Chapter 17 #2
"I don't have a rest of it." He came around the counter and stopped a deliberate distance away, the way he had on the stairs in January. "I've had a year to build a speech and I built about nine of them and every one of them was a way of being impressive at you. So I'm not going to do any of them."
He stood there.
"I love you," Adrian said. "I have loved you since the second year and I did not say it because saying it would have made me a man who needed something, and I had told you at the start that I wasn't going to be.
I let you think it was an arrangement because the arrangement protected me and I let you carry the cost of that for seven years, and I would like the rest of my life to be about being a person who says things out loud to you. "
Clara stood in a kitchen with her hand over her mouth.
"Say it again," she said.
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you," Adrian said. "I'll say it until you're sick of it. It's the only thing I've got that isn't a gesture."
She crossed the four feet of tile between them and took his face in both hands and kissed him, and it was not gentle and neither of them pretended it was.
Nine years. A year apart. Her hands were shaking against his jaw and his came up to her waist and stopped there — actually stopped, actually waited — and Clara made a sound against his mouth that was half a laugh and said, "No.
Don't you dare be careful with me," and he said, "Clara — " and she said, "Ask me, then," and he pulled back an inch and looked at her and said:
"Can I take you upstairs?"
"Yes."
They did not make it up the stairs.
They got as far as the hall, and she had his shirt out of his waistband on the second step and he turned her against the wall by the console table where a terrible lampshade had sat since March, and Clara got her hands under the shirt and onto the skin of his back and found him thinner, and something about that undid her completely.
"You lost weight."
"Yes."
"I noticed in January."
"I know," Adrian said. "I saw you notice."
She laughed and it turned into something else halfway, and he kissed her throat and she tipped her head back against the wall and let him.
His hands were on her ribs through the dress and then on the zip and then still.
"Clara."
"Don't ask me if I'm sure."
"I wasn't going to." His mouth was at the hinge of her jaw. "I was going to ask whether you wanted the dress on the floor of the hall, because you'll have to drive home in it and you'll be furious with me in the morning."
She laughed properly at that — a real one, up out of her chest — and it undid something in both of them, and he got the zip down and the dress off her shoulders and stopped again to look at her in the dark, and she let him, standing against a wall in her underwear with her hands in his hair.
"Say something," she said.
"I'm looking at you."
"I know. Say something."
"I have thought about this for a year," Adrian said, "and every single time I made myself stop, because I did not have the right to it and it seemed like a thing a man does instead of changing.
" His thumb moved along her hipbone. "And I have not stopped once in the last ten minutes and I am not going to. "
Clara pulled his mouth back down to hers.
And there was a moment then — a half second, no more — where she felt the old thing rise.
The thing that had run every room she had ever been in and every hour of nine years: manage this.
Make it easy. Work out what he wants and be that, and be excellent at it, and he will never have a reason to go.
She heard it arrive.
She actually heard it, the way you hear a familiar car in a driveway, and she stood in a dark hallway with her husband's hands on her and understood that this was the whole thing — that this was where it had always happened, quietly, without either of them noticing, for nine years.
And then she said, out loud, into the dark:
"Slower. I want it slower."
Adrian stopped completely.
"Say that again."
"I want it slower."
"Thank you," he said, with a fervor that shocked her, and slowed everything down.
They got upstairs eventually.
Not to the bedroom. She would not go into that room and he did not suggest it, and neither of them said a word about why — they ended up in the room off the landing that had been a guest room and was now nothing, on a bed with a bare mattress and a folded quilt, with the door open and the light off and the sound of the eucalyptus outside.
He undressed her the way you handle something you have been given back.
That was the only way Clara could describe it afterward, and she thought about it a great deal.
Not reverent — reverent would have been unbearable, reverent would have been a performance.
Careful in the specific sense of a man paying attention: stopping when her breath changed, going back to the thing that had made it change, and once, when he could not tell, simply asking — "This or the other one?
" — in the dark, with his mouth an inch from her collarbone.
"The other one."
"Okay."
Nine years, and he had never asked her a single question in that bed.
She had told herself for most of a decade that this part had been fine.
That whatever else the marriage had failed to be, they had always been good at this, and she had been telling herself the truth about the mechanics and lying about everything underneath, because good at this had meant Clara was extremely good at working out what Adrian wanted.
She had never once said a word in nine years.
She said a lot of them now.
It started badly. She wants that remembered too, because the version people would tell about that night if they ever heard it would be a smooth one, and it was not smooth.
The first time she tried, nothing came out at all. He had his mouth low on her stomach and she got as far as opening her mouth and the sentence simply did not arrive, and she lay there in the dark with her hands in the quilt and was furious with herself in a way that nearly ended the whole evening.
Adrian felt it. He came up on one elbow.
"Where did you go?"
"Nowhere."
"Clara."
"I was going to say something and I couldn't." She put her arm over her eyes. "This is going to be the thing. This is going to be the thing for years, isn't it."
He moved her arm off her face, gently, and put it down on the mattress.
"Then say it wrong," he said. "Say it badly. Point at it. I don't need a sentence."
So she took his wrist and moved his hand, and did not say anything at all, and he said, "There?" and she said, "Yes," and it came out cracked and half-furious, and after that it got easier.
She said there. She said not yet. She said harder than that, and then, when he did, she said no, go back, and he went back without a flicker, without a word, without any of the small wounded management that a decade of her life had taught her to expect from men who were told they had it wrong.
She said his name twice in a way that made his whole body go still.
She discovered, at some point past midnight, with her hands in his hair and her heels against the backs of his thighs, that she had spent nine years being extremely accomplished at a thing she had never once been present for.
And at one point she said wait, stop, I need a second — and he stopped instantly and put his forehead against her sternum and waited, breathing hard, with his hand flat on her hip, until she said okay.
That was the moment. That was the actual moment, and it was not the sex.
It was that she had said stop and the world had not ended, and nobody had been disappointed, and a man she had been afraid of losing for nine years had simply waited in the dark with his hand on her hip until she was ready.
When he came back up to her mouth she was crying and did not bother about it.
"Don't stop," she said.
"I'm not stopping."
"I know. I'm just telling you."
He got a hand under her back and lifted her slightly and she wrapped a leg around him and then he was inside her, and both of them made a sound, and Clara heard her own and did not recognize it.
He held still.
"Adrian —"
"Give me a second," he said, into her shoulder, and his voice was wrecked. "I'm sorry. Give me a second, I'm — "
And that was the thing that finished her. Not the year, not the speech in the kitchen, not the podium or the register or four hundred and eleven index cards in a shoebox under a bed in Cambria.
It was that Adrian Whitmore, who had never in nine years let her see him need one single thing, was lying on top of her in an empty room shaking, and asking for a second, and had not thought to hide it.
Clara put both hands on the back of his neck.
"Take it," she said.
He took it. And then he moved, and she moved with him, and it was not smooth and not choreographed and twice they got it wrong and laughed — actually laughed, out loud, in the middle of it, with their foreheads together — and she thought, distantly and with astonishment: we have never once laughed.
Nine years of a marriage that everyone in that county had envied, and they had never once laughed in a bed.
It went on a long time. He got slower rather than faster, which she had asked for in a hallway and which he had apparently taken as law, and at some point she got a hand between them and showed him, without saying anything, because the words were still hard and the showing was not, and he said "Yes" against her mouth and let her do it.
When it came for her it came from a long way down and took an unreasonable amount of time, and she said so, at volume, in a house where nobody had raised their voice in nine years — and heard herself, and did not stop, and was still shaking with it when he followed her.
Afterward he stayed there a while, on his elbows, with his face in her neck, and neither of them moved.
"Say it again," Clara said, into his hair.
"I love you."
"Again."