19. Brooke #3
He laughs, low, and the laugh turns into him lifting me, careful, one arm under me, and I wrap my arms around his neck and let him carry me through the dark penthouse to the bedroom, and he sets me down on the bed like I’m made of glass, and for once I let him, because tonight I want to be handled gently, I want the sweetness I refused him in the storm, I want all of it.
He undresses me slowly, and this is the part that undoes me completely, because he doesn’t just take my clothes off, he looks.
Adrian looks at me the whole time, at my face, at my body, at every part of me he spent two years too distracted to really see, and there is a reverence in it that would embarrass me if it weren’t so obviously, painfully sincere.
When his hands find the curve where our child is, he goes still, and his breath catches, and he presses his palm flat there, gentle, and looks up at me with his eyes wet.
“Is this okay?” he asks, low. “Are you, is it okay, like this, I don’t want to…”
“It’s okay.” My own voice isn’t steady. “You won’t hurt anything. Just, be here. Be gentle. Look at me the way you’re looking at me and don’t stop.”
“I couldn’t stop looking at you if the building was on fire,” he says, and then he’s kissing his way up my body, slow, worshipful, his mouth warm against my skin, and he says it against me, into me, a litany, “I see you, I see you, I should have seen you the whole time,” and I thread my fingers into his hair and I let the words land where the anger used to be.
When he finally moves over me, he goes slow, watching my face the entire time, one forearm braced beside my head to keep his weight off me, careful of the baby without ever making it about the baby, careful of me, and it is not the frantic collision of the cabin.
It is deliberate and deep and unbearably tender, every movement a question and my body the answer, and I hold his gaze because I can’t look away, because being seen like this, being wanted like this, without distance, without glass, without a single inch of him held back, is the thing I have been starving for the entire time I’ve known him.
“Adrian.” His name comes out broken, and he presses his forehead to mine, and we breathe together, moving together, and there is nothing careful left in either of us, only close, only here, only the two of us in the dark finding the rhythm we never let ourselves have.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, and it’s the opposite of everything the old marriage was, this man present and looking and here, “I’ve got you, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, look at me,” and I do, I look at him, and I let go, and I feel him go with me.
His mouth on my throat, my name on his lips like a prayer he’s finally allowed to say out loud, and for a long shaking moment there is no wall, no glass, no distance, no two years of loneliness, there is just this, just us, just the thing we were always supposed to be underneath all the noise.
When we come down from the high of it, he doesn’t leave a foot of air.
That’s the thing I notice, lying there in the dark, tangled up in him, his arm slung warm and easy across me and his hand resting low over our child like he’s keeping watch on the both of us. He doesn’t turn away.
He doesn’t hold himself carefully apart. He pulls me into him, all of me, against the whole warm length of him, and he tucks my head under his chin and holds on like a man who’s spent months learning exactly what it costs to let go, and I press my ear to his chest and listen to his heart slow down.
“So,” he says finally, into my hair, and I can hear the smile in his voice, and a note under it, careful and hopeful. “Start at zero.”
“Start at zero,” I agree.
“I should tell you,” he says, “in the interest of full honesty on day zero. I’m terrified.”
I lift my head and look at him. “Of what.”
“Of this.” His hand moves, slow, over the curve of our child.
“Of all of it. Of being somebody’s father when I couldn’t manage being somebody’s husband.
Of finally having the thing I want and finding out I’m still the man who forgets to look at it.
” His jaw works. “I keep waiting to feel sure, and I don’t, and I thought I should tell you that, on day zero, because the old me would have pretended he had it handled. ”
And I look at this man, my husband, lying in the dark being honestly, openly afraid instead of confidently absent, and I understand that the terror is the whole point, that a man who’s scared of forgetting me is a man who is finally, actively remembering, and I put my hand over his hand, over our child, and I hold it there.
“Good,” I say.
“Good?”
“Stay scared, Adrian.” I settle back against his chest. “The version of you that was sure of everything is the one that almost lost me. I’ll take the scared one. The scared one pays attention.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and then his arms tighten around me, and he presses a kiss to the top of my head.
Neither of us says anything else, because we don’t have to. It’s the first in the entire history of us that we are in the exact same place at the exact same time, wanting the exact same thing, with nothing at all between us.
Somewhere in the warm dark, with my head on his heart and his hand over our child, I fall asleep and dream of the house we’re going to build on a south-facing hill, with a nursery that fills up with mornings.