33. Dulcie
DULCIE
The box marked SCHOOL has arrived in the kitchen.
I find it between the kettle and a stack of bowls, my handwriting on the side, in the way of both tea and dinner.
Magnus comes in carrying another box.
“Don’t put that on top.”
He looks at the label. “I wasn’t going to.”
“You looked like you were.”
I point toward the room beside the sitting room. “These go in there. On the lower shelves.”
He puts down his box and takes mine. I follow with the smaller bag of pencils and the folder I refused to let anyone pack flat beneath the plates.
There is room for my teaching materials here. Not a temporary corner I am borrowing until someone finds a better use for it. I have measured the shelves. The paper fits without curling at the edges.
Kit is on the floor beside us on a clean mat, working at a soft toy with both hands.
“He’s got the elephant,” I say.
Magnus sets the box on the floor and sits beside him for a moment. Kit lets go of the toy in favor of his father’s finger. I begin putting things away while they negotiate the change in priorities.
The move has made the house smell of cardboard, clean wood, and whatever lunch Dad brought over in a bag large enough to feed the movers as well as us.
My parents left an hour ago to make space at their house for Kit’s planned evening and overnight stay.
They will collect him when we have finished the essentials.
Upstairs, his crib is assembled. The same crib Dad put together in the rental. He and Magnus carried the pieces in this morning, and Dad stood back afterward to let me decide whether it belonged where we first imagined it.
It did.
The green duck book is already waiting on its shelf.
I open the next box and find the gallery postcard between two novels. I put it on the desk for now, propped against the wall. The three people in the painting are still making room around their table.
On the other side of the room, Magnus has put a framed photograph on a high shelf.
“Not there,” I say.
He looks at it, then at me. “Why?”
“I’d like to see it without tilting my head.”
“I was thinking it would be out of Kit’s reach when he starts moving.”
We both look at our son, who is currently having difficulty deciding which hand to use.
“He’ll be into everything by summer,” I say.
“Then we go higher.”
“Then I stand on a chair.”
We choose a place on the wall above the lower shelf, visible from my chair and beyond small reaching hands.
The photograph is one Mom took on a timer at her house: Dad sitting at the edge, pretending he wasn’t the reason we needed three attempts; Mom beside him; Magnus beside me; Kit asleep against my chest.
Nobody has been left outside it.
Magnus gets the measuring tape. I stand back and tell him when the frame is straight. He disagrees once, checks the measurement, and concedes that my eyes are useful.
We finish the room together.
Mom takes Kit from my arms while Dad lifts his overnight bag.
“He’s eaten?”
“Yes. Everything else is in the side pocket.”
“I know,” she says gently.
“I know you know.”
She kisses my cheek.
I stand beside her car while she secures him. He looks around with interest, unconcerned that I have checked the bag twice. When Dad comes around to say goodbye, I hug him harder than he expects.
“What’s that for?”
“The crib. The lunch. All of it.”
He pats my back, then holds on properly.
“You’d better go inside before he starts arguing about the journey.”
At the door, Magnus waits beside me until their car turns the corner. Then we go into our house.
For a moment the quiet feels enormous.
I had expected the first day here to be all movement, decisions, people asking where things belong. Now the floor is scattered with empty boxes and there is nobody left to tell us what happens next.
Magnus looks at the kitchen.
“Tea first?”
“Yes.”
We find the cups. We find the tea. We discover that the sugar is in a box labeled BATHROOM because Dad used the nearest empty carton and was certain the purpose would be obvious.
I laugh until I have to sit down.
Magnus leans against the counter, smiling at me over his mug.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“That isn’t a nothing face.”
“I like you here.”
I look around the unfinished kitchen, then back at him.
“So do I.”
The words land differently from an invitation. I am not deciding whether he may stay until a certain hour. Neither of us is waiting for the other to name an end to the visit.
There will be a morning.
My school things are on their shelves, ready for it.
We have dinner on the table we brought from my rental.
There is room for a larger one, but I wanted this one while we decide. Magnus agreed. He doesn’t fit under it, so we set our plates at an angle and he sits sideways.
My wedding band catches the light when I pass him a bowl.
He doesn’t look down at it to check.
We talk about the room upstairs which still contains boxes and no bed, the shelf which can wait, the neighbor who introduced herself while carrying a watering can. He tells me what he wants to do in the garden. I point out that he has named three incompatible things for the same corner.
“I’ll draw it.”
“Draw it. Then choose one.”
He laughs, then puts his hand over mine on the table.
“I love you.”
The words no longer arrive like an answer to a question I have been pleading with him to hear. He says them in the middle of an evening, with half his dinner unfinished, as something true he wants me to know.
“I love you too.”
I let the sentence be whole. No condition spoken after it. The conditions are in how we live, and neither of us has forgotten them because the room is warm.
After dinner, we clear the table together. He reaches for a dish as I do, and our hands meet. This time I keep hold of his instead of giving way to the task.
“The bowls can wait,” I say.
He looks at me with the slow smile I have always liked, and I don’t have to apologize to myself for liking it now.
“How long?”
“Until morning.”
He kisses me beside the sink, and I answer without the old rush to discover what the kiss has settled. Nothing needs settling tonight. We have already chosen the house, the household, the man and woman standing in it.
I draw him toward the stairs.
Our bedroom is the one room we finished before everything else.
Clean sheets. Both our books. Two lamps which do not match because we each liked the one we already owned. The curtains are closed, and the sound of a car outside reaches us softly through the glass.
Magnus stops to move an empty box from the path. I sit on the bed and watch him put it beyond the door.
He comes back smiling.
I am not waiting to discover whether he will leave when I ask. He has already shown me that. Tonight, I want him here after the light is out, after the morning alarm, after the little inconveniences a shared life brings into a room.
I tell him to come closer.
He does, then takes my hand and kisses the palm. The simple tenderness of it quiets me for a moment.
“What?” he asks.
“I used to imagine this.”
“This room?”
“No. Being happy somewhere without needing to be careful about how much of it I showed you.”
He sits beside me. “You can show me.”
“I know.”
I stand, and he stands with me, and I put my arms around him.
He turns me. His hands at my hips, easy, and then I’m facing the bed with his chest against my back and his mouth at the side of my neck, and I don’t say anything.
I notice that I don’t. I notice I’m not waiting to see what he’ll do with my silence. Then I stop noticing and let my head fall back against his shoulder.
He undresses me from behind. The buttons, slowly. The zip. His palms flat on my ribs and down my sides, pushing the fabric ahead of them, and I step out of it when it reaches the floor. His mouth stays at my neck the whole time.
He isn’t in a hurry. I can feel him hard against the small of my back through his trousers, and I press into it, and his breath breaks against my ear.
“Bed,” he says.
One word. I go.
He follows me down. His weight comes over me, and I draw him closer. I hook my calf around the back of his knee to keep him there.
“Stay like that,” I say. “I want all of you on me.”
“You have it.”
His hand comes to my breast and pauses there, asking, and I put my own hand over his and press. They’re fine tonight. He learns that with his mouth, slowly, and my fingers go into his hair and my hips come up against him without any decision from me.
His shirt goes. His trousers go. He reaches for the drawer without being asked and deals with it and comes back to me, and I open my legs for him, and he doesn’t come in yet. He puts his mouth back on mine instead.
His hand slides up my back and into my hair and closes around the back of my neck, and he tips my face up to his, and he doesn’t stop, and I don’t want him to.
I open my mouth under his and give him my whole weight.
“You make a sound,” he says against my lips. “When I do this.”
He does it. His hand tightens at my nape. I make it.
“That one.” His voice is rough. “I drove home from every visit with that in my head.”
I can’t answer that. I pull him down.
He comes into me in one slow push, and my breath goes out of me in a sound I don’t recognize. His forehead drops to mine. Neither of us moves. Then I do, a small lift of my hips, and he makes a low sound that goes straight down my spine, and we stop being careful.
Nothing needs negotiating. My body knows that before the rest of me does.
He moves and I move with him and nobody is counting.
His hand stays at my neck. My heels press into the backs of his thighs.
The bed is bigger than the one at the rental, and it doesn’t matter, because we use the same square of it.
“Don’t stop,” I say.
“No.”
His mouth is at my ear and he’s saying my name and then not my name, only breath, and the heat climbs through my belly and my thighs go tight around him and I hold on to his shoulders because they’re the only solid thing in the room.
“Magnus.”
“I know. I know. Dulcie.”
I come with his hand at the back of my neck and his voice in my ear and my whole body closing around him, and it goes on longer than I expect, and he says my name once more in pieces and follows me, his weight going heavy and shaking on top of me, his breath hot against my throat.
For a while neither of us moves.
Then he lifts his head and looks at me, and I look back, and I don’t check for anything.
Later, we leave the lamps off and the door open. Nobody has a coat waiting downstairs. Nobody needs to decide what the night permits tomorrow.
“Where did you put the alarm?” I ask into the quiet.
“Beside you.”
I reach toward the table, touch my book, and find the clock just beyond it.
“That side’s yours tomorrow,” I say.
“Why?”
“You agreed to collect Kit in the morning.”
“I did.”
“And you look very comfortable.”
“I am.”
I laugh. He draws me closer, and I rest my cheek against his shoulder.
Outside, someone closes a car door. I can hear the quiet hum of a house I do not yet know well enough to identify every sound. I will learn it. Where the stairs creak. How the kitchen light falls before breakfast. Which window catches the rain first.
Magnus asks what time I need to leave for school the next day. I tell him, and we work out breakfast with the plans already in our calendars. He has a call later; I have materials to take in. Kit will need the things he always needs, regardless of how happy his parents are.
The thought pleases me.
I don’t want an evening which requires the rest of my life to stop outside the door.
“I’ll bring him back before you go,” Magnus says.
“Good.”
He tells me the garden drawing will be ready by breakfast.
“I want to see it,” I say.
He kisses my hair.
When I finally turn toward sleep, his hand rests over mine on the sheet. My band presses lightly against his finger.
In the morning, there will be a small boy coming home.
For now, I close my eyes beside my husband.