26. Karlie #2
He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a restoration.
There’s reverence in it that makes my eyes sting, his mouth following his hands, my shoulder, the inside of my wrist, the place along my ribs where the bruising used to be where he stops and stays a long moment, his lips pressed to the place I was broken, and I hold his head there and let him.
“I thought I’d lost this,” he says against my skin. “All of it. You. I sat in that hotel room with the papers and I thought, that’s it, that’s the price, and it was correct.”
“William.”
“You’re the whole list, Karlie.” His voice has gone rough and low, and he moves up over me, his weight settling home, forehead to mine.
“You said you stopped keeping the list of everything I put before you. Here’s mine.
There’s one thing on it. You’re the whole list. You always were, and I filed you under everything else because I was a coward, and I will spend the rest of my life reading it right. ”
“Show me,” I whisper. “Stop telling me and show me.”
He starts at my throat, where the locket sits, and he takes the locket between his teeth for a second, gently, absurdly, and I laugh, and the laugh turns into a very different sound as his mouth moves lower.
He is in no hurry anywhere. He relearns me like the fever afternoon, like the counter, like every good hour we ever banked, my collarbone, the crease of my elbow, the ticklish place at my hip that makes me swat at his head while he grins against my skin, actually grins, the surly man.
He spends a long time on my breasts, not hard, not the way he was at the hotel, just slow wet pulls of his mouth on each nipple until I’m arching up into him and pulling at his shoulders, and he only laughs low against my sternum and keeps going down.
When his mouth settles between my thighs the grinning stops and so does my capacity for observation.
He licks me open slowly, flat and unhurried, one hand splayed on my stomach to hold me to the earth, no fingers, nothing but his tongue moving over my clit and inside me and back, steady as breathing, and there’s no urgency in it at all, which is exactly what makes it unbearable.
The maple light fractures. I come with my fingers in his hair and his name in pieces in my mouth, and he gentles me through it and doesn’t stop, starts again, patient as gates, until I’m pulling him up my body by the shoulders because I need his weight and his mouth and all of him, now, everywhere at once.
He shows me the rest.
It’s nothing like the hotel. The hotel was a fire; this is the hearth, slow-built, banked deep. He pushes inside me face to face and stops there, seated deep, and everything in both of us goes quiet at once, brow to brow, trading breath in the red-maple light.
“Home,” he says. Just that.
And then we move, and it’s the old us and a brand-new us at once, unhurried and desperate together.
He reaches up and covers my hand on the iron rail of the headboard, fingers lacing through mine and holding on, and he fucks me like that, long slow strokes that go all the way in and stay, his other hand under my hip tilting me up so every one of them drags across the place inside me that makes me gasp, his mouth on mine the whole time, kissing me through it, everything counting, all of it said out loud.
There’s no rush anywhere in him and none in me.
It builds the way the light did in the maples, gold and gradual, until I’m clenching around him with our hands locked on the rail and his name in my mouth, and he follows with mine, deep and shaking, and after, wrapped in quilts and each other, neither of us lets go of the other’s hand for a very long time.
We surface hours later, starving, and raid the basket the owners left outside the door at some tactful point, bread and cheese and a bottle of wine eaten cross-legged in the quilts like a picnic on a life raft, and we talk about nothing, blessedly nothing, his terrible playlist opinions and the betting pool the staff ran on the garden and which of us Mrs. Potts loves more, which is not a real question and he knows it, and we fall asleep mid-sentence with the lamp still on.
I wake at dawn because the bed is cold on his side.
Panic gets one half-second, old reflex, and dies.
Because he’s there, three feet away, kneeling beside the bed in the gray-gold light in his shirtsleeves, and he’s been waiting for me to wake up, I can see it, patient the way he’s been for weeks, and in his hand is a small ring I would know anywhere, because I wore it for three years.
My engagement ring.
“You left the wedding band on your pillow,” he says quietly.
“I’ve carried it every day since that night, and it’s waiting for a day that earns it.
But this one you left in the velvet tray on the dresser, with everything my assistant ever picked out.
And I stood in front of that tray the worst night of my life and realized this was the one thing in that whole museum of outsourced affection I actually chose myself.
I sat in the jeweler’s for three hours choosing it.
You never knew that. There’s a great deal you never knew, and it’s all yours now, every fact I have. ”
“William.” My voice isn’t working properly.
“Marry me again,” he says. “Not for the families. For me. A real proposal this time, on a knee, at dawn, terrified, the way it should have been done the first time by a braver man. Say yes and I’ll spend the rest of my life making the first three years up to you.”
The maples burn red in the window. The room we finally reached holds its breath around us, six weeks late and three years late and exactly on time.
“Yes,” I say.