22. Tess
Tess
He doesn’t answer for so long that I nearly take it back. Then he sets the guitar down on the carpet, carefully, so it doesn’t make a sound, and turns with his shoulder against the wall.
“I’d spend the rest of my life getting to be somebody it was safe for you to have said that to.”
“That’s not an answer to the question.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got that isn’t a promise. And I don’t think you want a promise from me.”
“No,” I say. “I really don’t.”
We go to my room and leave the light in the hall burning.
It spills across the floor in a narrow gold stripe, enough for me to see him without making the moment feel exposed.
This is nothing like the hallway. That was anger with its hands on us.
This is quieter and somehow more frightening, because there is nowhere for either of us to hide inside it.
He catches the hem of my sweatshirt and pauses. “Still okay?”
“Yes.”
“You can change your mind.”
“So can you.”
His mouth twitches. “Not a chance in hell.” There he is. Not the man from the interviews or the hollow-eyed stranger who first sat on my floor with a notebook. Shane, dry and impossible and looking at me like taking off my sweatshirt might be the most important work he has ever done.
“Then stop hovering,” I say.
“I’m trying to be respectful.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
“Tess, I am hanging on by a spiderweb here.”
I laugh before I can stop myself. The sound changes his face. Some of the fear leaves it, and when he pulls the sweatshirt over my head his hands are steadier.
He kisses my shoulder, then the inside of my wrist, then the soft place below my ear that has always made my thoughts come apart.
He remembers that. He remembers everything.
The slow drag of his mouth, the pressure of his hand at my waist, the way I need him to hold still for one breath before giving me more.
“Tell me what you want,” I whisper.
He goes quiet. I curl my fingers around his wrist. “Out loud. Nobody gets to write it for you.”
“I want to stay.” His voice is rough against my throat.
“I want to wake up here when nothing dramatic has happened. I want to complain about the coffee and step on that plastic ring and know which cupboard the clean bottles are in. I want your mother letting herself into the house and pretending she didn’t.
I want Sadie yelling from the crib and you stealing all the blankets. ”
“I do not steal the blankets.”
“You commit crimes against bedding.”
“Shane.”
“I want you.” The humour leaves him. “I want you when you’re angry. I want you when you’re careful. I want every ordinary version you’ve been keeping from me because I taught you I couldn’t be trusted with any of them.”
My throat tightens. “And right now?”
His gaze drops to my mouth. “Right now I want to make you forget how to be careful for a while.”
“Then do it.”
He kisses me hard enough to push me back onto the mattress, but the moment his weight settles over me he slows again. His palm moves down my stomach. Lower. He watches my face as his fingers find me, and when my hips lift he lets out a low sound that goes through me like a struck chord.
“That,” he murmurs. “I missed that.”
“You’re talking too much.”
“You ordered me to talk.”
“I reserve the right to revise.”
“Denied.”
I catch his hair and pull him down. He laughs against my mouth, then makes me pay for it with a patient, relentless rhythm that leaves no room for laughter.
He knows when I am close before I tell him.
He always did. This time he does not hurry to prove it.
He keeps me there until I am shaking beneath him, until I say his name with no anger left in the sound.
When he finally moves between my thighs, he stops with his forehead against mine.
“Look at me,” I say.
His eyes open.
“Stay.”
“I’m here.”
He eases into me slowly, watching every change in my face. The stretch steals my breath. His does not sound much better. For a moment neither of us moves, our bodies remembering each other while everything else tries to catch up.
“Tell me,” I whisper.
“You feel so fucking good.” The words break out of him. “You always did. I used to leave this bed and spend weeks pretending I wasn’t still here.”
“You were good at pretending.”
Pain flashes across his face. He does not look away. “I know.” I tighten around him and his breath catches.
“No speeches,” I say. “Not now.”
“Thank God.”
Then he moves. Slowly at first, deep enough to make my fingers lock on his shoulders, then harder when I ask for it.
There is nothing polished about him now.
He loses the rhythm, finds it again, says my name like a plea and a curse.
I tell him exactly what I want, and he gives it to me without trying to turn my pleasure into proof of anything.
When I come, he keeps his eyes on mine. He follows with my name broken against my mouth, still looking because I asked him to, because this time neither of us is allowed to disappear.
Afterward he does not get dressed or retreat to the window.
He lies on his stomach with one arm across my waist, breathing like a man who has finally stopped running.
“For the record,” he says into the pillow, “you still steal the blankets.”
I pull the sheet higher over my shoulder. “Go home.” His arm tightens. “Cruel woman.”
“You love me.”
He lifts his head. There is no flinch in him now, no glance toward a door.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.” He falls asleep with his hand open against my stomach.
I lie awake a little longer, listening to him on one side of the wall and Sadie on the other, and for the first time the two sounds belong to the same life.
In the morning there’s a car parked across from the house.
I see it from the kitchen with the coffee going.
Silver, two guys in it, one of them with a long lens down between the seats.
I stand at the window with a mug and wait for the thing to happen in my chest, and it happens, because I’m not a superhero, and I put my hand flat on the counter and breathe through it.
He comes in behind me with Sadie on his hip.
“How long?”
“For a while, probably.”
He looks. I watch him run the math I’ve watched him run a hundred times, the exits and the angles and the version where somebody drops him at the corner and he comes up the alley.
“There’s a gate through the back.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve used it.”
“You have used it every time.”
He’s quiet a second. Then he shifts Sadie up and hands her to me and goes to get his boots.
“What are you doing?”
“Walking out your front door.”
“Shane.”
“Not with her. She’s not going out there and she’s not going to be in a frame with me, ever, and that’s not a conversation.
” He’s already at the entryway. “But you’ve got the session in Bouldin at ten.
You have to leave anyway. So either I go out the back like I have every time, and you drive past those two by yourself with our kid in the back seat, or I walk out with you. ”
I look at a man standing in my entryway with his boots half on. I call my mother. She arrives quickly and takes Sadie into the back of the house and shuts the door and doesn’t ask, and I love her more than I know how to put in a sentence. Then I get my bag and my keys.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I know. That’s most of the reason to.”
He opens the door. The car doors go before we’re four steps down the walk and there’s the shutter, that machine-gun stutter, and one of them talks the whole time the way they do.
His name, then mine. Are they together. Is the baby inside.
Have you forgiven him. He repeats that one because he wants a reaction, because they get paid for the frame where you react.
He doesn’t pose. He doesn’t stop and turn and give them a clean one to make them go away, which I have now watched him do in a parking lot and which works.
He doesn’t put his arm around my shoulders for it.
He doesn’t do the hand at the small of the back that means we’re together in the language of these photographs.
He takes my hand.
Halfway down my own front walk on an ordinary morning near the end of September, with the neighbor’s sprinklers going, in front of two men who’ll sell it before lunch.
He takes my hand the way you’d take somebody’s hand crossing a street.
And holds it all the way to the car, and opens my door, and doesn’t look back at them once.