20. Izzy #2
I press my face into his chest and let myself cry. For all those years of thinking he didn’t see me. For all the notes I stopped writing because the silence hurt too much. For how different everything might have been if we’d learned how to talk to each other.
At the very bottom of the box, folded flat against the cardboard, white cotton.
I pull it free and it opens in my hands.
The dress.
Forty dollars off a sample rack of rejects nobody else wanted. An empire waist that turned me into a Jane Austen heroine for one golden afternoon.
Tie straps that slid off my shoulders no matter how many times I fixed them during the ceremony.
The champagne stain on the hem from Wilson’s own toast, because we couldn’t afford a second bottle and he was shaking so hard with happiness that he baptized me with half of what we had.
It was all I could afford to wear to City Hall, and Wilson cried in front of the clerk when he saw me walking toward him in it.
“You kept this?” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it, hate how easily he still undoes me.
He moves closer, close enough that heat radiates off his body through the thin cotton of his shirt. “Of course I kept it, Izzy.”
“Why would you do that?” I clutch the dress to my chest against whatever he’s about to say. “Why keep this when you threw away everything it was supposed to mean?”
“Because you were the most beautiful thing I ever saw in that dress.” His voice is raw, no polish left. “I couldn’t let go of that. Even after I destroyed everything else.”
“Wilson, I…”
“You married me when I had nothing.” He takes a step closer. “Student loans that would take a decade to pay off. A studio apartment where you had to stand in the tub to shut the bathroom door.”
“I remember.” Barely a whisper.
“A ring I saved four months for.” His hand comes up to my shoulder, tentative, his thumb brushing my collarbone. “A ring that turned your finger green for a month.”
“I loved that ring.” The tears come now and I can’t stop them. “I loved that stupid green ring so much, Wilson.”
“You said yes anyway.” He’s close enough now that I can see he’s close to tears too. “Without hesitation. Without asking for more than I could give.”
I press the dress harder against my chest.
“You looked at me in that City Hall like I was worth more than my bank balance.” His voice cracks. “Like I was worth everything you had.”
The dress crumples in my fists and I can’t breathe right, can’t think straight, can’t remember what I came here to protect myself from when he’s looking at me with those eyes.
“Why did you keep it?” I ask again, because the first answer went straight through me and I need to feel it land twice.
He doesn’t give me one.
“Because I never wanted to forget who we were before I wrecked us with my own stupidity and selfishness.”
The sob rips out of me and my knees give, my legs simply refusing the job.
Wilson catches me around the waist before I hit the floor, and I press my face into his chest, the dress crushed between our bodies, shaking so badly my teeth ache.
“I’m sorry,” he says into my hair, his lips at my temple, his arms tightening around me. “For all of it, Izzy. For every second you spent hurting because I was too stupid and selfish to see what I had right in front of me.”
“I know you’re sorry.”
“I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life.” His voice breaks on it. “You don’t have to believe another word I say, but please believe that.”
He means it. You know he means it. That’s what’s making it hard to breathe.
“I know.” It barely makes it out.
His hands spread across my back, fingers wide, holding me together by force.
“I don’t want the life we had before,” he says, the words vibrating through his chest and into mine.
I pull back and swipe at my face with my wrist, my makeup surely ruined. “Then what exactly do you want from me, Wilson?”
“The life we should have built together.” His thumb catches a tear on my cheekbone, his touch unbearably gentle. “The one where you come first, always, no exceptions. Where your painting matters as much as my career ever did. Where I keep every promise I make you, down to the smallest one.”
“That’s a big life to promise.”
“I know it is.”
“You broke the last one.” I gesture at the boxes around us, at every piece of our marriage sorted into piles for keeping or discarding. “This is what it looks like, Wilson. Sorted into piles.”
“Then let me spend my life putting it back together piece by piece.” His forehead drops to mine, and our breath mingles in the small space between us. “Let me try, Izzy. That’s all I’m asking. Just let me try.”
“And if you can’t become that man?”
“Then I’ll die trying to be worthy of you.” His fingers slide into my hair, and every nerve in my body fires at once, electricity racing down my spine. “But you have to let me try.”
Cross it off. You already know it’s on the list.
I kiss him.
His mouth opens under mine, and I taste salt from my tears and this morning’s coffee, and underneath both a sweetness that might be hope or might be ruin. My hands find his shoulders, the solid muscle beneath his shirt, the short hair at his nape that’s softer than I remembered.
He groans into my mouth, and the sound goes straight through me, settling low in my belly, two months of him standing too close finally cashing out.
I don’t stop kissing him.
We stumble backward until his spine hits the window, the skyline sparking to life below us, and I press into him until there’s no space left between our bodies.
“Izzy, wait.” His voice is ragged.
“I’m done waiting, Wilson.”
“We should talk about what this means first.” His hands are on my waist, pulling me closer even as he protests.
“We’ve talked for months. Letters, porches, a fence, an inn, a hotel.” I drag my thumb across his lower lip and watch his control slip another inch, watch his pupils blow wide. “I’m done talking.”
“Then tell me what you want.” He swallows hard. “Whatever it is, it’s yours, Izzy.”
I draw one finger down the center of his chest. His heart slams against my palm. “Take me to the bedroom and show me you remember how I like to be touched.”
“I remember everything about you.”
“Then prove it instead of just saying it.”
***
He never packed this room.
The bed is still made with the gray duvet I picked out three years ago, corners tucked the way I taught him.
My hair ties are still in the lopsided ceramic dish I painted at the pottery class I dragged him to for our anniversary, the glaze uneven because I’d had too much wine. Two months of dust cover all of it.
I run my finger along the dresser and leave a clean line behind in the gray.
“You didn’t touch anything in here,” I say, my voice coming out hushed.
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” He stands at the foot of the bed, hands shoved in his pockets, a man who doesn’t trust them to behave. “Packing the front rooms nearly finished me. This room still smelled of you, so I left it alone. I wasn’t ready to let that go.”
I lay the forty-dollar dress over my reading chair and smooth the fabric flat with both hands, the cheap cotton soft and familiar under my fingers.
“You’re nervous right now,” he says from behind me.
“I’m not nervous.”
“Your hands are shaking against that dress, Izzy.”
“Maybe I’m cold because you never ran the heat properly in this apartment.”
“Izzy. Come on.”
“Fine.” I cross my arms over my chest and turn to face him, chin lifted even as my pulse hammers in my throat. “Maybe I’m a little nervous about this.”
“We can go back to the boxes if you want, no pressure at all.” He holds up his hands, palms out. “I’m pretty sure there’s one labeled ‘miscellaneous items and additional things’ that would upset you on a spiritual level.”
The laugh escapes, and my shoulders come down an inch. “That’s somehow even worse than ‘stuff and things.’”
“I have a gift for terrible organization that borders on performance art.”
“You have a problem that requires professional intervention.”
“Both.” He drops his hands and grins, and for a moment he’s twenty-six again, standing beside a folding table with a sad fake fern on it in a suit he borrowed because he couldn’t afford his own. “They’re definitely related.”
I cross the room and flatten my palm over his heart. It kicks hard against my hand. He doesn’t move, doesn’t reach for me, just stands there and lets me touch him, waiting for permission to exist in the same space.
“What do you want right now, Wilson?”
“Whatever you’ll give me, Izzy.” His hands stay at his sides, fingers twitching with the effort of keeping them there, tendons standing out along his forearms. “You decide everything tonight. All of it.”
“Then take your shirt off and stop talking.”
He pulls it over his head in one smooth motion, the muscles in his shoulders flexing. Leaner than he used to be, ribs closer to the surface, a man who’s been forgetting to eat, but it’s the same chest I used to trace in the dark when neither of us could sleep.
“Your turn,” he says, dropping the shirt on the floor.
“I didn’t say we were taking turns, Wilson.”
“Consider it a humble request from a man who’s been picturing this moment for months.” His voice cracks on the last word, and he coughs it clear.
I pull my sweater off and drop it on top of his shirt, the fabrics mingling. A plain black bra from a Target three-pack, twelve dollars, nothing special at all, and Wilson stops breathing anyway, his eyes moving over me with an intensity that heats my skin.
“Can I touch you now?” His voice is barely above a whisper.
“Where exactly?”
“Anywhere you’ll let me put my hands.”
I take his hand and set it on my waist, his palm hot against my bare skin. “Start here and we’ll see what happens.”
His fingers press in, careful, and his other hand comes up to mirror the first, thumbs brushing my ribcage. He draws me closer until I catch the cedar of his cologne and the clean sweat underneath, and my body answers before my brain gets a vote, leaning into him on its own.
“Is this okay with you?”