16. Imogen #2
Because he’s giving the question its full weight, and I can watch him choose between the easy answer and the true one, the easy one shorter, the true one costing more.
“Because I was afraid,” he says, “of what would happen if I didn’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the start of one.”
He turns to face me fully, and the wind off the water pushes his hair across his forehead and he doesn’t fix it.
“I was afraid because I watched you dance and the wanting was so immediate and so total that it rearranged my entire life around itself in about four minutes, and I had no idea what to do with a feeling that size. I’d never had one.
Not with Bridget, not with anyone, not once in my life.
And I knew, standing in that theater, that if I didn’t find a way to be near you, I was going to spend the rest of my life writing about the absence of you and calling it art. ”
“So the arrangement was convenient.”
“The arrangement was a door. I would have found another one if that door hadn’t existed.” He pauses, and his voice drops.
“Yet you let me believe it was obligation. For three years.”
“Because obligation was manageable. Obligation I understood.” His jaw works.
“Choosing you meant looking straight at the size of what I felt, and the size of it terrified me, and the terror sent me into the work, and the work became a habit, and the habit became our marriage. I turned the bravest thing I’ve ever done into a thing I was ashamed to look at directly, because looking at it directly meant admitting how much I stood to lose. ”
Hendrix reaches for my hand.
Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me every chance in the world to step back before he touches me.
His fingers close around mine, warm in the cold morning air, and his thumb presses into the center of my palm the exact way it always has, the way it did on the first real morning of us, the one before the wedding when we lay tangled in gray light and he traced circles into my hand and I thought, foolishly, that I finally understood the man I was about to marry.
“I’m not hiding anymore.”
His voice is low, and the wind nearly takes it out to sea.
“Not behind the work, not behind the fear, not behind my father’s mistakes.
I’m standing right here, on this beach, telling you that the marriage was never the arrangement.
The marriage was the bravest thing I ever did.
And I know I don’t get to have it back just because I finally figured out how to say that.
But you asked me why, and that’s why. There’s nothing underneath it I’m still keeping from you. ”
The last of my resistance, the final reinforced wall I built out of months of loneliness and weeks of pure stubbornness and the absolute, unbending refusal to be the woman who goes back, thins to a membrane.
A breath would tear it. A single touch.
I look at this man on this cold beach, holding my hand, telling me the truth I’ve been waiting three years to hear without ever letting myself know I was waiting for it.
Underneath the anger, underneath the exhaustion, underneath every defense I built and maintained and reinforced, I finally find the thing I’ve been refusing to name since the day I signed the papers.
I never stopped loving him.
The divorce was never a cure. It was a tourniquet on a wound that kept bleeding right through it, because the love was still there the whole time, pumping, relentless, refusing to close.
But here he is. Showing up. Finally, unmistakably, no audience, no agenda, his phone abandoned in the car and his hand wrapped around mine and the truth in his mouth where a performance used to live.
He’s showing up.
My free hand lifts.
My fingers find his jaw, the stubble rough against my palm, and I feel his whole body go rigid under my touch, every muscle locking with the effort of not moving, not reaching, not doing the thing his body is so obviously straining to do, because he’s learned, finally, at a cost I watched him pay all night, that the choosing has to be mine.
“If I do this,” I say quietly, “it is not forgiveness instantly, it’s hard to forget everything in the blink of an eye.”
“I know.”
“The deal was one day, and this is still one day, and tomorrow I might get in that car and tell you it’s over the whole drive home.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Hendrix.”
“I know,” he says again, and there’s no argument in it, no angling, no attempt to convert a single thing I’m giving him into more than I’m giving.
“It’s one day. It’s whatever you decide it is.
I’m not going to pretend it’s more than that to keep it, because pretending is what I did last time, and I would rather have the truth of one day than the fiction of a lifetime. ”
My thumb traces the line of his jaw.
His eyes fall shut. A breath leaves him, unsteady, and the sound of it goes straight through me in a way I am completely done pretending doesn’t affect me.
“I just need it to be mine,” I tell him, and my voice isn’t as steady as I’d like.
“My choice. Not the arrangement, not the families. Not the momentum of a night that got away from us in a locked room. Mine. After three years of every important thing in my life being decided for me, I need to be the one who decides this.”
“Yours.” His eyes open, and they’re dark, and the word comes out of him rough and low and absolute. “It’s yours, Imogen. All of it. Whatever you want, however you want it, whenever you want to stop. It has always, always been yours.”
I look at his mouth.
And finally, I stop fighting.
I kiss him first.
Then I fist both hands in the front of his shirt and I pull him down to me and I put my mouth on his with every ounce of the wanting I’ve been carrying for months, and the sound he makes against my lips, low and involuntary and completely wrecked, is worth every wall I built and every single one I’m about to tear down.
His hands come up to my face, both of them, framing my jaw, his fingers sliding back into my hair, and he holds me there, not pulling, not steering, just holding, his palms warm against my cold cheeks while I kiss him with the appetite of a woman who has been starving and only just remembered what food is.
Because I need this to be mine.
So I take.
His mouth opens under mine and the taste of him floods me, coffee and morning and him, the specific flavor of my husband that I have spent weeks lying to myself about forgetting, and my body answers before my brain can get a word in.
The heat drops low and pools between my hips.
My skin goes tight and awake from my scalp to the soles of my bare feet, every nerve I own waking at once, and the sound that comes out of me is not remotely dignified and I could not possibly care less.
“Imogen.” Hendrix says my name against my mouth, and it isn’t a question and it isn’t a warning, it’s closer to a prayer, and the way it leaves him pulls a wire tight and low in my belly.
“Imogen… are you sure? Because if you’re not, we stop right now, and I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go and never say a word about it. ”
“Stop talking.”
I pull back just far enough to look at him, my fists still knotted in his shirt, his hands still cradling my face.
His eyes have gone black at the centers, his breathing’s gone ragged, and the restraint in every locked line of his body, the visible effort it is costing him not to take over, not to crowd me, not to do the thing every straining muscle in him is clearly begging to do, is the single most attractive thing I have ever watched a man do.
“I’m sure. I’ve been sure since I woke up on your chest this morning and my body knew before I did that I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“The beach house.” His voice comes out gravel. His thumb drags across my lower lip, slow, back and forth, and it is making it genuinely difficult to hold a thought. “It’s right up the dune. If you want a bed. If you want walls. Whatever you want, I just need you to say it.”
“I want,” I tell him. “All of it. Say yes and stop asking.”
“Yes.” It’s barely a breath. “God, yes.”
He takes my hand and we go up the dune barefoot, my heels abandoned somewhere on the sand behind us, his jacket already gone, shed and dropped at some point neither of us noticed.
The beach house is small and white and unlocked, because this stretch of coast never sees a stranger, and he shoulders the door open and I pull him through it by the shirt.
The morning light comes through the salt-hazed windows and turns everything soft gold.
The white sheets on the unmade bed, the pale wood floor, the long gray stretch of ocean framed in the glass. It’s spare and clean and completely, blessedly private, no phones, no cameras, no audience, just the sound of the waves and our breathing and the rustle of fabric as he turns to face me.
“Your pace.” His hands drop to his sides, deliberately open, deliberately still. “Whatever you want. However you want it. I follow you.”
The control in that sentence nearly takes my knees out from under me. Not the words. What they cost him.
Because I can see the price of them, the muscle jumping in his jaw, the way his fingers curl and uncurl against his thighs, the open war between the man who wants to close this distance in one stride and the man who has finally understood that the taking was part of what broke us.
So I close the distance for him.
I start on his buttons.
My fingers work down his chest one at a time, and with every one more of him appears, the warm golden stretch of him I’ve been forbidding myself to picture for weeks and picturing every single night anyway.
His chest lifts under my knuckles. His stomach goes tight when my fingertips graze the skin below his navel, and the flex of it sends a bolt straight through me that lands low and stays and pulses.