Epilogue #2
And I look up at my husband, in the hallway of our finished house, with our daughter asleep down the hall, and I feel the thing I have not had the time or the body or the space to feel in months come rushing back all at once.
Low and warm and certain, and I decide that the laundry can wait and the dishes can wait and the whole rest of my life can wait, because right now I want my husband and I finally, actually get to have him.
“Show me to the bedroom,” I say, “like we’re not two exhausted people who’ve forgotten how this works.”
“Brooke.” He grins, and it’s the old grin, the one from before everything, the one I fell for across a table before. “I could find that bedroom blindfolded. I drew half of it. Poorly. You fixed it.”
He takes my hand and walks me down the hall to our room, the one with the windows that look out over the dark hills and our father’s tomatoes coming up in the moonlight, and it is nothing like the cold cabin and nothing like the desperate reconciled dark of the penthouse, because this time there’s no storm and no wall and no wreckage and nothing to prove.
This time it’s just ours. This time we have all the time in the world, and a door that locks, and a bed we picked out together arguing about mattress firmness for an hour, and the specific unhurried confidence of two people who already know they’re staying.
He undresses me slowly, but there’s no reverence in it this time, no careful worship, there’s just delight, his hands sure and warm and familiar as they slide the straps of my dress down my shoulders and let it pool on the floor, and he takes his time, his palms mapping the length of my back, my waist, the curve of my hips, like a man reacquainting himself with a favorite country.
I fumble the buttons of his shirt because my hands aren’t as patient as his, and he laughs low against my throat.
“We’ve got time,” he murmurs. “We’ve got time, slow down.”
“We absolutely do not have time, that baby is a ticking clock.” I give up on the buttons and just pull the shirt over his head, and he lets me, still laughing, and then the laugh dies in his throat when I press myself against the bare warm length of him, skin to skin, and his hands come up to cradle my face and he kisses me like he has all night, which we both know he does not.
We fall into the bed together, and it is easy, that’s the thing that undoes me, how easy it is now, how well he knows me, how well I know him, no negotiation, no learning, just the deep worn comfort of a body you’ve mapped and a person you’ve chosen and chosen and chosen again.
His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, lower, unhurried, learning me all over again in the low light, and I arch up into him and thread my fingers into his hair and let myself feel every slow deliberate thing he does, no anger to rush it, no grief to complicate it, nothing but want and warmth and the luxury of time.
When I can’t stand the slowness anymore I push him onto his back and climb over him, and he goes willingly, his hands settling at my hips, and he looks up at me in the low light with an expression that isn’t the desperate hunger of the storm or the aching reverence of the reconciliation, it’s better than both, it’s happiness, plain and warm and slightly disbelieving.
A man looking up at his wife in the bed of the house they built and understanding exactly how close he came to never having this.
“There you are,” he says softly, but it’s not the wrecked way he said it in the cabin, it’s easy now, it’s a fact, it’s a man greeting the best part of his life.
“God, I love you.” He says it like it costs him nothing and everything at once, like a thing he’s been saving.
“I love you. I don’t say it enough. I’m going to say it every single day for the rest of my life until you’re sick of it, and then I’m going to keep saying it. ”
“I’ll never be sick of it.” I brace my hands flat on his chest and feel his heart going hard and fast under my palm, and I sink down onto him slow, watching his face the whole time, and his eyes go dark and his hands tighten on my hips and he lets out a breath like he’s been holding it for years.
“You went two years without saying it once. You’ve got catching up to do. ”
“Then I’d better start now,” he says, rough, and I begin to move, slow and deep, and he meets me, his hips rising to mine, one hand splayed warm and possessive across the small of my back and the other coming up to cup my jaw so he can keep looking at me, because he does not stop looking at me, not for a second, and I don’t let him.
I set the rhythm and he lets me have it, lets me take exactly what I want, his jaw tight and his breath ragged and my name spilling out of him low and helpless every time I move.
“Brooke, God, Brooke,” and it builds slow and deep and warm between us, no anger burning it down, no grief chasing it, just the two of us and the dark and the enormous quiet joy of finally being allowed.
Then he sits up under me, unable to stay still any longer, wrapping both arms around my back and pulling me flush against him, chest to chest, close as two people can get, and the new angle makes me gasp against his mouth and he swallows it, and we move together like that, wrapped around each other, upright and close and unhurried, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing the same air, my arms locked around his neck and his hands roaming my back, holding me like he never intends to let go, which, I understand now, he doesn’t.
“I love you,” he says again, into my mouth, into my skin, a litany now, easy, free, a man who spent two years unable to say it making up for lost time, “I love you, I love you,” and I feel the words land in all the places the silence used to live.
“I’ve got you,” I tell him this time, because I get to be the one who says it now, and he makes a sound against my mouth that’s half a laugh and half a thing breaking open.
His arms tighten, and I feel the moment crest and take us both, and I hold on tight and let it, feeling him come apart underneath me exactly as I come apart above him, the two of us clinging together in the dark of our own room, in our own house and there is no distance left anywhere, not an inch, not a breath, nothing at all between us.
We lie tangled in the sheets, both of us grinning like idiots at the ceiling, catching our breath, and he pulls me into the crook of his arm and I put my head on his chest and we don’t talk for a while, we just breathe, in the good dark, in the quiet, in the life we somehow got to keep.
“Can I tell you a thing?” he says finally. “And you’re not allowed to make fun of me.”
“No promises.”
“I keep waiting to wake up.” His hand moves slow through my hair.
“That’s the truth. Every morning I open my eyes and for one second I’m braced for it to have been a dream, the house, you, her, all of it, and to be back in that glass box alone with a book nobody real ever loved.
It doesn’t feel like a thing I get to have, Brooke.
It feels borrowed. Like somebody’s going to come and tell me there’s been a mistake and take it back. ”
I lift my head and look at him, this man who almost lost everything and knows exactly what it’s worth because of it, and I climb up and hold his face in both my hands the way I did the night I came back to him.
“Nobody’s taking it back,” I say.