Chapter Twelve
I found the last insult on a Thursday, in the credit card statement, because I did the books.
I'd always done the books. That was the joke underneath my entire marriage, that Mark ran a fund and couldn't have told you what his own kitchen cost, and so it was his wife, the easy one, the lamp, who sat down each month and reconciled the accounts, and it was his wife who found the charge from the Carlyle.
A deposit, against a booking, on the joint card. September fifteenth. One night.
Penny's actual birthday was the fifteenth. Mark had told me weeks ago, laying track with his usual laziness, that mid-September he'd be in the city overnight for an investor thing.
I called the hotel. I was Mrs. Duke, confirming my husband's reservation, and could they check we'd been given the suite we asked for, we were sentimental about it, and the young man on the phone was lovely and read it out to me, and yes, madam, all confirmed, the Empire Suite, and would we be wanting champagne on arrival again.
Again.
The Empire Suite. Our wedding night. We'd stayed there before flying to Italy, five years and change ago, and Mark had carried me over the threshold badly, laughing, both of us laughing, and we'd had champagne on the terrace in hotel robes and he'd made a toast, to the only woman who's ever known what I actually am, which I'd taken, then, as romance.
I stood in my kitchen holding the phone after the lovely young man rang off, and I waited to cry, and nothing came.
Instead something snapped. That's the only way I can put it, and it wasn't a breaking feeling, it was a setting feeling, like a bone going back into place, like a wheel dropping into its rail.
He was taking her to our suite, on our card, for her birthday, and he'd have the same champagne sent up, because it was a move that had worked before and Mark never wasted a working move.
I'd been a rehearsal. Every sacred thing in my marriage was a reusable prop, and the fury that went through me then was clean and cold and completely quiet, and it walked me upstairs, and it packed a small bag, and it put me in the car.
Mark was in the city that night. Something true had finally come of it.
I texted Chris from the driveway. Two words.
Coming over.
The reply came before I'd reached the end of the road.
Door's open.
He was standing in the kitchen when I came in, and he took one look at me and set down the towel he was holding, and didn't come closer.
"What happened."
"He booked the Empire Suite at the Carlyle for her birthday.
On our joint card. It's where we spent our wedding night.
" My voice came out level and strange. "He's going to give her our honeymoon, Chris, second-hand, with the same champagne, because it worked the first time, and I reconciled it out of the statement like a phone bill. "
Chris's jaw went hard. He started to say something, and I crossed the kitchen and stopped a foot away from him and said it first.
"I'm done waiting."
"Lily."
"You said clean. You said certain, and about us, and I've thought about nothing else since that porch, so here's my testimony, and then you can rule.
" I was shaking, and not from fear, and I let him see it.
"The suite put me in the car. I'll give you that for free, spite drove the first eight miles, and if you need me to be ashamed of that you'll be waiting a long time, because he's spending my marriage like petty cash and I'm allowed to be furious.
But spite didn't walk me up your steps. I stood in that driveway with the engine off for a full minute, and I checked, the way you taught me, know, don't believe, and what I know is this.
" I took a breath. "Certain happened weeks ago.
It happened on a porch, and before that at a drafting table, and before that in a truck with a handkerchief, and I will still be bleeding on the twelfth, and probably at Christmas, and clean is a thing I'm going to be building for a year, and I am not spending one more night of that year twenty feet from a stranger when I could spend it here.
So the question isn't whether I'm sure about you.
The question is whether you want me as I am, under construction, or whether you're going to send me home to that house one more time on principle.
Rule now, Chris. I'm standing right here. "
The kitchen was silent. Outside the window the water went dark blue to black.
"God help me," Chris said quietly, and he closed the foot between us and kissed me.
It was nothing like I'd imagined, and I'd imagined it plenty.
I'd expected careful, the porch version of him, restraint with a tide behind it.
What I got was the tide. One hand came up into my hair and the other spread flat and warm against the small of my back, exactly where it had hovered for four inches of night air, and he pulled me in and kissed me like a man cashing in six years of patience, and my whole body lit up from the points of contact outward, and I made a sound against his mouth that I'd never once made in five years of marriage.
"Last door," he said against my jaw, rough, hands already at my waist. "You can still leave,"
"Chris."
"Tell me."
"Take me upstairs."
He took me upstairs.
Chris undressed me slowly with the lamp on and looked at me the whole time, unhurried, greedy and reverent at once, and when I moved to cover the soft of my stomach, reflex, five years of reflex, he caught my wrist and put my hand back down at my side and said, "None of that.
Not in this house. Not ever in this house," and kissed the exact spot I'd tried to hide, and I stopped being able to breathe in the normal way.
He asked things. That undid me more than the hands.
Do you like this. Slower or harder. Show me.
Nobody had asked me a question in bed since my twenties, my body had been assumed for half a decade, and this man built like a door frame, thirty years of certainty in everything he did, wanted instruction, wanted the map, took my hand and put it over his and said, "Teach me tonight and I'll know forever," and I did, and he learned the way he did everything, thoroughly, filing it all away in that draftsman's memory, and then he used what he'd learned with a patience that took me apart.
His hands were rough from a lifetime of work and unbearably careful.
His mouth went everywhere without hurry, down my throat, over my breasts, along the inside of my thigh, and the first time I came it was against his mouth with his hands holding my hips steady, and it went through me so hard I heard myself say his name in a voice I didn't recognize, and he stayed exactly where he was and did it again, slower, because, he said afterward, against my hip, "The first one had five years of interference on it. I wanted one that was all mine."
When he finally moved up over me I was shaking, and he paused there, braced on his forearms, heavy and warm, and looked down at me with the lamplight on his face.
"Still with me?"
"If you stop I'll sue."
He laughed, this low rumble I felt in my own chest, and then he pushed inside me slowly and neither of us laughed anymore.
He went deep and unhurried and kept his eyes open, watching my face like it was the only readout that mattered, adjusting to every catch of my breath, and it built and built with none of the choreography I knew, no performance, no positions run like a program, just weight and heat and his voice low in my ear saying things, my name, Lily, Lily Potts, and, there, and, I've got you, and when I broke again he held still and let it take me all the way through, and then he let himself go with a sound like something surrendering, my name in the middle of it, and his full weight came down onto me after and I held it, all of it, gladly, like ballast.
We lay tangled in the lamplight for a long time. His heart slammed under my ear and slowed. His hand moved in my hair, absent, steady, like he'd been doing it for years.
"I need to say the true thing," I murmured, eventually, into his chest. "The whole way over here I thought, this is a fuck you to Mark. Those words, in my head.
"I know." No tension came into him at all. His hand kept moving in my hair. "You told me at the door, or near enough. Anger got you in the car. I've no quarrel with the car, Lily. I only ever cared what got you up the steps."
"I came over here for revenge and it turned into coming home, and I don't know what to do with that."
Chris looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached past me and turned off the lamp, and pulled me back down onto his chest, and settled the blanket over us both with one arm, unhurried, like a man securing a site for the night.
"You just did it," he said, into the dark. "There's nothing else to do with home. You just come in and put your feet up." A pause, and then, dry as sand: "And tomorrow, I'm making you the duck."
I laughed into his chest until my eyes ran, at the end of the worst summer of my life, in the last bed I'd ever have picked in June, safer than I'd been in years.
Sixteen days to the microphone.
I slept all the way through the night.