Chapter 5 #2
She got her hand in his hair and pulled his head up and kissed him so hard their teeth knocked, and he laughed into her mouth, and she felt the laugh go all the way down through her, and that was worse than anything. That was so much worse than the wanting.
He worked his way down. He took his time about it, which he had always done and which she had spent fifteen years being smug about in the company of other women.
He put his mouth on her and she arched up off the rug and got two handfuls of his shirt, and he settled in like a man with nowhere else to be for the rest of the month.
She lost the thread of it fast.
There was a place she went with him, and she had assumed it was gone — burned down, salted, filed under things that belonged to a woman who no longer lived here.
It was not gone. It was right there where she'd left it, and it came up around her in about ninety seconds, and the fact that it was still there when everything else had come down made her eyes sting.
"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you stop."
He didn't.
She came apart with her heel pushing into his back and one hand over her own mouth, which was ridiculous, in an empty house, four miles from another human being.
He pulled her hand away.
"Nobody's here," he said. "Nobody's here. Let me hear you."
The second time she didn't cover her mouth.
They did not make it to the bedroom for a while.
He sat back on his heels and she came up after him, and she got his shirt off over his head and stopped the way he had stopped.
He'd lost weight. She hadn't been able to see it in a work shirt from across a yard. Ribs showing at the bottom, and the tan line at his neck where it went white, and the crooked ring finger, and a bruise on his forearm from the roof.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like you're taking inventory."
"That's exactly what I'm doing."
"I know it."
She put her hand flat on his chest. His heart was slamming. Thirty-eight years old and her husband's heart was going under her palm like a boy's, and she thought about that for one second and then decided she was not going to be a woman who thought about things tonight.
"Stand up," she said.
He stood up. She stood up.
She got his belt undone and he made a sound down in his throat, and she pushed him back three steps and he hit the wall by the hall door hard enough to rattle the picture on it.
"Georgia —"
"Be quiet."
"Yes ma'am."
She had him in her hand and he stopped talking entirely.
He put his head back against the wall and shut his eyes and she watched his throat work, and she took her time, because she knew precisely how to take her time with him and because for one hot cruel minute she wanted to be the one standing up.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked.
"You want this."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I want you." His voice was gone to pieces. "Georgia, I have wanted you every day for fifteen years, including the ones I was — "
"Don't." She put her free hand over his mouth. "Not tonight. Don't put her in this room."
He nodded against her palm.
She took her hand away and kissed him, and he got his arms around her ribs and lifted, and she got her legs around his waist, and he carried her down the hall like it was nothing, banging her shoulder into the door frame on the way through.
"Ow."
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry, don't stop —"
They made it to the bedroom eventually.
He was over her and she had her ankles locked at the small of his back, and when he pushed into her they both stopped breathing at the same time, and neither of them moved for a long moment.
"Georgia."
"I know."
"I know it doesn't —"
"Shut up," she said, "and don't stop talking."
So he didn't. That was another thing about him.
He talked, low, right at her ear, and it was not filthy, or not only — it was her name and it was look at me and it was God, I missed you and it was there, that's it, right there, and he had always done that and she had never in her life told him what it did to her.
She got her hand around the back of his neck and held on.
It went slow and then it didn't. He got a hand under her hip and changed the angle and she said a word she did not use.
His forehead came down against her collarbone.
She could feel his heart going against her chest, faster than hers, and she thought — hazily, from very far off — fifteen years and I've never once beat him to it.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes.
His face was six inches away and it was wide open, and there was nothing performed in it, nothing in it that had ever been in front of a crowd.
She had seen that face maybe four times.
Once at twenty-five in a van. Once at his mother's kitchen table.
Once in her kitchen three weeks ago with a laptop between them.
"Don't look at me like that," she said, and her voice broke on it.
"I can't help it."
"Jesse —"
"I'm not gonna say it. I'm not gonna use it right now, that's not — " He shut his eyes and pressed his mouth to her temple. "You know it. That's all. You know it."
She came with her face turned into his shoulder and her whole body shaking, and he followed about four strokes behind her, and he said her name, once, like it had been taken out of him.
The second time was slower and it was worse, because slow leaves room for thinking.
She woke him up. That was the thing she would turn over later, when she was turning everything over: she was the one who woke him up.
It was somewhere past nine and the room was dark and the window was open and she had been lying there listening to him breathe for forty minutes, and she put her mouth on his shoulder and he came awake all at once with a sound in his throat.
"Georgia?"
"Don't say anything."
"Are you —"
"Jesse. Don't say anything."
He didn't. He rolled onto his side and got a hand in her hair and kissed her like a man with all the time in the world, and this time there was no fighting in it, and that was the trouble.
She could feel every year of it. That was what slow did.
Fast, she could call it wanting and leave it alone — bodies do what bodies do.
Slow was the two of them, and the way he waited, and the way his thumb moved on her cheekbone, and how he knew to put his hand flat between her shoulder blades and pull her in the last inch.
He took his time getting there and she let him.
When he finally pushed into her she made a sound like something giving way, and he stopped.
"Hey."
"I'm fine."
"Georgia."
"I'm fine, I'm — " Her eyes had spilled over. She could feel it going down into her hair and there was no hiding it in a room that dark and she did not try. "Keep going."
"I'm not gonna keep going while you're —"
"I have missed you for four years," she said. "Four years, in this bed, with you in it. That's not tonight's fault. Keep going."
He put his forehead against hers and kept going.
It went on a long time. Neither of them was in a hurry and neither of them said much, and at some point she stopped being able to tell where the wanting stopped and the grief started, which she thought was probably the truest thing that had happened to her since March.
She said his name at the end of it. Not Jesse. The other one, the one nobody else on this earth used, the one she had called him at twenty-two in the parking lot of a dance hall in Bandera before either of them had a dollar.
He went absolutely still above her when he heard it.
Then he shook, once, hard, like a man hit from behind — and he put his face in her neck and did not let her see it, and she let him have that, and she held on to the back of his head with both hands and looked at the dark ceiling of her own bedroom while her husband cried on her.
That was the second time, and neither of them ever talked about it again.
At half past ten they were in the kitchen eating cold chicken out of the pan with their hands, because neither of them had eaten since two.
She had his shirt on. He had jeans on and nothing else. The overhead light was off and the one over the stove was on, and the whole room was the color of weak tea.
"There's cornbread," she said.
"Where."
"In the thing. Where it always is."
"Where it always is," he said, and found it in the second place he looked, and she said nothing about that, and he saw her say nothing about it and grinned at her with a piece of cornbread in his hand like a man who had gotten away with something.
They ate standing up at the counter.
"You know what I thought about the whole time in April," he said.
"Don't tell me if it's dirty."
"It's not dirty."
"Then I'm disappointed."