19. Imogen #2
Not dramatically. No grand gesture, no speech, no cinematic swell of the kind that would make a good scene in one of his books.
I just tear them, cleanly, straight down the middle, the way you tear up a receipt you don’t need to keep, and I drop both halves into the trash can under the counter, and I wipe my palms on my jeans, and I look at my husband.
His mouth is open. His glasses have gone crooked. The manuscript page has slid off his lap onto the floor and he hasn’t noticed, because every part of him has gone still with the work of processing what he just watched me do.
“I’m choosing you.”
My voice is clear.
Steady. Full of all the things I didn’t have in the museum or on the beach or at that podium, because this isn’t survival, and it isn’t adrenaline, and it isn’t the momentum of a crisis dragging me forward whether I’m ready or not.
This is an ordinary Tuesday evening in a sublet kitchen, with cold coffee on the counter and a manuscript page on the floor, and I am choosing my husband with clear, open, unfrightened eyes, and the ordinariness of it is exactly how I know it’s real.
Nobody arranged this, nobody planned it.
“Not because of the arrangement, not because of your last name or my parents or a viral apology or anything at all that anybody else decided for me. Because you became the man I married. Because I want you. And because I am done pretending that wanting you isn’t reason enough to have you.”
Hendrix stands up off the couch.
The manuscript page flutters. His glasses come off.
He crosses the three steps between the living room and the kitchen and stops in front of me, close enough that I can see the pulse going in his throat and the muscle working in his jaw and the fact that his eyes have gone wet, which I have never once seen from this man who controls every surface of himself for a living.
“Say it again,” he whispers.
“I’m choosing you.”
“Again.”
“Hendrix, I’m not going to stand here and repeat it all night just so you can…”
He kisses me.
His hands come up into my hair and his mouth lands on mine and the force of it walks me backward into the edge of the kitchen counter.
I grab a fistful of the front of his shirt to keep myself upright, because my knees have abandoned every ounce of their professional credibility, and the sound he makes against my lips, broken and grateful and mine, is the sound of a man who has been holding his breath for three years and has just, finally, been handed permission to let it out.
His mouth is on mine and my back is against the kitchen counter and this is nothing like the beach house.
That was tentative. Devotional. The slow, confessional reconnection of two people testing their weight on a bridge neither of them was sure would hold. But the bridge held. I tore up the papers.
I chose him with both hands and open eyes and a manuscript page still on the floor, and now his hands are buried in my hair and my fingers are knotted in his shirt and there is nothing careful left in the way we’re reaching for each other, because there is nothing left to be careful about.
I’m not thinning my resistance tonight, I don’t have any resistance left to thin.
“This counter,” I get out against his mouth, “is not comfortable.”
“We can move.”
“Not yet.” I fist my hand in his collar and drag him back into me, because moving would mean letting go of him and I am not remotely interested in letting go.
Not for a second. Not for the ninety seconds I used to ration myself down to, the careful, self-protective little intervals I measured out my own vulnerability in so it could never cost me too much at once.
Tonight there’s no ration.
Tonight I’m taking the whole thing.
His hands leave my hair and drop to my waist and lift me onto the counter in one motion that sends the coffee mug skating toward the edge. I hear it go over. Neither of us so much as glances at it.
My legs come up around him and he steps in between my thighs and the press of him drags a sound out of both of us, his low and wrecked in his chest, mine somewhere closer to a gasp that loses its nerve halfway through and turns into his name.
“This counter is too small,” he says against my jaw, his mouth already moving down the line of it.
“Everything in this sublet is too small. It’s part of the charm.”
“Your charm, maybe. My back is filing an objection.”
“Your back can take it up with the landlord.”
I pull his shirt up and over his head, because buttons are for people with patience and I am completely out of it, and the fabric clears his shoulders and I flatten both palms against his bare chest, feeling the heat coming off his skin and the fast slam of his heart underneath my hands and the way the muscles of his stomach pull tight when my fingers trail down and find the waistband of his jeans.
“After.”
The laugh that comes out of him is breathless and startled and delighted all at once, the laugh of a man who braced for careful and got handed the exact opposite.
His mouth drops to the spot just below my ear, the one he has always known undoes me completely, and my head tips back and my nails press into his shoulders and the counter gives an ominous creak underneath us that suggests we have maybe three minutes before this becomes an engineering problem.
“Okay. Moving.” His hands slide under my thighs and he lifts me clean off the counter, and I lock my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist and put my mouth against his throat, feeling his pulse hammer against my lips as he carries me the whole four steps that constitute crossing this sublet.
Hendrix doesn’t make it to the bedroom. He makes it to the couch.
We go down into the collapsed middle together and the cushions swallow us the way they always do, and I’m laughing, because this couch was not built for one grown adult let alone two and absolutely not for whatever we’re about to put it through, and he’s laughing too.
Both of us breathless and tangled and grinning at each other in the low light, and that, right there, is the part that makes tonight different from every single time before.
Because this isn’t grief. This isn’t the starving, desperate reach of two people trying to feel one good thing before it gets taken away again.
This is joy. Pure, uncomplicated, hard-earned joy, the kind that only comes from choosing the difficult thing with your whole chest and having the difficult thing turn around and choose you right back.
“Hi,” he says, braced over me on his forearms, his face hanging inches above mine, his hair a wreck where my hands have been in it.
“Hi.” I trace a slow line down the center of his chest and watch his stomach jump under my fingers. “You still have entirely too many clothes on.”
“That is a bold complaint from a woman who is currently fully dressed.”
“Then do a thing about it.”
His eyes go dark, and it’s not the slow, careful burn from the beach, not the reverent, permission-seeking hunger of a man afraid of wanting too much.
This is different. This is the heat of a man who has been handed permission completely and without a single condition attached, and is finally, finally allowed to want out loud, with none of the old fear laced through it.
Hendrix takes the hem of my shirt and pulls it up and over my head and sends it somewhere behind the couch, and then his mouth follows every inch of skin his hands just uncovered, down the line of my collarbone, into the hollow of my throat, down the center of my chest where he can probably see my heartbeat going against my ribs.
His hands find my waist, then the button of my jeans, and he gets it open one-handed while his mouth works the soft skin below my navel, and my spine arches up off the sagging cushion before I’ve decided to let it.
“Hendrix.”
“I’m doing a thing about it.” The words vibrate against my stomach, and I can feel him smiling into my skin. “As requested.”
My jeans go. His follow a beat later, kicked off and forgotten. The rest of it disappears with the specific, single-minded efficiency of two people who have already waited far longer than they ever should have and are thoroughly finished with the waiting.
And then it’s just us.
Skin and breath and the ruined couch and the ring-stained coffee table and the borrowed sublet that has somehow, over the course of a few weeks, become the most honest place I have ever lived in my life.
No mansion marble, just a small room with terrible furniture and good morning light and the man I chose out loud, pressing me down into cushions that are never going to fully recover from tonight.
I push a flat hand against his chest, and he goes, rolling onto his back and taking me with him, and I follow the motion, swinging one leg across him and settling my full weight down over his hips, and the change in angle pulls a sound out of him so completely unguarded that it makes me grin down at him.
“Your turn to look at me,” I tell him.
He looks.
God, he looks.
His hands settle on my hips, fingers spanning the bones, his thumbs stroking slow circles into my skin, and his eyes travel up the length of me with an attention that has left worship behind entirely and gone somewhere hungrier, the look of a man who is done, completely done, holding himself back, letting three years of swallowed wanting hit him all at once with nothing left in the way of it.
“You are so beautiful it makes me angry,” he says.
“That’s a new one.”
“I mean it. Three whole years of this. Three years of you, right there, right in front of me, in my house, in my bed, and I chose a blank page instead.” His grip tightens on my hips, almost involuntary. “The single stupidest man who has ever lived.”
“Oh, easily top five.” I lean down over him, my hair falling around both our faces, closing us into a small dark room of our own, and press my mouth to his, slow and deep and unhurried, because I can, because we have all the time in the world now. “But you’re improving.”