33. Zoe #2
And after that there was no more talking and no more almost-fires and no more careful anything.
It was the storm getting into us, the wind and the want and the whole white roaring world narrowed down to this one thing, to him and me and a guttering candle and an old bed knocking its rhythm against the wall.
He moved in me deep and certain and I rose to meet every stroke of it, my legs locked around him, my hands gripping the muscle of his back, the two of us finding the rhythm that belongs to nobody else on earth and learning it all over again.
He said my name into my hair like a man holding the one fixed thing in a world that has come loose at the corners.
We had spent a whole season being so careful, so gentle, so braced for every way a thing this good can be taken, and tonight we let all of it go and simply took each other, unafraid.
I felt it building in me a long time before it broke, that slow unbearable gathering, and he felt it coming too, and he moved to chase it, shifting the angle, slowing and then driving deeper until I could not hold it off one second longer.
When it broke it broke through all of me at once, and I turned my face into his shoulder and bit down to keep from waking the house, going to pieces around him, and he followed me over a breath later with my name breaking in his mouth, pushing in deep and going still while it took him, his whole body drawn tight and then let loose against mine.
I held him through it while he shook. I held onto him after, while the wind raged and drove the snow against the glass and the candle he had saved burned low and steady, and our hearts came back down out of our throats one beat at a time.
A whole year of fear had burned clean off me, and I lay there wrung out and lit up and more alive than I had let myself be in longer than I could count.
We lay tangled and breathless and grateful in the dark, and that was the moment Biscuit chose for his entrance.
He came up over the side of the mattress with the gravity of a far larger animal, conducted a brief inspection that found us morally lacking, and then, having written the humans off as a lost cause, burrowed straight down under the covers and packed himself into the warm hollow behind my knees as though it had been booked in his name.
“We have company,” Jamie said into my shoulder.
“He pays no rent, he has opinions, and he turns up exactly too late to be any use. He’s basically family.”
Jamie laughed, the real one, the one that still surprises me every single time, the one I have privately decided is the entire reason for everything.
He drifted toward sleep the way he has only lately learned how, heavy and trusting, one arm thrown across me like an anchor, his breath leveling out against the back of my neck.
The storm had not eased at all. It flung itself at the house and screamed down the stovepipe and buried us deeper by the minute, and inside it we were one small warm animal thing, breathing, safe, alive.
And I lay there in the circle of him, with the dog a warm lump tucked in behind me and a child sleeping safe down the hall and a man I loved going slow and soft into sleep against me, and I felt the word rise up in me the way it had risen once before, on Christmas, when we had pressed our mouths to it and swallowed it down together because we were both still too afraid.
But I was done swallowing things. I had spent a marriage swallowing things, and a year learning how to stop, and I was not going to lie in the arms of the first person who had ever made me feel safe and keep the truest thing I owned locked behind my teeth out of fear of what he would or would not say back.
So I said it. Quietly, into the dark, into the warm skin of his arm where it crossed my chest, so quietly that the storm very nearly took it, but I said it out loud, all of it, the word I had not said to a man in years and had never once in my life meant the way I meant it now.
“I love you.”
And then I held my breath.
The silence after it was the longest of my life.
I did not know whether he was awake. I did not know whether he had heard me, or whether the storm had swallowed the words before they reached him, or whether he had caught every syllable and was lying very still on the far side of them, deciding.
I did not know which of those I was the most afraid of.
There is a kind of brave that is really only refusing to take a thing back, and I lay inside that particular brave with my heart going hard, and I waited.
He did not speak.
The wind howled and packed the snow against the windows and the candle guttered down toward nothing, and he did not speak, and I could not tell whether he was asleep or only holding very still, the way I had held still a hundred times to keep from answering something too big.
And I did not take it back. I let it stand there in the dark between us, the words still warm in the air where I had set them down, the question inside them still unanswered, and somewhere in the waiting, with the storm singing the whole world down to white, I fell asleep with my love finally spoken and his answer still out there somewhere, on its way or not coming at all.
I would find out which. But not that night.