17. Wilson #2
“Hey.” I let go of her wrists and cup her face instead, tilting it toward me until she has no choice but to look at me. “Where did you just go?”
She opens her eyes. They’re full of tears she’s fighting not to let fall.
“Slow.” Her voice comes out barely louder than a breath.
I take my hands off her face and put them flat on the bed, one on each side of my thighs where she can see them.
It costs me everything I have. My whole body is screaming at me to pull her closer, to chase what she was offering thirty seconds ago, to take whatever she’ll give me before she changes her mind and walks out that door.
I don’t move a muscle.
“I said slow.” She says it again, stronger this time, testing whether I’ll listen. “I mean it, Wilson.”
“I heard you the first time.” It comes out of me wrecked. “I’m not moving. I’m right here.”
She stays in my lap with her hands still pressed against my chest, my shirt hanging open, both of us breathing hard enough that I can hear it over the wind.
A car passes on the street below the window, headlights sweeping across the ceiling.
“Fuck.” I close my eyes and tip my head back, trying to get control of myself. “Just… give me a second.”
“I thought I could do this.” Her voice is small and frustrated with herself. “I really thought I was ready.”
“You don’t have to be ready.” I open my eyes and look at her, keeping my hands exactly where they are even though it’s killing me. “You don’t have to be anything you’re not ready to be.”
“I want to be ready, though.” Her fingers curl against my chest, nails scraping lightly. “I want to stop being so goddamn scared of you.”
“I know you do.”
“I hate that I’m scared of you.” Her voice breaks on the word hate. “I hate that you can still make me feel like this.”
“I’d hate me too.”
She leans forward and rests her forehead against mine, and we stay there a long time, breathing the same air, not moving, letting the moment settle.
“I’m not leaving tonight.” She says it as a decision she just made. “I’m not driving that road back to the cottage in the dark with my hands like this.”
“Then stay here with me.”
“I’m not ready for anything more than this either.”
“Then we do exactly this.” I finally let myself touch her again, one hand on the small of her back, gentle and still. “Just this. Whatever this is. Nothing more until you say so.”
She climbs off my lap slowly and lies down on the narrow bed, on top of the covers, still fully dressed in her grandmother’s cardigan and her jeans with the hole in the knee. She looks up at me and pats the space beside her.
I lie down behind her, curving my body around hers without pressing, one arm draped over her waist.
The jewelry box is still on the bed near our feet, the letters scattered around it. I can see my handwriting on the pages in the low light, all the wrong things I wrote and all the corrections in her cramped pencil beside them.
“Wilson. Hey.”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“I’m taking you to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving.”
I go completely still behind her. “You’re what?”
“You heard me.” She pulls my arm tighter around her waist. “She called yesterday afternoon. She asked if you’d be there, the way you’d ask about the weather.”
“And you said?”
“Yes, before she finished the question.” Her thumb moves over my knuckles. “Then I sat on the porch for an hour wondering what I’d done.”
“You told her I’d come before you’d asked me?”
“I’m not asking you.” She laces her fingers through mine where they rest against her stomach. “I’m telling you. You’re coming with me to Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Okay. Yes.” I say it before she finishes the sentence, before I can think about it too hard, before I can find a reason to talk myself out of it. “Of course I’ll come.”
“It’s going to be awful, Wilson. She’s going to interrogate you for hours.”
“I know she is.”
“She’s going to bring up every terrible thing you’ve ever done to me and make you answer for all of it.”
“She’s earned that.”
“She’s going to make you sit through a four-hour dinner and ask you extremely pointed questions about your intentions and your failures and your plan for earning back her daughter’s trust.”
“Izzy.” I press my mouth to the back of her head, breathing in the smell of her shampoo. “I already said yes.”
She’s quiet for a long time after that. The inn settles and creaks around us.
“I’m not ready to forgive you,” she says into the dark, and her voice is barely a whisper.
“I know you’re not.”
“I might never be ready to forgive you for what you did.”
“Then I’ll take never, as long as it’s never with you in the room.”
“But I’m also not ready to let you go.” Her voice breaks on the last word, an admission that costs her. “And I don’t know what the hell to do with that, Wilson. I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it tonight.” I hold her a little tighter. “You just have to let me be here.”
She doesn’t say anything else. Her breathing slows and deepens, and I think she might be falling asleep, but I don’t let myself close my eyes.
I hold her and watch the shadows move across the ceiling and listen to the wind pick up outside the window. I try not to think about how much I don’t deserve this moment, or this woman, or the second chance I’m somehow getting anyway.
Sometime before dawn, I wake up alone.
The bed is cold beside me where she was lying. The jewelry box is gone from the foot of the bed. The letters are gone too, all of them, including the corrections she made me write.
There’s a piece of the inn’s stationery on the pillow next to mine, folded once, with her handwriting on it.
I pick it up and read it in the gray light coming through the window.
Slow is not no. Come to Thanksgiving.
I read it three times to make sure I’m not imagining it.
Then I fold it carefully and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, next to the two rings that have lived there since the day she closed my fingers over them.
The unfinished letter about the quilt is gone too. She took it with her when she left.
I lie back on the empty bed and stare at the water-stained ceiling, and for the first time in months I let myself hope.