Chapter 32 – DAMON
DAMON
She was quiet in the car, her hand in mine on the console, and I drove the whole way home certain that if I said the wrong thing, or possibly anything, she would remember herself and ask me to turn around.
"You're gripping the wheel," she said.
"I'm aware."
"We're just going home, Damon."
"Yeah, and that's a miracle. I'm in a state of shock."
She laughed and it was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.
The house was dark when we pulled in. I'd been living in maybe four rooms of it, and it had the stillness houses get when nobody fills them, and I was suddenly embarrassed by it, the empty fridge, the unread mail, the whole museum of my own failure.
She stepped into the front hall and stood there a moment, looking around at the dark, and I hovered behind her with my keys in my hand like a man showing a property he knows won't sell.
"We can eat first," I said. "I'll order in. We can also only eat. Whatever tonight is, it can be that and nothing else, and I'd still call it the best night of my?—"
She turned around and kissed me.
Her clutch hit the hall table. Her hands came up under my jacket and pushed it off my shoulders, and I stopped talking, because she'd made her point, and because her mouth was on mine and I wasn't going to spend one second of this on speeches.
"Stop treating me like I'll change my mind," she said against my jaw. "I decided before I said it. I don't say things I haven't decided. You should know that about me by now."
"I'm learning it."
"Learn faster." She took my hand and walked backward toward the stairs, pulling me with her, and the look on her face undid eight years and rebuilt them in the space of about four steps. "Take me to bed, Damon."
We made it up the stairs slowly, stopping twice, her back against the wall on the landing while I kissed her throat and she worked my shirt buttons with the efficiency of a woman who had decided.
The bedroom door stood open. I hadn't been sleeping there much, the bed was too big and too much hers, and I had one bad moment in the doorway where the months caught up to me all at once.
She felt it. She put her palm flat on my sternum.
"Hey. I'm here."
"I know. I'm catching up."
"Catch up later." She reached behind herself and drew the zipper of the green dress down, and the linen slid off her shoulders and pooled on the floor, and my catching up was over.
I'd been married to this woman for eight years.
I had to be honest about what that had looked like.
Late nights, half attention, the lights off, my mind on a merger more often than I will ever forgive myself for.
I had eight years of her and I could not have drawn her body from memory.
So I took her to bed and I started memorizing.
I laid her down and went slow, and when she shivered I noted it, and when she sighed I noted that too, filing every sound like the most important data of my life, because it was.
I kissed her throat and the line of her collarbone and the inside of her elbow, which made her laugh and then made her stop laughing.
I learned that there's a spot below her ear that makes her grip my hair, and that she likes her name said low against her skin, and that eight years of neglect had left a map nobody had ever bothered to read, and I read it.
All of it. Slowly enough that she started to squirm.
"Damon."
"Mm."
"You're being thorough."
"I have years of inattention to answer for," I said, kissing my way down her stomach. "I've prepared remarks."
"Oh my God," she said, half a laugh, and then I settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her and the laugh broke apart into a sound I had never once heard in eight years of marriage, and I nearly came undone just from that, from the fact that I had never heard it, from everything that sound said about the husband I'd been.
I made up for it. I took direction. Slower, she said, and I slowed.
There, she said, and I stayed there, her fingers tight in my hair and her heel pressing into my back, and when she came it was with her whole body, arching off the bed she'd left me alone in, saying my name like it was finally worth saying.
I kissed my way back up to find her flushed and bright-eyed and entirely unembarrassed.
"You never used to do that," she said.
"I was a fool. We've covered this."
"Cover it again," she said, and pulled me down.
She pushed me onto my back and straddled me, and I let her set everything, the pace, the angle, the depth, her hands braced on my chest and her hair down around her face, and I held her hips and watched my wife take what she wanted from me at last. The sight of her like that, above me, in charge, taking, was the single best thing I have ever seen, and I told her so, and she rode me harder for hearing it.
"I love you," I said, because it was true and because I'd rationed those words for eight years like a miser and I was done. "Maddie. Look at me. I love you. I'm yours. Whatever years I get, however you'll have me, I'm yours, and I will never make you wonder again."
She slowed, deep and deliberate, and looked down at me with her hands on my chest.
"Show me," she said.
So I sat up with her in my lap and wrapped my arms around her, skin to skin, nothing between us and nowhere to look but each other, and we moved like that, slow and close, her forehead against mine, and it stopped being anything I have clinical words for.
She came again with my name in her mouth and her nails in my shoulders, and I followed her over with my face buried in her neck, saying hers, just hers, like there had never been another word.
After, she lay across me with her ear over my heart and her leg thrown over mine, and I ran my hand through her hair and down her spine and back up, over and over, because I could.
"I used to lie here and plan the next day," I said into the dark. "Every night. You'd be right here and I'd be in Singapore in my head. I want you to know I'm here now. There's nowhere else in me. This is the whole itinerary."
She was quiet for a while. Her fingers traced something idle on my ribs.
"I'm ready," she said.
Oh, right. We still hadn't had dinner.
Well, I'd had her and that was better than anything any chef had ever prepared for me. With any luck, I'd have her again before the night was done.
"The kitchen's a wasteland but I can?—"
"Damon." She lifted her head and looked at me, and there was something in her face that stopped me cold. "I'm ready."
She reached across me, and for a strange second I thought she was reaching for her phone, and then she opened the drawer of her old bedside table, the one I had never touched in all these months, never once opened, because it was hers and the not-opening was a thing I could do for her.
It was so hard to find small things to do, things money couldn't buy and employees couldn't be delegated to do, so I took every one I got whether it was one she was going to notice or not. She took out a small box.
The box.
I sat up so fast I nearly dumped her off the bed.
"How long has that been there?"
"Three weeks." She settled back against the headboard, holding it, watching me.
"I came by for my brushes on a Wednesday when you were at work.
I had it in my bag. I'd been carrying it around for months, and that day I walked past the bedroom and I just came in and put it in the drawer.
" She turned the box over in her fingers.
"I stood there afterward thinking, what did you just do?
And the answer was, the ring lives here.
Some part of me had already decided. I've spent three weeks waiting for the rest of me, and tonight the rest of me showed up. "
I couldn't say anything. I have run earnings calls with my company on fire and I could not produce one word.
She opened the lid. The gold caught the lamplight, sitting in the velvet where I'd placed it on a rooftop half a year ago, and she took it out and held it toward me on her open palm.
"You said I'd know the day without you saying a word," she said. "You were right. Put it back, Damon."
I took the ring. My hands weren't steady and I didn't care. I took her left hand in mine and I slid it home onto her finger, where it settled into the faint pale band of skin that had waited for it, and I held her hand in both of mine and kissed her knuckles, the ring, her palm.
"You won't regret it," I said. "Not one day of it. I'm going to make sure of that for the rest of my life."
"I'd better not." She was smiling, and her eyes were wet, and she poked me in the chest with her free hand. "I know everything about you, Sterling. Your schedule, your tells, your board. If you make me regret this, I have the means and the motive, and no jury of wives would convict me."
"Understood," I said. "Noted and minuted."
"Good." She admired her hand a moment, turning it in the lamplight, and then her stomach growled, loudly, with magnificent timing. She looked up at me without a shred of shame. "Now feed me. I sold out my own show and never got near the canapés. What's in the kitchen?"
What was in the kitchen, it emerged, was cereal.
One box, half gone, and milk I checked twice before trusting. My wife stood at the counter in my shirt and nothing else, her ring catching the light over the sink, and surveyed the cupboards of a man who had been eating like a hostage for six months.
"You really were a disaster without me," she said, with deep satisfaction. "Weren't you?"
"Completely," I said. "Unhinged. It's all documented."
I poured two bowls. There was no good reason to stand at the sink to eat them, there was a perfectly good table ten feet away, but she leaned against the counter and so I leaned next to her, shoulder to shoulder, and we ate cereal over the sink at two in the morning like college kids, and she stole my spoon when hers fell in, and I let her, because it was the best meal of my entire life and I knew it while it was happening.
"Hey," she said, around my spoon. "Welcome home."
"That's my line," I said.
"You'll have to be faster," said my wife. "I run this house."
"Clearly," I agreed. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
THE END