23. Juliette #3
I cup his face and keep his eyes on mine.
Tears slip free from the corners of my own; he kisses them away without ever losing the slow, punishing pace.
My other hand slides down the flexing muscles of his back, feeling every tremor of held-back power.
The wet sound of our bodies meeting fills the quiet room.
Outside, a foghorn calls once across the water. Inside, there is only this.
“Harder,” I breathe eventually, though I don’t want fast - just deeper, closer, more. “I need to feel how much you mean it.”
He gives it to me. Still slow, but with more weight behind every thrust, hips snapping just enough to make the headboard tap the wall in a gentle rhythm.
One of his hands slips between us so his fingers can circle my clit in time with his movements - light, teasing, exactly in time.
The dual pressure builds again, coiling low and bright and inevitable.
“That’s it,” he praises, voice wrecked. “Take all of me. You’re doing so well… fucking perfect… I can feel you getting close again. Let me have it. Let me feel you come around me while I tell you the truth.”
“I love you,” I gasp. “I never stopped. Not for a single day. It hurt - God, it hurt - but I never stopped.”
“I know, Jules. I know.” His rhythm falters as his own orgasm approaches; I feel him swell even thicker inside me. “Come with me. Please. I need it. Need you.”
We break together - my cry muffled against his shoulder, his groan buried in my hair - as pleasure rips through me in long, shaking waves.
I clench around him rhythmically and he follows with a full-body shudder, pulsing deep, filling me in hot spurts I can feel while he says my name over and over, wrecked and grateful.
For a long time afterward we stay locked together, sweaty and trembling, his weight a comforting press along my front.
He softens slowly inside me but doesn’t pull away.
One hand has full custody of my hip; the other keeps drifting through my hair with a wonder he isn’t performing, because there’s no audience here and he’s forgotten I count as one.
I set the price against his shoulder, lips brushing the freckle I love.
“That’s the last time,” I say, voice hoarse. “Until you’ve said all of it everywhere.”
“To be clear about the terms.” He props himself on an elbow, still half inside me, negotiating naked in my mother’s quilts, which should not be as endearing as it is.
His fingers wander my bare hip and send a fresh tremor through me.
“If I stand in front of the entire island and tell the truth, all of it, out loud-”
“Then we discuss renewal of privileges.”
“Discuss.”
“I’m a small business owner now. Everything is negotiation.” I squeeze around him gently just to hear the sound he makes.
“You’re going to make me earn every inch of this marriage back, aren’t you.”
“Every inch. With interest.” I settle more fully against his chest, where his heart is going like a man mid-sprint. “You’re the one who taught me about compound debt.”
“Worst thing I ever did,” he says into my hair, sounding happier than I have ever heard him. His arms tighten, pulling me impossibly closer.
“The Christmas Stroll.”
“In front of your mother. Nicole. Everyone who ever looked at me like I didn’t belong.”
“And after,” I say. “Say we survive the Stroll. Monday morning. What are we?”
“What do you want us to be Monday morning?”
“I asked first.”
“Married,” he says, no hesitation, and then catches himself and does the new thing, the checking thing.
His hand cups my cheek, thumb stroking the corner of my mouth.
“Eventually. Properly. At the speed you set. Monday morning I want to be the man who brings the coffee to your shop and gets introduced however you decide to introduce me. ‘This is Zachary’ is fine. ‘This is my mistake, we’re renovating him’ - also fine.
I’ve heard Rosie’s versions. I can survive yours. ”
“Then that’s when they’ll see.”
“See what?”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, eyes clear and steady in the dim light. “What it looks like when I finally choose you out loud.”
I search his face for doubt. For hesitation. For any sign he’s going to manage his way out of this.
I don’t find any.
“Three days,” I say.
“Three days.” He says it into my hair like a vow with a countdown, and kisses me, soft and deep.
His arms settle around me in my mother’s bed, and the last thing I register before sleep takes me is his heart under my ear, going steady and unhurried, the rhythm of a man who has finally stopped negotiating with the truth.
The storm lamps burn down while we sleep. Outside, the island does what islands do at night - fog, foghorn, the long patience of water - and inside, for the first time since a laptop on a kitchen island in Boston, both people in this bed are telling the truth.
***
Morning
I wake alone, the space beside me still warm.
There’s a bookmark on the pillow.
His terrible handwriting. Five words.
Everywhere starts at the tree lighting.
I hold it up to the window light and read it twice, his terrible handwriting going translucent against the gray morning, and I laugh - alone, in bed, like an idiot - because the man kept a drawer full of my words for six years, and now he can’t stop leaving me his.
Look who learned to answer his mail.