Chapter 6 #2
She wakes up slowly. She does not jolt. She comes awake the way she fell asleep — gradually, in pieces, becoming aware of her body and her surroundings in the order that occurs to her.
She becomes aware of the pillow first. Then the quilt.
Then her hand on my chest. Then me. She freezes for half a second.
I feel it — the small tightening of her hand on my shirt, the catch in her breath.
Then she relaxes.
She does not move her hand.
She lifts her head, slowly, and she looks at me.
I have turned my face toward her at some point in the night.
We are looking at each other. Her hair is in her eyes.
Her face is sleep-warm and softer than I have seen it.
The grey at her temples is silver in the dawn light.
The line between her eyes — the line she has had since she was twenty-one — is right there, and I am close enough to touch it, and I do not.
She says, "You stayed."
I say, "You told me to."
"Yes."
She is quiet for a beat. Then she says: "Are you all right."
I think about that.
"No," I say. "But I am — but I am fine. I am — yes. I am all right. I don't know which one. Both."
She almost smiles.
She says, "Same."
She lays her head back down on my shoulder.
Her hand stays on my chest. We do not get up for another forty minutes.
Callum is going to wake up at seven. We have the kitchen to ourselves until then.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks.
We just — we just lie there, in a bed that was a ghost story for seventeen years, and we breathe.
The seventh night is the night.
It is not — it is not planned. We do not announce it.
It happens because both of us have decided, without telling each other, that we are not going to keep pretending.
Callum has gone to the clubhouse for the weekly pack supper, which goes late, which means he will be back after eleven.
The cabin is ours. The dishes are done. The fire is low in the stove and the lamps are at the dim setting and Willa is on the couch with her feet tucked under her, and I am in the chair across from her, and we have been talking for an hour about nothing — about the boat shop she wants to open, about the men she wants to hire, about whether goats can in fact be trained to come when called, which Toad insists they can — and at some point in the middle of the conversation she has gone quiet, and she is looking at me with her chin in her palm, and her face is very still.
She says, "Come here."
I stand up.
I cross the room. I sit down beside her on the couch — close, but not touching her — and I wait.
She does not look away from me.
She says, "I forgive you, Kael."
The wolf in me makes a sound I do not have a name for.
I say, "Willa, you don't —"
"Don't tell me I don't have to."
"You don't."
"I'm telling you anyway. I have been carrying it for seventeen years.
It's mine to let go of. I'm letting it go.
I am letting it go in your kitchen on the eighteenth night of February in the year I have come home, and I am letting it go because I have looked at it for long enough and I am done carrying it.
I forgive you. It is mine to give and I am giving it. Do you understand me."
"Yes."
"Do you accept it."
I look at her. The wolf in me has stopped breathing again. He is — he is at attention inside my chest. He is waiting for the answer too.
I say, "Yes."
I say it because if I do not accept the gift she is giving me I will be the man who refused her one more thing, and I have refused her enough. I take it. I take it with both hands.
She leans forward.
She kisses me.
It is slow. It is unhurried. She comes across the space between us the way she came across the kitchen four nights ago — without rushing, without hesitation — and she puts her mouth against my mouth and she stays.
Her hand comes up to my jaw. Her thumb presses against the hinge of my jaw and her fingers curl behind my ear.
Her mouth is warm. Her mouth tastes like the coffee we have been drinking and like something underneath that is just her, and I have not — I have not been kissed in this manner in my life.
I have been kissed. I have not been kissed slowly.
I have not been kissed by a woman who is in no hurry and has nowhere to be, by a woman whose hand on my jaw is telling me, very plainly, I have decided, I have decided, this is not a moment of weakness or impulse, this is a thing I have decided.
I bring my hand up.
I bring my hand up slowly because I do not trust it. I lay my palm against the side of her face. My thumb finds the line between her eyes, the one I have been trying not to touch, and I touch it. She makes a small sound against my mouth. She turns her face into my palm.
I deepen the kiss.
Carefully. Carefully. I am still — I am still the man who is afraid he is going to break this, that any sudden movement is going to send the wild thing back into the trees.
I open my mouth, just a little, against hers.
She does the same. The kiss goes from a kiss to a kiss, and her hand slides from my jaw down to my collarbone and her fingers curl into the collar of my flannel and she pulls, gently, and I follow.
I follow her down onto the couch.
I brace one hand on the cushion above her head and the other I keep on her face, and I am over her, and she looks up at me with her hair fanned out on the cushion and her cheeks pink and her mouth wet and she says, "Take this off," and she tugs at my flannel, and I sit up enough to take it off.
I pull it over my head. I drop it on the floor.
I have a t-shirt underneath and she pulls at that too and I take it off, and I am bare-chested over her on the couch and her hands come up and she lays both her palms flat on my chest.
She looks at the scars.
I have a lot of them. The long pale one across my left side from a knife in 2017.
The small puckered one at my shoulder from a bullet that should have killed me in 2014.
The cluster of three round ones along my ribs from a fight at twenty-four that I do not remember the cause of.
The thin white ones across my knuckles from years of collection work, the kind of scars that are too small to remember and accumulate anyway.
She traces the long one with her fingertip.
"This one's new," she says.
"2017."
"What happened."
"A man with a knife who didn't want to pay what he owed."
"Did you collect."
"I collected."
She almost smiles.
She traces the scar all the way down to where it disappears into the waistband of my jeans, and her hand stops there, at my hip, and she looks up at me and she waits.
She is not going to ask. She has already asked.
She has asked all night, every night, for two weeks, in a hundred small touches, and she has decided already, and now she is waiting for me to decide, and I am — I am deciding now.
I bend down. I kiss her again. I kiss her harder this time.
She makes a sound and her hand at my hip pulls me down against her, and I let myself come down — slowly, taking my weight on my forearms so I do not crush her — and her body comes up under me, her hips, her chest, the soft give of her against the long hard line of me, and I am — I am thirty-nine years old and I am undone by the weight of a woman against my chest.
I get her shirt off.
I do it slowly. I unbutton each button with one hand because the other hand will not leave the side of her face.
She has a long flannel and seven buttons and I undo them one at a time and she lies still under me and watches my hands the whole time, and the watching is its own kind of intimacy, the way she has been watching all week — patient, unhurried, decided.
I open the flannel. She has a soft cotton undershirt underneath, faded, blue.
I leave it. I touch her shoulders first. I run my hands down her arms and back up.
I push the flannel off and she sits up enough for me to pull it off her completely and I drop it on the floor with mine.
I kiss her throat.
I open my mouth against the soft place under her jaw and I let her feel my breath before my lips, and her pulse jumps under my tongue when I find it.
I taste her skin — clean cotton, the lavender of Della's soap, the faint salt from where she has been at the stove all night, the warm underlying smell of her that I have been carrying in my nose for two weeks of porch nights without permission.
I drag my mouth slow along the ridge where her collarbone meets her shoulder, and she makes a sound — a low sound, an oh — and her hand comes up to the back of my head and her fingers go into my hair, gripping, pulling me down harder.
I kiss the soft skin beneath her ear. I use the edge of my teeth there, lightly.
She arches. Her hips come up off the cushion and press against me through the thin barrier of her jeans and I feel the heat of her against me even through two layers of denim, and the wolf in me makes a sound against the back of my throat.
I kiss down the line of her neck to the hollow at the base of it.
I rest my tongue there for a beat in the warm cup of it, feeling her pulse.
I kiss the space between her collarbones.
I kiss the place where the cotton of her undershirt begins, and I pause there with my mouth pressed flat to her sternum and her heartbeat hammering against my lips.
She says, "Kael."
"Yes."
"The bed."
"Yes."
I stand up. I lift her with me — she comes up easily, her arms around my neck, her legs hooked at the small of my back — and I carry her the twenty feet to the bedroom.
I do not look at the bed. I do not let myself look at the bed and think about whose bed it used to be.
I look at her face. I lay her down on the quilt and I follow her down and I put my mouth back on hers.