Epilogue #2
“I spent a year trying to write a book about love and failing at it, because I was writing from a distance, and love is not a thing you can describe from the outside. You have to be inside it. Standing in the middle of it, surrounded by the mess and the fear and the specific devastation of needing someone so much that the needing makes you stupid. I was too afraid to stand there. So the page stayed blank.”
He pauses. His eyes lift off the book and find me, across a whole room of strangers, and what crosses the distance between us isn’t a performance.
It’s a look. The kind that says I wrote this for you, and I’m reading it to them, but you are the only person in this room whose ears I actually care about.
“You taught me how to stand there. Not by asking me to. Not by waiting for me to figure it out. By leaving. By walking out with a suitcase and your dignity and the quiet certainty that you deserved more than a man who hid behind his work because the alternative was feeling the entire weight of what you meant to him.”
My eyes are wet. I press my spine into the bookshelf and my hand over my mouth, because this is the last letter. The final entry in a year of handwritten pages, each one naming a truth too small for a grand gesture and too large to fit in a text.
The millimeter lift of my ring finger off a pen. My tea order that changes with the weather. The ankle that never healed quite right. The way I hum the opening bars of a waltz under my breath when I’m nervous and don’t know I’m doing it.
Every detail he ever quietly cataloged, every piece of me he memorized and carried and flatly refused to forget, gathered up now into a single dedication and read out loud to a room full of strangers and one wife in the back who is trying with everything she has not to sob in a bookstore.
“This book is for you,” he says, and he’s reading straight to me now, the pages abandoned, the words coming up from somewhere much deeper than print. “Every page, every line. You’re all my poetry is about. Always, forever.”
He closes the book. The room is silent.
“So… To Imogen.” He lifts the book slightly, a toast, a gesture so plain and so completely unperformed that it lands harder than any speech could. “My beautiful ballerina, my wife. The whole story. Thank you for the second chance to write it.”
The room erupts.
Applause, the real kind, the kind that comes out of people who just heard a thing that mattered and are answering it in the only language they’ve got on hand.
Hendrix stands at the front of the room and takes none of it for himself, because his eyes are already back on me, and the look on his face is the one from the third row, the one from the sidewalk, the one from the museum bench at dawn.
I mouth two words across the room, through my tears, through the crowd, through the whole rebuilt architecture of a life I came so close to losing.
Come here.
He’s already moving.
He reaches me in the back of the room and his hands are on my face before the applause has even finished, and his mouth is almost on mine when I press one finger to his lips.
“There are still people here,” I whisper.
“I don’t care.”
“You’re at a book signing. These people paid money.”
“They paid for a book. They’re getting a show.”
But he pulls back, barely, his forehead coming to rest against mine, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones, and the grin on his face is the single most dangerous version of the Hendrix Carver charm, the one that knows exactly what it does to me and is deploying it with full, shameless intent.
“Stay. Wait for me. Twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
“You’re negotiating?”
“I’m setting a deadline. You work well under those. Fifteen minutes. Sign the books, shake the hands, get everyone out the door.”
“And then?”
I lean in. My lips just brush his ear. “And then you can read me the dedication again. Privately.”
His whole body pulls taut against mine. I ease back with the most innocent expression I can build on short notice, which is not remotely innocent, and I get to watch the precise instant his professional composure catches fire and only barely survives the blaze.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says, and his voice has dropped a full register from where it lived thirty seconds ago. “Starting now.”
Hendrix turns and walks back to the signing table, and I watch him go, and the watching is pure uncomplicated pleasure, the pleasure of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and intends to enjoy every second of it.
He signs those books faster than any author has signed anything in the recorded history of publishing.
The bookstore empties.
The manager locks the front door behind the last stragglers with a knowing smile and a “take your time, we don’t open until ten tomorrow,” and then it’s just us.
The two of us, alone in a room full of boxes.
His boxes. His book. My name threaded through every page inside every one of them, our whole story stacked in cardboard columns that climb from the floor to the display tables where copies fan out beside a poster with his face on it.
“So.” He leans back against the signing table, arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other, the posture of a man who is very comfortable and very aware of the effect he’s having. “You wanted a private reading.”
“I said that?”
“You said that.” He picks a copy of the book up off the table. Opens it to the dedication page. “Shall I start from the top?”
“You memorized it.”
“I wrote it. Obviously I memorized it.”
“Then put the book down.” I cross the room toward him, slow and deliberate, letting him watch me close the distance the exact way he watched me cross a stage from the third row. “You don’t need the book.”
“I’m beginning to suspect the book was never really the point.”
“The book was never the point.” I stop in front of him, close enough that my hands find the front of his shirt, the fabric warm under my palms, his heartbeat going fast against my fingers. “You were the point. Showing up. You, Hendrix. That was always the point.”
His arms come uncrossed. His hands find my waist and pull me into the space between his legs where he’s leaned against the table, and the feel of his body against mine in a room full of his own words about me sends a current straight through my bloodstream that makes rational thought a luxury I can no longer afford to buy.
“Do you want to know my favorite part of tonight?”
He’s playing with the hem of my cardigan, his fingers finding the strip of bare skin between it and the top of my leotard, tracing idle, unhurried patterns against my hip.
The touch is light and casual, a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and has decided to take his sweet time doing it. “Not the line out the door. Not the applause. Not the part where a total stranger cried while I signed her copy.”
“A stranger cried?”
“Three strangers cried. But that isn’t my favorite part.”
“What’s your favorite part?”
“You.” His fingers slip fully under the cardigan and spread warm across the small of my back.
“Standing in the back of the room in your rehearsal clothes, hair up, leotard on, not one single person in the whole place recognizing you. You were watching me, and you were grinning, and you were mine, and nobody in that entire room knew it but me.”
“That is a deeply possessive favorite part.”
“I am a deeply possessive man.” He pulls me in closer, until there’s no daylight left between us. “Have I somehow failed to make that clear over the last three years?”
“You’ve made it aggressively clear.”
“Good.”
His mouth finds the side of my neck, the spot just below my jaw where the tendon meets the curve of it, and his lips press there, slow and unhurried, with the specific targeted attention of a man who has committed every inch of this territory to memory and is revisiting it purely for the pleasure of watching what it does to me.
It does quite a lot. My hands slide up his chest and into his hair.
“We’re in a bookstore,” I remind him, or possibly remind myself.
“We’re in my bookstore. Temporarily. The manager said to take our time.”
“She meant with the cleanup.”
“I’m choosing to interpret her broadly.” His teeth graze my earlobe and a sound gets out of me that echoes off the shelves in a way that would be mortifying if I still had any interest in being mortified, which somewhere in the last five minutes I have decided I do not. “Tell me to stop.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
His laugh vibrates against my throat, low and delighted, the laugh of a man who spent three years too frightened to enjoy a single second of this and is making up for every lost minute with a thoroughness that borders on scholarly.
His hands work the cardigan off my shoulders and it drops onto an open box of his novels, and the sight of it, my clothes on his books, my body pressed to his in a room built out of our story, does a thing to both of us that moves the timeline forward considerably.
“The floor,” I tell him. “Now.”
“The floor. Of a bookstore.”
“Among the boxes. Among your books. Among every single page in this room with my name printed on it.” I pull his shirt up and over his head and send it sailing onto the stack nearest us. “Right here.”
His eyes go dark with a hunger I have seen before, more than once, but never aimed at me with this much pure joy running underneath it.
He pulls me down to the floor with him, the two of us sinking together into the narrow space between the stacked boxes, my back coming to rest against the smooth cardboard of a carton stamped with his publisher’s logo.
His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is nothing like the desperate reconnection on the beach or the fierce declaration in the sublet. This one is playful.
Greedy. Unhurried. The kiss of a man who has all the time in the world and fully intends to spend every second of it taking his wife apart among his own novels.
“This is extremely on brand for you,” I manage against his mouth. “Seducing your wife in a room full of your own books.”