Chapter 16 #3
She sat on the arm of a chair in the middle of the afternoon with her husband's arms around her waist and her hands in his hair, and let him have his minute, and it was — she would think about this for years afterward, and never once manage to explain it to anybody — the single most erotic sixty seconds of her entire life.
Then he stood up and got her jeans off, and after that they were both past being careful.
She had forgotten how well he knew her. That was the thing that undid her, in the end — not the hands or the mouth or the weight of him, but the accuracy of it.
Six years. He knew where to put his hand.
He knew the exact second she stopped being able to keep her eyes open, and he knew what she did with her left foot, and when he found the place at the base of her spine that she had never once had to tell anybody about, she said something unrepeatable into his shoulder and felt him laugh.
"There it is," he said.
"Shut up."
"There she is."
She got him onto the rug because the chair was going to break, and got on top of him, and took him in her own hand and put him where she wanted him and sank down, and he said her name once, in a voice that did not belong to a man who had ever run anything.
She stopped. Fully seated, her hands flat on his chest, both of them absolutely still.
"Look at me," she said.
He opened his eyes.
"You said no six years ago in that study and you didn't tell me," Erin said. "Say it now. Out loud. To my face. Not to your sister, not to a piece of paper."
Graham Lockwood looked up at his wife with both hands on her hips.
"I love you," he said. "I loved you in the study. I loved you three days before that on a dock and I couldn't say it because of what saying it would have cost me with those people, and I let you carry that for five years, and I will not be quiet about it again as long as I live."
Erin put her hand flat over his mouth, and shut her own eyes, and started to move.
After that it was not tidy at all. It was thirteen months and six years and a hospital corridor and forty minutes early in a parking lot every Wednesday, and she came with her forehead against his and her fingers locked in his and made a sound she'd have been embarrassed by at any other hour of her life, and he followed about four strokes after with her name in his mouth and his whole body shaking.
Then it was just the two of them on a rug in a small apartment above a bookshop, breathing.
Down through the floor, faintly, the shop bell went, and Owen said something to somebody about the weather.
They lay there a long time.
At some point she got the blanket off the back of the chair. At some point he fell asleep for about ten minutes, which she let him do, watching a forty-year-old man sleep on her floor in the middle of the afternoon in October.
When he woke up he did not move. He lay there looking at the ceiling of a room he had never been in.
"This is it, then," he said. "This is the room."
"It's the front room. The bed's in there, we didn't get that far."
"No — the apartment. The one you bought two years before you used it." He turned his head. "I've thought about this room about four hundred times. I got the layout wrong. I had the window on the other side."
Erin propped herself up on one elbow.
"I want to tell you something," she said, "and then I want to go and get our son, because Shannon will have taught him at least two words I'll have to unteach."
"All right."
"I bought this place in April. Two years before I left." She looked at him steadily. "And I furnished it, and I made up a bed for Wyatt, and I came up here on Tuesdays and sat in that chair for an hour and then drove home to you. For two years."
"I know. I've known since the disclosure."
"Yes, but here's the part nobody knows." Erin's voice was very level. "I never once packed. Not properly. The bag in the closet had a sweater and some boots in it for two years and that's all, and any time in those two years I could have loaded a car in forty minutes and I never did.
"And I told myself for two years that it was because I was building the case.
It wasn't." She put her hand flat on his chest, over the place where his heart was going.
"It was that every single Tuesday, in that chair, I decided to come home.
Two hundred times. And I have never once said that out loud, and I'm saying it now so that you understand exactly what you're getting, because it isn't a woman who came back.
"It's a woman who never actually left. I just stopped being quiet about it."
Graham did not say anything for a while.
Then he took her hand off his chest and turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist, once, in the place she had kissed his.
"Okay," he said.
And Erin Brooks lay down on her own floor in her own building with her head on his shoulder, in a life she had built with her own hands and had now, deliberately, at thirty-six, on a Saturday in October, chosen to share.
It felt like putting down something she had been carrying since a staircase in the dark.
It felt like exhaling.