21. Willow
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Willow
Four months.
He hasn’t touched me in four months because I told him not to, and I hate him for listening.
The thought ambushes me in the middle of dinner, a dinner he cooked, because he cooks now, because he’s home by five every day now, because he’s become this impossible, infuriating, perfect version of himself that makes me want to scream.
The salmon is perfectly seasoned. The vegetables are roasted to that exact point between tender and caramelized that I’ve never been able to achieve.
Even the wine is my favorite, a pinot grigio he must have driven across town to get because the store near us never stocks it.
Four months of this. Four months of perfect dinners and considerate gestures and his hand hovering near my back when I stumble on the stairs but never quite touching me.
Four months of separate bedrooms and polite conversations and watching him transform into the husband I begged for years ago, now that I’ve spent four months holding him at arm’s length.
“You’re quiet tonight.” He sets the plate in front of me, garnished with a sprig of rosemary because of course he’s learned to garnish. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.”
“The baby?”
“Fine. She’s been kicking up a storm all day, but the doctor says that’s normal at this stage.”
“Work stuff? Glenn mentioned the fall fundraiser planning is getting intense.”
“I said I’m fine, Corey.”
He nods, accepts it, retreats to his side of the table without pushing. Because that’s what he does now. He accepts. He retreats. He gives me exactly the space I demanded and not one inch more, and it’s driving me absolutely insane.
I watch him eat, cataloguing the changes four months have carved into him.
He’s filled out again after the gaunt weeks following our separation, cooking for both of us means he actually eats regular meals now.
There’s a hint of gray at his temples now that wasn’t there a year ago, but it suits him, makes him look distinguished rather than tired.
His hands are the same, though. Those big, capable hands that I used to watch for hours when he was working, that I used to pull toward me in the dark and press against my skin because I couldn’t stand not to be touching him.
Four months since those hands have touched me anywhere except to steady me when I stumble.
Four months since that kiss in the kitchen, the one I told him meant nothing, the one I’ve replayed behind my closed eyes every single night since.
“The foundation grant came through,” he says, breaking the silence. “Glenn called me this afternoon to tell me. They’re fully funded for the next three years.”
“That’s wonderful.” I mean it. What Corey did during those four months I was holding him at arm’s length, turning his fortune into a charity and sending the first big gift to Glenn’s organization, it was exactly what I used to wish he would do.
Use his money for people instead of just piling up more of it.
“He sounded happy. Relieved, mostly. Said he can finally stop courting donors he doesn’t believe in.”
“He’s been wanting that for years. The compromise was killing him.”
“I know. You told me once, back before…” He stops, recalibrates. “Anyway. I’m glad it worked out.”
Back before. That’s how we reference it now. The time before the accusation, before the separation, before everything shattered. Like our marriage has a fault line running through it, and we’re both still learning how to walk on the new terrain.
“Stop it,” I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I intend.
He freezes with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Stop what?”
“This.” I gesture at the table, the food, him. “All of this. The perfect dinners. The perfect schedule. The perfect…” I shove back from the table, my chair scraping against the hardwood floor. “Stop being so goddamn perfect all the time.”
“I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m trying to be better.”
“Well, stop.”
“You want me to be worse?” There’s genuine confusion in his voice, which only makes it more infuriating.
“I want you to be real!” The words explode out of me, weeks of frustration finally finding an exit. “I want you to yell at me. Fight with me. Be the man who slammed his hand on the table and accused me of sleeping with my best friend. At least that man was honest about what he was feeling!”
Corey sets down his fork very carefully, placing it parallel to his knife with the precise attention to detail he brings to everything. “You want me to yell at you.”
“I want you to do something other than accept everything I throw at you with that sad patient face! I told you the kiss meant nothing, and you said okay. I told you I still wasn’t sure about us, and you said okay.
I told you to sleep in the guest room indefinitely, and you said okay.
I could tell you I want to move to Antarctica and raise penguins, and you’d probably start researching parka brands! ”
“What do you want me to say, Willow?” His voice is still calm, still measured, and it makes me want to throw my wine glass at his head.
“That it doesn’t hurt? That watching you keep me at arm’s length for four months hasn’t been the hardest thing I’ve ever done?
That I don’t lie awake every night wondering if you’re ever going to let me back in, or if I’m going to spend the rest of my life on the other side of a door you’ll never open? ”
“Yes! Say that! Feel that! Stop being so…”
“I feel everything.” He stands up so fast his chair tips backward and crashes to the floor.
Neither of us moves to pick it up. “I feel it every second of every day. But you told me to give you space, so I gave you space. You told me not to push, so I didn’t push.
You set the rules, Willow. I’m just trying to follow them. ”
“Maybe I don’t want you to follow them anymore!”
The words hang in the air between us, electric and dangerous. I can hear my own breathing, harsh and ragged, and his, matching mine beat for beat. The space between the table and the counter has never felt so small, so charged, so full of everything we haven’t been saying.
“What?” His voice has dropped, gone rough in a way that sends heat pooling low in my belly despite the anger still crackling through my veins.
“I said…” I stop, suddenly aware of what I’ve admitted. Of the door I’ve just kicked open after spending four months barricading it shut. “I didn’t mean…”
“Yes, you did.” He’s moving toward me now, slow and deliberate, and I back up until my shoulders hit the wall beside the refrigerator.
“You meant every word. You’re angry because I’ve been respecting your boundaries.
You’re angry because I haven’t pushed. You’re angry because you wanted me to fight for you, and instead I’ve been waiting for permission that was never going to come. ”
“That’s not…”
“Tell me I’m wrong.” He’s close now, close enough that I can smell him, soap and cedar and something underneath that’s just him, the scent that’s lived in my memory for twelve years.
“Tell me you haven’t been lying in that bed every night thinking about the kitchen.
Tell me you don’t remember exactly how it felt when I kissed you.
Tell me, Willow, and I’ll back off right now.
I’ll go back to my side of the house and my cold showers and my patient waiting, and I won’t say another word about it. ”
I should tell him. I should push him away, rebuild the walls, protect myself from another heartbreak. I’ve spent four months convincing myself that keeping him at a distance was the smart thing to do, the safe thing, the only way to guard my heart against the man who shattered it so completely.
But my heart doesn’t feel guarded right now. It feels like it’s trying to beat its way out of my chest and throw itself at him.
“I can’t tell you that,” I whisper. “Because it would be a lie.”
His face shifts, hope and hunger and a desperate kind of relief all tangled together.
“Willow…”
“It was never hormones.” The admission costs me, cracks open a wall I’ve been hiding behind for four months.
“I was lying. I’ve been lying to both of us this whole time because I was scared.
I’m still scared. But I’m so tired of being scared, Corey.
I’m so tired of sleeping alone when you’re right down the hall.
I’m so tired of pretending I don’t still want you when wanting you is all I can think about. ”
“Then stop pretending.” He takes my face in both hands, and the touch after four months of nothing is so intense it makes me gasp.
“Stop protecting yourself from me. I know I hurt you. I know I have years of making up to do. But I can’t do that from the other side of a wall, Willow.
I can’t prove I’ve changed if you won’t let me close enough to show you. ”
“What if you hurt me again?”
“Then you leave. For real this time. But what if I don’t?
” He presses his forehead to mine, and I can feel him trembling, this man who built an empire through sheer force of will, shaking because he’s afraid I’ll push him away again.
“What if I spend the rest of my life being exactly the husband you deserve? Don’t you want to find out? ”
I should think about this. I should be rational, measured, careful. I should protect the heart that’s still healing from the last time I trusted him completely.
Instead, I grab the front of his shirt and pull his mouth down to mine.
The kiss is nothing like the one in the kitchen four months ago.
That one was tentative, questioning, a test neither of us was sure we’d pass.
This one is fire and fury and four months of starvation on both sides.
His hands slide from my face into my hair, tilting my head back, and he kisses me like he’s been drowning and I’m the first air he’s tasted in months.