Epilogue #3
“I’m a committed artist.” His hands work the leotard down off my shoulders, peeling it away with the specific practiced patience of a man who has undressed a dancer before and understands the engineering involved. “I create immersive experiences.”
“Is that what this is?”
“This,” he says, and presses his mouth to my shoulder, “is me.” A kiss to my collarbone. “Worshipping my muse.” A kiss to the center of my chest, lower, slower. “Among her collected works.” Lower still. “On a floor she deserves considerably better than.”
“I don’t want better.” I arch up into him, my fingers dragging through his hair, hauling him back up the length of my body to my mouth. “I want this. Right here. On the floor of your bookstore, with our names on every box in the room.”
His forehead drops to mine, and for a breath he just looks at me, close enough that I feel the smile start before I see it. “God, I love you.”
“Prove it.”
He proves it.
With the unhurried greediness of a man who is finally, permanently done being afraid of wanting too much, who is done rationing out his attention in careful measured doses, who is done treating love as a liability he has to manage and has learned, at enormous cost, to treat it as a fire he gets to feed.
His hands know me. His mouth knows me.
Every touch is specific and deliberate and aimed with the same obsessive precision I used to resent when it was pointed at a manuscript and now, God help me, crave when it’s pointed at me. The leotard goes.
What’s left goes after it. His own clothes join the growing wreckage draped across boxes of a book neither of us could have written alone, and then it’s nothing but skin, his against mine, warm and certain in the low after-hours light of a shuttered store.
Hendrix takes his time.
He takes it the way he never once let himself take time in the whole first year of us, working me open with his hands and his mouth and that relentless, cataloging attention, reading every sound, learning every response over again as though he’s afraid of missing one, until I’m arching off the cardboard with my fingers fisted in his hair and his name coming out of me in a register I’d be embarrassed by if embarrassment were a thing I still had access to.
“Hendrix,” I get out. “Now. Please.”
“There she is.” His voice is wrecked and warm and threaded through with that infuriating grin. “The woman who sets deadlines.”
“I will end you.”
“You’ll have to catch me first.” But he rises over me, settling his weight between my thighs, the whole warm length of him pressed against me, and when he finally moves, when he joins us in one slow deliberate stroke that pulls a broken sound out of both of us at once, the teasing burns off him completely and what’s left underneath is just the truth.
Him and me, on the floor, surrounded by our own story, no distance left anywhere between us.
The boxes rise up on every side.
His books, our story, my name on the dedication page inside every copy in every carton, and we move together among them with a freedom that tastes earned, that tastes flat-out victorious, that tastes of the golden morning we started with, the one from the very beginning, the gray light and the tangled sheets and his thumb tracing circles into my palm, returned now, finally, with absolutely nothing left in the world to come and interrupt it.
He’s playful in a way he has genuinely never been before, grinning against my skin, laughing outright when I gasp, offering running commentary that by every law of physics should ruin the mood and instead does the exact opposite, because it’s so perfectly, maddeningly, unmistakably him that it folds straight into the heat and becomes part of it.
“You’re loud in bookstores,” he observes, breathless, catching both my wrists and pinning them above my head against a box labeled COPIES: 24.
“You’re insufferable in bookstores.”
“And yet.” He rolls his hips and my spine curves clean up off the floor, and the sound that gets out of me makes his entire point for him. “Consistently rewarded for it.”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
He shuts up as he kisses me. And the rest of it builds and builds with the rhythm of a conversation we’ve been having in every room and every bed and every borrowed horizontal surface we’ve shared since the night I walked back into his life.
When we break, we break with laughter.
Both of us. Breathless and grinning and hopelessly tangled on the floor of a bookstore with our clothes flung across boxes of a novel neither of us could have made alone, holding on to each other with the fierce, ridiculous, absolute certainty of two people who went through every single thing and came out the far side of it still wanting this.
Still choosing this. Still laughing about it, which is the part I never let myself imagine back when I thought love had to hurt to be real.
Hendrix pulls me up onto his chest. I lie there listening to his heartbeat, surrounded by cardboard and literature and the particular hush of a closed bookstore late at night, and I think, this is it.
This is the golden morning.
This is what the whole thing was supposed to feel like the entire time, and it took us three years and a disaster and a second chance to finally get here, and the getting here, the clawing and the failing and the choosing, all of it, is the whole point.
***
We renew our vows on a Sunday morning.
On the Carver coastline. Barefoot. Just us.
The ribbon is on my wrist. It’s always on my wrist now, faded past pink into a color that’s more memory than shade, and I glance down at it while the water pulls at my ankles, and it strikes me that this is exactly where it belongs.
“I’ll go first,” I tell him, because going first is the thing I’ve learned how to do.
“Always,” he says. And waits.
“The first time we did this, I walked down an aisle my parents built, toward a man I believed was marrying me out of obligation. I wore a dress I didn’t choose, in a church I didn’t pick, and I said vows somebody else wrote, because I didn’t trust my own words to be enough.
” The ocean drags at our feet, cold and real and grounding.
“This time I trust them. So here they are.”
His hands tighten around mine.
The wind pushes my hair across my face and I leave it, because fixing it would mean letting go of him, and I have done more than enough letting go for one lifetime.
“My turn?” he asks.
“Your turn.”
“The first time, I stood at the end of an aisle and told myself I was honoring a promise my mother made, because admitting out loud that I wanted you was more terrifying than anything I had ever written down. But I have loved you every day since, including, and especially, the days I failed to show you that I did.”
The water is cold around my ankles. The sun is just beginning to warm the sand under our feet. His thumbs trace slow circles over my knuckles, the same unconscious pattern he’s been tracing since a gray morning a lifetime ago.
“I promise, from this morning forward, that the answer to where else would I be is always, always, the same one. Right here. With you.”
I step forward. He meets me halfway, the way he does everything now, and the ocean pulls at our feet and the morning opens up wide around us, gray going gold at the edges, and I think about the stage waiting for me back in the city, and the pages waiting for him at home on his desk, and the door standing open to every person we love, held open at the exact width I chose and not one inch wider.
“One more thing,” I say, and my voice is steady and soft and full of a certainty I earned with every single step of the last three years.
“Tell me.”
I press up onto my toes, a dancer’s instinct, the ballet that never once left my body even in the years they made me set it down, and I put my mouth against his ear, and I make him one final promise.
About the life that’s still ahead of us.
“The third bedroom,” I whisper. “I think it’s time we talked about the third bedroom.”
His arms lock around me. His whole face breaks open into a thing I have no adequate word for, luminous and stunned and undone, every wall gone, every last fear dissolved clean out of him, and the sound he makes, half a laugh and half a sob and entirely helpless, is the most beautiful, graceless, wholly human sound I have ever heard come out of a person.
“Yeah?” His voice is wrecked. His hands have started shaking against my back. “You mean…”
“I mean my mother is going to be completely, catastrophically unbearable about this, and I find that I do not care even a little.”
Hendrix lifts me clean up off the sand, and I wind my arms around his neck.
He holds me there, held, whole, barefoot on a beach at dawn, the ocean washing cold over our feet and the morning getting brighter by the second and the whole enormous life ahead of us, unchoreographed, unmanaged, unarranged, and entirely, completely ours.
The golden morning returned to us fully.
This time, it lasts.
THE END