Chapter 17 #3
"Ms. Brooks." He was undoing the buttons at the back of her dress, badly, one at a time, with the concentration of a man defusing something.
"Ms. Brooks, whose name is on the deed of this building, and the mortgage of this building, and the lease of the shop downstairs, and who is, as of about six hours ago, married to a man who parks in the lot behind the church like everybody else. "
"There are nineteen spaces in that lot."
"There are nineteen spaces in that lot," he agreed, and got the last button, and pushed the dress off her shoulders, and stopped talking.
They made it to the bed this time, which felt like an achievement and which they both found funny at the exact same moment, and the laughing went on longer than either of them expected and did not spoil a single thing.
He took her wrists and put them over her head and kissed her throat, and she got a leg around him and turned him over, because she could, and because after a year of this it was a running argument neither of them had any interest in settling.
"Every time," he said, from underneath.
"Every time."
"I don't even mind."
"I know you don't. That's why I do it."
She sat up over him with her hands flat on his chest and her hair down and the streetlight coming in through the window she had sat at on Tuesdays for two years being a woman with a gun in a drawer.
He put his hands on her thighs and looked up at her with an expression she had spent seven years learning to read and could now, finally, read instantly.
"Say it," she said.
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you," Graham said. "Erin. I love you, I love you, this is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I am going to say so out loud until you're sick of it."
"I'm never going to be sick of it."
"I'm counting on that."
She took him inside her, slowly, watching his face the whole way down, and he said something incoherent and got his hands on her hips, and after that they took a long time about it because there was no reason on earth to hurry.
It was easy. That was the thing. It was easy in a way she had not known was available to people — the two of them in a warm room at half past two in the morning, a year into a life, laughing when the headboard did something, finding each other's hands.
She came with his thumb where he had put it and her forehead against his and her mouth open on a sound she no longer had any interest in muffling, and she felt him let go about a minute later with his arms locked around her and her name said once, quietly, into her collarbone, like a man setting something down.
Afterward she lay across his chest and he traced something on her back with one finger, over and over, and she was almost asleep before she worked out what it was.
He was writing her name.
Not Lockwood.
Brooks.
Erin started to laugh, and could not stop, and had to press her face into his shoulder.
"What."
"Nothing."
"Erin."
"Nothing," she said. "Do it again."
She woke at half past seven because the delivery came at seven now and the back door of the shop had a particular voice.
The light was doing its October thing over the roofs across the street. Beside her, her husband was asleep on his front with one arm over her, breathing the way he had breathed for seven years, which she had once been able to identify from four rooms away in a house on a peninsula in the dark.
Erin lay still and let herself have it.
She was thirty-seven years old. She had a son who was seven, asleep three miles away in a house with a fire in it, who could read anything you put in front of him and who had practiced with the cushion.
She had a second book at forty thousand words with nine hundred dollars a month in it, and a third one already elbowing at the back of her head.
She had a building. She had a friend downstairs with a lease, and a friend on the water with a boat that was slowly losing, and an old woman in Camden who had bought a book in a shop.
And she had this man, who had said it out loud in front of fifty-one people at four o'clock in the afternoon.
There were four blue ledgers in a box under the window seat in the other room.
She had not opened one in two years. She was not going to burn them, either — she had thought about it, once, and had decided that a woman who had spent five years writing down exactly what happened was not going to start setting fire to the record now.
They could sit there. Somebody could read them in fifty years and find out that she had been right about everything, which she had been.
But she did not need them anymore, and that was what a year of ordinary time had proved.
Graham stirred and did not wake and pulled her in closer.
"Hey," Erin said.
"Mm."
"Wake up."
"No."
"Wake up. I want to tell you something."
He got one eye open. His hair was ridiculous. He was forty-one years old, and forty pounds of him had come back over two summers, and he had a bruise on his shoulder from three hundred pounds of somebody's filing cabinets.
"You're my husband," she said.
Graham Lockwood smiled at his wife in a bed above a bookshop on a Sunday morning in October.
"I know," he said. "I was there."
And Erin kissed him, and the sun came all the way up over Main Street, and downstairs somebody unlocked the door of a shop that stood in a building she owned, and the two of them stayed exactly where they were.