16. Eloise #3
“Look at me,” he says. The words vibrate against my throat where his mouth has traveled, and I open my eyes and he’s looking up at me from below my jaw and the angle makes him vulnerable and commanding at the same time and I don’t know which one is undoing me faster.
I look at him. He looks at me.
And the looking is the most intimate part, more than the hands and the mouths and the skin, because we are seeing each other, finally, fully, with nothing between us except the decision to be here and the knowledge that being here was a choice and the choice was hard and we’re making it anyway.
His hand slides under the hem of my shirt. Palm flat against my ribs, moving up, and the slowness is deliberate, giving me time to stop him, to change my mind, to pull the wall back up. I don’t.
I lean into his hand and let him find me and the finding is a reclamation, his fingers mapping territory that was always his and never explored, and every inch of contact is a sentence in a language we should have been speaking from the beginning.
I pull his shirt off his shoulders. He pulls mine over my head. The air hits my skin and his mouth follows it, tracing the line of my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, the space where the gardenia pendant used to sit.
He pauses there. Presses his lips to the bare skin, the empty place, and the tenderness of it in the middle of the heat makes my chest crack in a way that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with grief and joy colliding.
“I love you,” he says against my throat. Not a performance. Not a declaration. Just the truth, spoken into my skin, pressed into the place where his gift used to rest.
“I know,” I say. And I mean it now. I believe it now.
We move from the counter. Down the hall.
His hand in mine, leading, following, the navigation of a small apartment done by two people who keep stopping to press each other into walls and doorframes because the distance between the kitchen and the bedroom is twelve steps and neither of us can make it three without reaching for the other.
The bedroom. My bed, not his. The sheets are mine, the pillows are mine, the room is mine, and the man standing beside the bed looking at me with the expression of someone who has been given a thing he doesn’t deserve and knows it and is going to treat it with every ounce of care he has left is mine too.
Maybe. Starting tonight. Starting now.
He’s careful with me. The belly, the body, the specific geography of a woman who is carrying his child and has spent months carrying everything else alone.
He adjusts. He pays attention. He reads my face the way he used to read market reports, with complete focus, and every sound I make is data he’s cataloguing and acting on and the acting is precise and unhurried and devastating.
I am not careful with him. I pull and press and demand and the demanding is its own kind of honesty because for three years I asked for nothing and received nothing and tonight I am asking for everything and he is giving it, giving it, his hands and his mouth and his body and the broken, trying, beautiful wreckage of a man who is learning how to love someone properly by starting with the most basic language of all.
The closeness is a thing I forgot existed. Not proximity, not the careful distance of two people sharing a bed with a gap between them.
Closeness. The full-body, full-breath, no-space-between version where his skin is against mine and his breath is in my ear and the sounds he makes are sounds I’ve never heard from Oliver Ellington and will never hear from any version of him that isn’t this one, this man, this bed, this night.
When it’s over, we don’t separate. He stays close.
His body curled around mine from behind, the way it was the night before he left except neither of us is asleep and neither of us is pretending the proximity is accidental.
His arm is across my waist, his hand resting on the place where the baby is, and his mouth finds my forehead.
The forehead kiss.
The same gesture. The same placement. His lips against my hairline, warm, lingering, the press of a man who has been giving this kiss every morning for three years as a substitute for the words he couldn’t say.
Except tonight the words have been said.
Tonight “I love you” lives in the room alongside the gesture and the gesture isn’t a placeholder anymore.
It’s just love. Simple, terrifying, real.
He stays. His mouth against my forehead. His body against mine. His hand on the baby.
“Good night, Elle,” he murmurs. The new name in the old gesture, and the combination of them is the most complete sentence he’s ever spoken.
“Good night, Oliver.”
The room is quiet. The apartment is dark. His breathing slows against my hair and his arm tightens a fraction and we are lying in my bed in my apartment in the life I built without him and he is here and I let him be here and the letting is the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
I close my eyes. His heartbeat is steady against my back. The forehead kiss is still warm on my skin.
After a long time, I don’t press my fingers to the spot.
I don’t need to. He’s still here.