Chapter 26 Abbie #2
I cross to my bag on the kitchen table, dig through it until I find what I'm looking for.
The document is folded, creased from months of being shoved in drawers and moved between apartments, but it's still legible.
My copy of the separation agreement. Gray waits, watching as I walk back to him.
His eyes move from my face to the paper in my hands.
"What are you doing?"
"Something I am ready to do now."
I grip the agreement in both hands and tear it down the middle. The sound is louder than it should be, more satisfying. I tear it again, and again, until I'm holding a handful of confetti, and then I let the pieces scatter to the floor.
"Abbie—"
"That's not forgiveness," I say clearly. "I'm not there yet. I might not be there for a while. But that—" I gesture at the paper littering the floor. "That's me choosing what's next. That's me deciding I'm done waiting to get hurt and starting to believe we might actually make it."
"It's just paper," he says. "It's a symbolic gesture. We're still technically—"
"I know what it is. I know it doesn't legally change anything. But it changes something for me, okay? It changes what I'm choosing."
He stares at me for a long moment, candles flickering around us, storm raging outside. "I love you," I tell him, and they are words I have not said to him since we separated. They feel specific. Intentional. Earned.
"I love you," he says back, and I can hear that he means it the same way. As a choice.
He kisses me then, slow and careful and devastating, and I let myself fall into it. Let myself want without waiting for the other shoe. When he pulls back, his eyes are asking a question he won't say out loud.
"Yes," I tell him. "But the bedroom has candles, right?"
"The bedroom has candles."
"Then take me to bed, Gray. And this time—" I lace my fingers through his. "This time, stay."
He squeezes my hand, lifts it to his mouth, presses a kiss to my knuckles. And then he leads me toward the hallway, toward whatever comes next.
The hallway is a tunnel of candlelight.
Gray leads me by the hand past flickering tapers Marguerite stocked for apocalypses, past the rain hammering the deck, past the torn separation agreement still scattered across the kitchen floor like a snake we decided to kill.
His bedroom, our bedroom, the one with the bed he built, smells like beeswax and storm.
He stops at the foot of the bed and looks at me like he's afraid I'll vanish if he blinks.
"Still yes?" he asks.
"Still yes." I take his face in both hands. "Take my clothes off. Map what's changed. I want you to know this body the way it is now, not the way you remember it."
He undresses me like the power outage gave him all the calendars in the world. Sweater first. Then the soft bra that barely contains the new heaviness of my breasts. He makes a sound when he sees them, half prayer, half curse, and cups them with a reverence that makes my throat tight.
"Sensitive?" he checks, thumbs brushing my nipples.
"Very." The word comes out shaky. "Be filthy about it anyway."
"I can do both." He bends and takes one nipple into his mouth, gentle suction, and my knees nearly buckle.
Twenty-two weeks has rewritten every nerve ending.
He notices. Of course he notices. He switches sides, just as careful, just as hungry, while his hands skim down over the unmistakable curve of my belly.
He drops to his knees again, different from the porch, different from the kitchen a lifetime ago, and presses his mouth to the place where our daughter sleeps.
I thread my fingers through his hair.
"I'm mapping," he says, obedient, and kisses lower. My underwear. The crease of my thigh. Then he peels the last of my clothes away and looks at me fully naked in candlelight, round, flushed, blonde hair wild, and the expression on his face leaves me in no doubt that he wants me exactly as I am.
He strips in record time, henley, jeans, everything, and stretches out across the cedar frame, tattoos stark in the flickering dark, cock hard against his stomach. He holds out his hands for me.
I straddle his thighs, not yet taking him inside, and wrap my hand around his cock. He jerks like he's been shocked. Candlelight loves the ink on his forearms as his fists knot in the sheets.
"Abbie, you don't have to—"
"I want to." I stroke him slow, thumbing the head, watching his face crack open. "I want to see what three years of not hearing I love you looks like when I touch you like this."
"Cruel," he gasps.
"Call it whatever you want." I lean down and take him into my mouth, just the tip at first, then deeper, messy and wet and intentional. He makes a sound I've never heard during a power outage. His hand finds my hair and doesn't push, just anchors.
"Fuck, Abs, your mouth—"
I pull off with a filthy pop and crawl up his body, belly brushing his stomach, until I can kiss the taste of him into his mouth.
"Now I'm driving," I remind him.
I sink down onto him slow. The stretch is familiar and brand new. Pregnancy has made me slicker, tighter somehow in the way everything feels amplified, and the first full seat of him punches a moan out of both of us.
"Oh—" I brace on his chest. "Gray—"
"I know. I know. Fuck, Abs, you feel—" He cuts himself off, jaw flexing. "Take your time. Unhurried. Whatever you need."
Unhurried is what I give him first. Long rises.
Slow sinks. My hips set the pace. His hands roam, breasts, belly, the new flare of my hips, cataloguing, worshipping, filthy-tender in a way only he has ever managed.
When I roll forward the angle hits something bright and I gasp; he memorizes that too.
At some point he sits up so we're chest to chest, belly between us, and the new angle makes me clutch at his shoulders. He holds my hips and helps me rise and fall while he mouths at my throat, my jaw, the corner of my eye where a tear has escaped without permission.
"You're crying," he notices, soft.
"Happy, overwhelmed, hormonal. Pick one."
"I'll take all three." He kisses the tear. "I'll take every version of you this storm dragged into my kitchen."
"Our kitchen," I correct, breathless.
"Our kitchen," he agrees, and the correction undoes him almost as much as my body does. "Our bed. Our daughter. Our... God, Abbie, our life, if you'll keep letting me earn it."
"You're earning it right now." I grind down hard enough that his forehead drops to my shoulder. "Don't stop earning."
He doesn't. He fucks up into me with short, deep strokes, buried so deep I feel it everywhere, while I cling to him, and the wet sound of us fills the candlelit room like another kind of weather.
My breasts brush his chest with every movement, nipples aching, and he cups one carefully, filthy and tender in the same grip, pinching just enough to make me cry out.
"Too much?"
"Perfect. Again."
He does it again. Maps the new sensitivity like a man studying a language he intends to be fluent in by morning.
"There," he rasps. "That face. Do that again."
I do. Over and over. The storm throws rain at the glass like it wants in on the sacrament.
Somewhere a candle gutters and rights itself.
I ride him until unhurried tips into desperate, until my thighs burn and my rhythm stutters and I'm chasing something with both hands fisted in the sheets beside his head.
"Gray, I need—"
"Take it." His hips lift to meet me. "Ride my cock, love. Take what you need. I'm here. I'm staying. I'm—"
He breaks mid-thrust.
Not physically, he's still moving, still deep, still holding me, but his face cracks open and the words come out of him like they've been locked behind his teeth since the night I left.
"I love you." Thrust. "I love you." Thrust. "I love you, Abbie, I love you, I love you—"
He's saying it on every drive of his hips now, a litany, a repair, a man catching up on years of silence in the span of a storm. Tears streak from the corners of his eyes into his hair. His hands shake on my waist.
I lean down as far as my belly allows, forehead to his, and I say it back the way he needs to hear it, not the kitchen version, not the choice-we-made-over-candles version. The slower one. The in-bed one. The one that means I know exactly who I'm saying it to.
"I love you." I roll my hips through the words. "I love you, Gray. I love you. I'm saying it while you're inside me so you can't file it under temporary. Feel it. Feel me mean it."