16. Imogen #4
From the raw exposure of letting a man I was supposed to be leaving lay his hands on me and prove, with every second of it, that he never forgot a single inch of who I am.
The tears track down my temples into my hair, and he sees them, and he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t ask. He dips his head and kisses them where they fall, my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my eye, tasting the salt of me and asking for no explanation, because he already knows.
He knows the tears aren’t pain. They’re the relief of coming home to a place I was certain I’d lost, and the terror of what it means that I still call him home, and the permission, finally, after ninety seconds and ninety minutes and ninety days of holding every piece of myself together alone, to simply let go.
My hand finds his jaw and I tilt his face back to mine and I kiss him through the tears.
Hendrix groans into my mouth, and I feel us both go over the edge at the same moment, tangled and shaking and gripping each other with the desperation of two people who know exactly how close they came to never having this again.
When we come down from the high, he doesn’t let go.
His arms stay wound around me, his chest to my back, his face buried in my hair, and we lie in the wrecked white sheets while the waves work the shore outside and the gold light moves across the ceiling in slow unhurried tides of its own.
His thumb traces idle circles on my stomach, the absent motion of a man who can’t make himself stop touching, because stopping might let the distance find its way back in.
I notice the ribbon then.
Still there, wound loose around my left wrist, migrated from my fingers to my wrist somewhere in the dark without my ever deciding to keep it on.
The faded pink of it against my skin, the reason he married me, tied to me now like I put it there on purpose.
Maybe I did. Maybe some part of me that’s braver than the rest kept hold of it all night on purpose.
“Stay,” he murmurs against the back of my neck. Not a demand. An offering, laid down soft, easy to refuse. “Just tonight. No decisions, no conversations, no deciding what any of it means. Just stay the night.”
I press back into the warm line of him. I lace my fingers through his where they rest on my stomach.
“Just tonight,” I agree, and I feel the breath go out of him against my hair, relief and disbelief in equal measure, a man who cannot believe his luck and knows better than to say so.
We sleep. Real sleep, the kind that comes when a body that’s been running on adrenaline and armor for weeks finally finds a surface and a person safe enough to fall against.
I sleep deeper than I have in months, anchored by the weight of his arm and the warmth of his body and the slow even rhythm of his breath against my shoulder, and I do not dream of empty rooms.
Next thing I know, I wake at dawn.
The reflex comes first, before my eyes open, before I’m fully anywhere.
My body does the thing a year of hollow mornings trained it to do.
It braces. My hand slides across the bed on its own, searching for cold sheets, for the dent where a body should be and never is, for the familiar nothing that has been the first sensation of every single one of my days for longer than I want to count.
My hand finds warm skin and my eyes open.
Hendrix is sitting up in the bed beside me.
Awake. Not on his phone, not typing, not composing sentences behind his eyes while his body holds a place his mind vacated hours ago.
He’s watching the tide come in through the salt-hazed glass, the gray water turning silver in the early light, and my hand is cradled loosely in both of his, resting in his lap, my fingers threaded through his like he lifted them while I slept and simply never put them down.
He feels me stir and looks down at me.
The expression on his face is the thing that undoes me more than any of it. More than the night. More than the confession in the museum, more than the ribbon, more than the whole truth about why he married me.
Because there is nothing hidden in it. No performance. No charm. No careful arrangement of features built to make me see a feeling he wants me to see.
Just a man. Looking at the woman he loves.
In the morning light. Present.
Hendrix didn’t leave in the night. He isn’t already gone behind his own eyes.
The phone is still out in the car, and the blank page can wait, and the whole loud world can wait, and every single thing that used to matter more than me can wait, because he is sitting in this bed at dawn holding my hand in both of his like the holding is the only work worth doing.
“Morning, beautiful,” he says softly.
I look up at him. My hair is a catastrophe. My makeup is a rumor. Last night’s tears are dried on my face, and I am wearing nothing but a white sheet and the faded ribbon still wound around my wrist where it ended up sometime in the dark.
“You’re here,” I whisper.
“Where else would I be?”
On a golden morning, he traced a circle into my palm and said it as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
For so long, I’m not sure I can still trust his words. I spent years learning to be afraid of broken promises.
But this time…
This time, I believe him.