Chapter 15 #2
I noticed because I did the same thing. Every Sunday at my mother's table, every shift at the hospital, every room I'd ever walked into and made feel effortless for the people inside it.
Duke did it with charm. I did it with competence.
The machinery was the same. He laughed at Reese's next joke a half beat before it landed, the early laugh that told her the room was with her.
He stood up to check the pie before Diane had to ask, pulling it from the oven with a dish towel, setting it on the counter without breaking stride.
He was performing, being the good son. I recognized the performance because I ran the same one, and seeing it clearly for the first time did something in my chest I wasn't expecting. Recognition. The private exhaustion of holding a room up so nobody else has to carry anything.
The meal wound down. Coffee. Pie that was better than it had any right to be. Ray on the porch with the dog. Reese pouring me a glass I declined. Henry asleep against Duke's leg on the couch, Caroline lifting him off with practiced hands.
Diane handed Nova back to me on the porch. Her hands lingered on the carrier handle for a beat, and she looked at me. The look held something she wasn't going to say with words. Nova was welcome here. We were welcome here. The door was open whenever we wanted to walk through it.
"Thank you," I said. I meant it completely.
Duke and I walked down the porch steps to the truck.
Nova in the carrier between us. The Sunday light was gone, the sky purple above the tree line, the porch light throwing yellow behind us.
I looked back once at the house. The kitchen window was lit.
Diane was at the sink, and Ray was beside her with a dish towel, talking about something, his mouth still going.
She was laughing. The radio was still on.
The cab was quiet after all that noise.
Duke put the key in the ignition. Headlights on. He didn't put it in gear. He sat with his hands on the wheel, looking at the driveway, and the evening was settling onto him—the performance dropping away now that the audience was inside.
"Thank you," I said. "For taking us to meet your family."
He looked over at me.
"Your mom held her like she'd been doing it for years, Duke. She knew exactly how Nova sleeps. Nobody told her."
"That's my mom."
"And your dad asked me about my job like it mattered. Not like he was checking a box. Like he actually wanted to know."
"He did want to know."
"I'm saying thank you."
I leaned across the cab and kissed him on the cheek. Quick, light, the kind of kiss you give someone when the words aren't enough, and your body fills in the rest.
He went still. Then his hand came up to my face. His thumb traced my cheekbone, and he held me there, close, his eyes on mine.
"Don't thank me for giving my daughter a family, Aud."
The same thing he'd said in the parking lot after the pediatrician. Don't thank me for being her father. The same quiet refusal to let me treat his presence as a gift instead of a fact.
He leaned in and kissed me. Not the cheek. My mouth. Slow, deliberate, his hand still on my face. I let him. I felt myself let him—felt the door I'd been holding shut for weeks swing open, not because he pushed it but because I stopped bracing against it.
I broke it first. I didn't go far. My forehead against his.
"Come home with me," I said.
He kissed me again. Then he put the truck in gear.
The drive was short. My hand found his on the gearshift, and he turned his palm up to hold mine, and neither of us said anything. Nova slept in the back.
We moved through my apartment in the quiet choreography of parents with a sleeping baby. Duke set the carrier down. I went to the nursery, lifted Nova out with both hands under her back, and laid her in the crib with my palm on her chest until her breathing steadied. Monitor on. Door pulled to.
I came out of the nursery and closed the door behind me.
Duke was waiting in the hallway. His hands at his sides, his eyes on me. Not moving toward me. Letting me come to him.
I crossed the hall and kissed him.
His hands came to my waist and pulled me in.
Not politely. Not the careful way he'd been touching me for two months, passing the baby, brushing my shoulder, keeping his hands where a co-parent's hands belonged.
He pulled me against him, and I felt what the last seven weeks had cost him—the restraint in his arms giving way all at once, his mouth on mine with a need that made my knees soften.
I pulled at his shirt, working the buttons. He pulled back just far enough to look at me.
"Audrey." Softly. No grin. "I've been wanting to touch you for months."
Months. Since the wedding, since the pact, since the morning he walked out of my apartment, and neither of us called. He'd been holding this the entire time, and I could see the full weight of it on his face.
"Then touch me," I said.
He pulled my shirt over my head and stopped.
His eyes moved down my body, and I felt the impulse to cover myself—the reflex I'd been running for weeks, turning sideways in the mirror, pulling the robe tight, cataloguing every place where my body had become someone I didn't recognize.
The softer skin at my waist. The marks on my hips.
Breasts that belonged to my daughter now.
He didn't look away. He looked at me like I was something he'd been starving for, and the hunger on his face was so open it made my breath catch.
Not despite what my body had become. Because of it.
His hands came to my hips, and his thumbs found the marks, and he bent his head and kissed them.
Not carefully, not with the cautious tenderness of a man trying not to remind me.
He kissed them like they were part of what he wanted.
I'd not felt wanted in almost a year. Needed, yes.
By Nova, by the floor, by my mother, by every person who required something from me.
But needed and wanted were not the same thing.
Needed was a shift you show up for. Wanted was a man's hands shaking against your skin because he'd been holding himself back for months, and the holding just ended.
I took his face in my hands and brought him up to me. I walked us to the bedroom because this time, I wasn’t being carried anywhere. I was choosing.
When we came together, his whole body was taut with want, and the restraint in him was for me—because he knew my body was still tender in places and he wasn’t going to rush past that.
I could feel both things at once, his hunger and his patience, and the tension between them broke something open in me I didn't expect.
He wanted me. This version. The postpartum version, the tired version, the version with the marks, the softness, and the body I hadn't felt at home in for months.
He wanted her. That was the thing that undid me.
He said my name against my temple, barely a sound, and his voice cracked on it. I pulled him closer. For a long time after that, I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
After, we lay in my bed. His arm across my waist. My back against his chest. The room was dark except for the hallway light, the thin stripe under the door I left on so I could get to the nursery without tripping.
His hand was flat against my stomach, warm and steady, and he didn't move it, and I didn't want him to.
I didn't know what this was. I knew what it wasn't. It wasn't a pact on the edge of my bed at six in the morning. It wasn't a Tuesday night someone would forget by Thursday. I was in my bed with the father of my daughter, and I wasn’t pretending to be anywhere else.
I turned my face into his shoulder. He didn't wake up. His arm tightened around me by a fraction, the unconscious pull of a body that had decided where it wanted to be.
I closed my eyes and let out the breath I'd been holding since the truck.