Chapter 5 #3
I do not say anything. There is nothing to say.
I put one hand on the back of his head and I press his face into me and I let him do what he has not done in seventeen years, and the kitchen is quiet around us, and the woodstove ticks, and somewhere outside Callum is laughing with the younger wolves at the bonfire, and somewhere on a mountainside Ronan is in the ground saying, again and forever, I forgive you, I love you, do it now, and the man whose face is pressed into my stomach is finally — finally — letting the sentence land.
He cries for a long time.
I stand there for all of it. My hand on his head.
My other hand on his shoulder. My back beginning to ache and my face wet and my breath coming slow and even, because if I am going to be the thing he is holding onto right now I am going to be still, I am going to be still as a porch post, I am going to be exactly as still as he needs me to be.
When he is done he does not move for a while.
He keeps his face against me. He breathes against the cotton of my shirt.
He smells like the laundry he brought over yesterday, the lavender and the cedar and the something-else that is him, and I close my eyes and I let myself smell him back, and the wall — the wall on my side, the one I did not realize I had also been building — comes down too, and I stand there in the wreckage of two walls in a kitchen at seven o'clock at night and I think: all right. All right. This is where we are.
He lifts his head finally.
His face is wet. He does not try to hide it.
He looks up at me from the chair and his eyes are — they are the eyes of a man who has just been forgiven, and I have not forgiven him, not in words, but the body knows things the words do not, and his body has been told something tonight that his words have not caught up with yet.
He says, "Willa."
I say, "I know."
He says, "I —"
"I know, Kael."
I do not move my hand from his head.
He does not move his arms from my waist.
We stay like that for another minute. Two. I do not know how long. The pot on the stove starts to burn and neither of us reaches for it and I think, somewhere far back in my head, that's dinner ruined, and then I think, we'll eat eggs, and then I do not think anything for a while.
Eventually I sit down.
I sit down on the floor beside his chair, because my legs are tired and I do not want to walk back to the table, and he slides off the chair and sits down beside me on the floor with his back against the table leg, and we sit on the kitchen floor with our shoulders touching and we do not say anything for a long time.
He says, finally, "Did he — was he afraid?"
I look at him.
I say, "No, Kael. He wasn't afraid. You told me already. He told you. He wasn't afraid because you were going to do it right."
He closes his eyes.
I say, "And he loved you. And he forgave you.
And I — I — am not all the way there yet, but I am closer than I was an hour ago, and I am closer than I was a week ago, and I am going to keep getting closer.
I want you to know that. I want you to know I am moving in that direction.
I am not — I am not promising you a destination.
But I am promising you the direction. All right? "
He does not open his eyes.
He says, "All right."
He says, "Thank you."
He says it the way a man says it when the word is not big enough and he uses it anyway because there are no other words and he needs to give me something, and thank you is what he has.
I take it.
We sit on the kitchen floor for a long time.
Eventually I get up. I scrape the burnt pot.
I make eggs. He sets the table for two. Callum is still at the bonfire and will not be back for hours.
We eat eggs at the table, across from each other, in the lamplight, and we do not say anything important.
We talk about the truck. We talk about the goat Toad has acquired against everyone's wishes.
We talk about Della's hands, which have been bothering her in the cold.
We do not talk about the kitchen.
But the kitchen has happened. It is between us. It is going to be between us forever now.
When he leaves, I walk him to the door. He stops on the porch. He turns back. He says, "Goodnight."
I say, "Goodnight."
He goes.
I stand at the door and watch him walk down the path, and when he is out of sight I close the door and I press my forehead to the wood and I stand there with both my hands flat on the door and I breathe.
I do not know what we are going to do tomorrow.
I do not know what I am going to do tomorrow.
But I know that for the first time in seventeen years there is a man in this compound who has been allowed to weep, and the woman who allowed it was me, and the woman who allowed it is going to be in the same cabin tomorrow morning at breakfast and the man who wept is going to walk through the door for coffee and we are going to keep going.
We are going to keep going.
I take off my shirt. I hang it on the peg.
It smells like him.
I do not mind.
I go to bed.