Chapter 17 #3
Not the way I’d kissed him during the marriage — quick, familiar, the shorthand of a couple who’d been doing it for years.
Slow. Careful. My mouth on his like a question, my hand on his jaw like an answer.
He tasted like hospital coffee and toothpaste and something underneath that was just him, the taste I’d forgotten I remembered, the particular chemistry of a man I’d been married to for five years and had been trying to stop wanting for fifteen months.
He kissed me back. Carefully — his body limiting what his mouth wanted to do, the ribs and the wrist and the burns creating a cage around his desire that forced everything slow.
His right hand came up to my hair. Gentle.
Not the grip of the man he’d been — confident, certain, a man who took what he wanted because everything had always been his for the taking.
This was tentative. The touch of a man who knew he’d lost the right to certainty and was asking permission with his fingers.
I pulled back. Not far. An inch. Our foreheads touching. His breath on my mouth, shallow because of the ribs.
“We can stop,” I said. “Your ribs—”
“My ribs have been broken for four days. If I can walk to the car and up two flights of stairs and sit on your couch, I can do this. I want to do this. I’ve wanted—” He stopped.
His hand was still in my hair. His voice was rough, not from the smoke anymore.
“I’ve wanted to touch you since the reception.
Since you walked into that room in the green dress and I couldn’t breathe and it had nothing to do with the suit or the champagne.
I’ve been carrying the weight of not touching you for six weeks and I’m done carrying it. ”
“Then don’t.”
I kissed him again. Deeper this time. His mouth opened under mine and the sound he made — low, quiet, from the back of his throat — traveled through me like a current, lighting nerves that had been dark for over a year.
His hand moved from my hair to the back of my neck.
My hand moved from his jaw to his chest, careful, so careful, my palm flat against his sternum where the ribs weren’t broken, feeling his heart hammer against my hand.
I leaned forward. He winced — the ribs — and I pulled back immediately.
“Let me,” I said. “You stay still. I’ll do the moving.”
He looked at me. The vulnerability on his face was raw and unguarded and I had never seen him like this — not during the marriage, not during the good years when we’d had each other every night without thinking about it.
This was different. This was a man who knew exactly what he’d lost and what he was being given back and was terrified of breaking it with a wrong movement.
I stood. Took his hand — the right one, the unburned one. Led him to the bedroom. He followed slowly, the ribs shortening his stride, and I matched his pace because the person beside me was hurting and I wanted him to know he didn’t have to pretend otherwise.
The bedroom was small. Fern’s crib against the wall, my bed taking up most of the floor, the nightstand with the lamp and the monitor and the book I’d been reading — a novel, nothing about science, the kind of escape I allowed myself at the end of long days.
The room smelled like Fern’s baby soap and my shampoo and the lavender I kept on the nightstand because the smell helped me sleep.
I sat him on the bed. He sat on the edge, his feet on the floor, his hands on his knees. I stood in front of him.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” I said.
“Everything hurts. I don’t care.”
I pulled my shirt over my head. His eyes moved over me — not the way they used to, the practiced appreciation of a man who knew his wife’s body the way he knew his corner office. Like he was seeing me for the first time. Like the skin he was looking at was new, or the eyes looking at it were.
I stepped closer. Put my hands on his shoulders. Felt the tension in them — the held breath of a man trying not to move too fast because too fast would hurt and also because too fast would risk this ending.
“Breathe,” I said.
“That also hurts.”
“Breathe anyway.”
He breathed. I felt his shoulders drop under my hands.
I leaned down and kissed the stitches on his forehead — gently, my lips against the suture line, the plain tenderness of touching a wound instead of avoiding it.
He made a sound. I kissed his temple. His jaw.
The corner of his mouth. He turned into the kiss and our mouths met and I felt his hands come up to my waist, the bandaged one careful, the other pulling me closer.
I eased him back on the bed. Slowly, guiding him down, my hands supporting his weight so the ribs didn’t take the impact. He lay back against the pillows and I climbed over him, my knees on either side of his hips, my weight on my hands and knees instead of his chest.
“You’re being very careful with me,” he said.
“You have two broken ribs.”
“I don’t mean the ribs.”
I looked down at him. His face on my pillow, in my bed, in the apartment I’d built without him.
His eyes dark and open and full of something that was not desire — or not only desire.
It was gratitude and grief and the naked awe of a man lying beneath the woman who had every reason to lock the door and was instead opening it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m being careful with you. Because the last time I wasn’t careful with us, I ended up packing boxes in blue tape and crying in an exam room. I’m going to be careful with everything from now on. That’s not fear. That’s intelligence.”
I undressed him slowly. The sweater first — easing it over the splinted wrist, lifting it carefully over his head.
The bruising on his left side was deep purple and green, the ribs visible beneath the discoloration, his body mapped with the cost of what he’d done.
I touched the edge of the bruise. He flinched. I pulled back.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “It’s not — it doesn’t hurt more than the rest. I flinched because you touched me gently and I forgot what that felt like.”
I bent and pressed my mouth to the bruise. Felt him inhale — shallow, limited, the breath of damaged ribs. My lips on his skin, on the injury, the raw intimacy of kissing the place where a man was broken because the brokenness was part of who he was now.
I moved slowly. Deliberately. Each touch an act of reclamation — not taking back what was mine, but discovering what was new.
His body was different from the body I’d known.
Leaner, harder, the year of sleepless nights and the weight of transformation written in the angles of his hips and the ridges of his stomach.
I traced the changes with my hands, with my mouth, learning the new territory the way you learn any landscape: by paying attention.
He touched me the way a man touches something he’s afraid to hold too tightly.
His right hand on my hip, the fingers spread, the thumb tracing the hollow beside the bone.
His bandaged left hand resting against my thigh, barely touching, the gauze a barrier he didn’t try to work around.
I felt his restraint like a physical thing — the desire held in check by the knowledge that he’d lost the right to take and hadn’t yet fully earned the right to be given.
“Stop holding back,” I said.
“I don’t want to—”
“I know. Stop anyway. I’m not fragile. I wasn’t fragile when I packed the boxes, I wasn’t fragile when I gave birth alone, I wasn’t fragile when I built the lab. I’m not fragile now. Touch me like you mean it.”