Chapter 16 #2
That was the first thing that undid her — that after seven months of a man being careful with her, of ten feet of yard and a cushioned chair and a truck at the end of a parking lot, he came across the grass and kissed her like the thing he had actually been the whole time, which was starving.
She got a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and he made a sound against her mouth that she felt in her whole body, and she was aware of about four things at once: the sun on the side of her face, the fence wire on the tailgate, her own heart going, and the enormous ridiculous inconvenient fact of a nine-month belly between them.
"I can't — " she said, laughing into his mouth. "Shane. I'm the size of a truck."
"Shut up."
"I'm serious, this is going to be an engineering problem — "
"Jenna Bishop," he said, with his forehead against hers, breathing like he'd run somewhere, "I have thought about nothing but you for two hundred and twenty days. We will solve the engineering problem."
They did not make it to the house.
They made it to the barn, which was closer and which was, in every sense that mattered, the room both of them actually lived in.
He got the door shut with his shoulder and then took her face in his hands again and stood there just looking at her for a second, and Jenna said, "Don't you dare get sentimental on me now," and he said, "Too late," and kissed her again.
He undressed her the way you handle something you have been given back.
The green shirt came off over her head and her own self-consciousness arrived — at thirty-eight weeks, in daylight, with her body doing the enormous thing it was doing — and she watched him look at her and understood, with a lurch, that there was nothing in his face but wreckage.
"Okay?" she said.
"No," Shane said. "Give me a second."
He put his hand flat on the curve of her, low, the way she had done alone in the dark for seven months, and he bent his head, and Jenna Bishop stood in the middle of the Redbud barn with her husband's hand on their daughter and her fingers in his hair and did not say a single word.
"Okay," he said, eventually. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Bed's upstairs and it's twenty years old and I'm not carrying you anywhere in your condition."
"There's a couch."
"There's a couch," he agreed.
He was careful with the arranging and not with anything else, and that turned out to be exactly right.
He got her down on her side on the old couch under the high window with a folded blanket under her hip, and he came down behind her, and the whole length of him was against her back, and she felt his breath go out against her neck like something breaking.
"Tell me if — "
"I'll tell you."
His hand came around and up. He knew this body.
That was the thing she had not let herself think about in seven months, and it arrived all at once: he knew exactly where, he had always known, twenty years of a man learning one woman, and it was the cruelest possible advantage and she had wanted it every single night since September and had refused to admit it.
He cupped her breast and she made a noise and he said, "Sore?" and she said, "Everything's sore, don't stop," and he laughed against her shoulder blade and did not stop.
His hand went down. She was already — God, she had been since the yard, she had probably been since a piano bench in March — and when he touched her she said his name in a voice that did not sound like hers.
"There she is," Shane said.
And Jenna went absolutely rigid.
He froze. She felt it go through him — the horror, instant and total, a man realizing what had come out of his mouth.
"Jenna. Jenna, I didn't — "
She reached back and got a handful of his hair and held on.
"No," she said. "No. It's ours. He can't have it, and she can't have it, and I'm taking it back."
"Jenna — "
"Say it again."
He said it again, into her neck, wrecked: "There she is."
"Again."
"There she is."
And then she was crying and moving against his hand and it did not matter at all which of those was which, because he was saying it over and over into her shoulder like a man saying a prayer he had lost the right to, and she was taking every single one of them back.
When she came it went through her like weather up a valley, slow and enormous and shaking, and he held her through the whole of it with his hand flat and his mouth against the back of her neck and said nothing.
Afterward he tried to make her lie still and she was not having it.
"Come here."
"Jenna, you don't have to — "
"I've had a very trying eight months, Shane, and I would like my husband, and if you say one more careful thing to me I'm going to get up and drive home."
So he came.
It was slow because it had to be, and awkward twice, and they laughed once, and neither of those things took anything out of it.
He got behind her again and got one arm under her head and the other around her, low, holding the whole weight of the front of her, and when he pushed into her the sound he made was not a sound she had ever heard him make in twenty years.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, God. Jenna."
"I know."
"I'm not going to — " He stopped, and his forehead came down against her shoulder. "Give me a minute. I'm not going to last four seconds and I'd like to not."
"You've got two hundred and twenty days on you."
"Yeah."
"Then don't last," she said. "I've got the rest of my life for you to last."
He moved and it was careful and deep and completely unhurried, and it was — she thought this clearly, at the time, and never once revised it — it was the least performed thing that man had ever done in her presence.
He said her name three times. He did not say anything else at all. And when it went through him he made a wrecked broken noise against the back of her neck and held on to her like a man in water, and Jenna held his forearm across her chest with both hands and let him.
They lay there for a long time with the light going gold through the high window and the whole barn ticking around them.
His hand was on her belly. He had put it there without asking somewhere in the last minute and she had let him, and neither of them had said anything about it.
Then the baby moved — a big one, a full slow roll, the kind that had been keeping her up since March.
Shane's whole body jolted.
"That's — " He couldn't get it out. "Jenna. Was that — "
"That's her."
"That's her."
"That's what she's been doing to me at two in the morning since Easter," Jenna said, and then had to stop, because he had made a sound behind her that she had heard from him exactly twice before in twenty years.
She turned over, which took some doing, and got her hand on his face.
Shane Bishop was crying — not gracefully, not photogenically, in the ugly halting way of a man who has not done it since he was a boy and does not have the machinery for it.
"I missed all of it," he said.
"You missed some of it."
"I missed all of it. I missed every single — " He stopped and put the heel of his hand against his eye. "I'm not asking you for anything. I want to be clear that I'm not — "
"Shane."
"Yeah."
"Ask me for something," Jenna said. "Just once. Go on. You've got eight months of credit and you've never once spent it."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Can I come to the next one," he said. "The appointment. Can I come inside the building."
And Jenna Bishop laughed, and put her forehead against her husband's chest, and cried for the second time since December.
"Yeah," she said. "You can come inside the building."
They went up to the house at dusk and she walked through it like a woman viewing a property.
He let her. He stayed two rooms behind her the entire time and did not narrate one single thing, which she noticed, because the old Shane could not have crossed a room without providing commentary.
The kitchen was clean. That was the first surprise. Not tidy-for-company clean — lived-in clean, a man who had been washing one plate at a time for eight months. The table was where it had always been and there was a legal pad on it and a coffee cup with a ring in it.