both grown up a fair amount in two very different, very difficult ways."
"I'll call Dr. Ellery Monday," she said. "She sees a few other folks from the club already. Sable mentioned her once."
"Monday," I agreed. "We'll go together."
Dawn was breaking by the time we made it back to our feet, gold light just starting to climb the kitchen windows, and something had shifted in the room, in both of us — the last wall down, nothing left held in reserve.
Josie looked at me across the kitchen, tear-streaked and open and entirely herself, and something in her expression changed, gathering into a different kind of intensity, and I felt my own chest answer it before she even moved.
"Come here," she said, low.
I crossed the kitchen and she met me halfway, and this kiss was nothing like the reverent, careful reclamation of three weeks before.
This was fierce, urgent, alive — not mourning the past this time but claiming the future, both of us fully here, fully chosen, no ghosts left standing anywhere in the room between us.
She backed against the counter and pulled me with her, and I lifted her onto it without breaking the kiss, her hands fisting in my shirt, both of us moving with none of the careful restraint of before, everything held back for three weeks finally given full permission.
Dawn light poured gold through the windows, catching in her hair, and I thought, distantly, that I would remember this exact light for the rest of my life — the specific color of the sun breaking over a woman who'd just finished grieving me properly and had chosen, fully, completely, to keep choosing me anyway.
Her hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled it up and over my head, impatient in a way that felt entirely new after three weeks of careful, unhurried rediscovery, and I answered in kind, unbuttoning her robe with fingers that weren't quite steady, both of us laughing once, briefly, when a button caught and neither of us wanted to slow down long enough to fix it properly.
It was different this time in every way that mattered. Not slow. Not reverent. Urgent and certain and a little desperate in the way two people get when they've just crossed through the last real wall between them and found nothing but want on the other side.
Her legs wrapped around me, her mouth at my jaw, my ear, murmuring my name like she was testing that it still worked, that the man attached to it was still solid and here and hers.
I answered every murmur with my hands, with my mouth at her throat, with the full unguarded weight of two years finally, entirely spent.
The kitchen tile was cold under my bare feet and the counter edge dug into her thighs and neither of us cared about any of it, too caught up in the current running between us to notice anything beyond the immediate press of skin against skin, breath against breath.
When we came together this time it wasn't the slow rediscovery of that first reclaimed night.
It was faster, fiercer, both of us gripping tight to the counter and to each other from the very first movement, her nails biting crescents into my shoulders, my hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks neither of us would mind finding later.
Every drive of my hips pulled a sharp, unguarded sound out of her, and she met me with equal urgency, her whole body arching up into mine, her heels pressing into the small of my back to pull me deeper, closer, like there wasn't enough of me yet no matter how much she got.
The kitchen filled with the low sounds of two people fully present, fully chosen, nothing held back and nothing left to fear — her breath breaking apart against my ear, my name gasped out ragged and desperate, the counter groaning faintly under the force of it and neither of us caring in the slightest.
I felt her tighten around me first, her whole body going taut and trembling, a broken cry tearing loose from her throat as she came apart, her nails dragging hard down my back, and the sound and the feel of her together were enough to pull me over right behind her, my forehead dropping to her shoulder as the current finally broke through both of us at once, hard and fast and entirely consuming, her name the only word left in my mouth as I emptied every last bit of restraint into that final, shuddering release.
The current between us built fast and broke faster, both of us gasping into the same breath, her forehead against mine, my hands braced white-knuckled against the counter on either side of her, both of us trembling through the aftershocks together.
Somewhere in the middle of it I heard her laugh, breathless, disbelieving, the particular sound of a woman who couldn't quite believe her own joy was allowed to be this large, and the sound of it undid something in my chest all over again, even mid-motion, even entirely lost in her.
Afterward, breathless, tangled together in the gold spreading dawn, she laughed — a real laugh, unguarded, echoing off the kitchen tile.
"We keep christening kitchens in this family," I said, still catching my breath. "It's a whole thing. I don't know when it started but it's definitely a pattern now."
"Whose family," she said, arching an eyebrow, still wrapped around me.
"Ours." I kissed her forehead, her nose, finally her mouth, soft this time. "The loud one with the motorcycles that buried me and then threw the best un-funeral you've ever seen."
"Knox cried twice," she said, laughing properly now.
"Don't tell him I told you that. He'll deny it to the grave."
A pause. I heard the words land a half second after I said them, and felt my own face do something complicated.
"Poor choice of words," I admitted.
Josie grabbed the dish towel off the counter beside her and hit me with it, laughing so hard she could barely land the blow, and I let her get me twice more before I caught her wrist, still grinning, and pulled her back in against my chest.
"You realize," she said, still laughing, "that we're going to have to explain to the mayor's office why the christening-kitchens joke keeps coming up. This town already thinks our marriage is the strangest thing that's happened here since the flood of '98."
"Let them think it. It's not wrong."
"It's deeply not wrong." She tucked herself more firmly against me, both of us catching our breath in the gold morning light of a kitchen that had, finally, completely, come back to life.
"Do you think Doreen Henderson's going to want to put this in the town newsletter?
'Local Resurrected Husband Continues Pattern of Kitchen-Based Incidents. '"
"I think Doreen Henderson has been personally offended since the day they took my headstone down. She's going to find a way to work me into that newsletter until the day she dies, purely out of spite that the drama's mostly over now."
"Mostly over," Josie repeated, testing the phrase. "I like the sound of that. Mostly over. Not perfectly resolved, not a fairy tale ending tied up with a bow. Just — mostly over, and we get to handle whatever's left together."
"That's the whole promise," I said. "I don't think I could offer you a better one if I tried for the rest of my life."
"Good," she said. "Because I already checked. There isn't a better one. I looked."
"You looked?"
"Extensively. Turns out four hundred thousand imagined speeches from a locked room beats every fairy tale ending I ever read as a kid. You ruined me for lesser love stories, Cormac Vale. I hope you're proud of yourself."
"Deeply," I said, and meant it, and kissed her again, slow this time, unhurried, no urgency left in it at all — just two people who'd found their way, impossibly, completely, back to the same kitchen, the same life, the same unfinished, ordinary, extraordinary future.
"I love you," I said, into her hair, simple and unguarded, no careful qualifications left to add to it.
"I love you too," she said, muffled against my shoulder. "Even furious. Even grieving. Even now. All of it, at once."
"Same body," I said.
"Same body," she agreed, and held on.