Chapter 16 #3
She got a fist in his shirt the way she had in May and it was not the same at all, because in May she had been reaching for something she was pretending she had not lost, and now she knew precisely what she was picking up and what it weighed.
He made a sound against her mouth like a man going under.
"Say it," she said.
"Georgia —"
"Not that. The other one."
"I love you." His hands came up on either side of her face. "I've loved you since I was twenty-five years old in a parking lot outside a dance hall and I have never one time in my life stopped, not on the worst day, not on the bus, not for one hour —"
She kissed him to make him stop, and then to keep him going.
They did not make it out of the kitchen.
She got his shirt off and put her hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going like something trying to get out, and he stood there and let her look at him — thinner, older, a man who had been living in a rent house for eight months — and she looked at all of it and did not look away.
"Come here," she said.
He came.
He got her up on the counter, which they had done at twenty-five and had not done since, and it turned out neither of them had forgotten how.
He got her jeans off and dropped them on the floor of her own kitchen and got both hands under her and pulled her to the edge and put his mouth on her, and Georgia said something that was not a word and got a handful of his hair and held on.
It was not slow. Neither of them had one bit of patience left in them.
She came with her heel against his back and her head against the cabinet door, and he stayed with her the whole way down, and when she pulled him up by the shoulders his face was wet and so was hers and neither of them said anything about it.
"Bed," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
"Now, Jesse."
He carried her down the hall and she let him and she was laughing about it, which was the part she remembered — that they were both laughing, at thirty-eight and forty-one, in a hallway, and that she hit her shoulder on the door frame in exactly the same place as last May and said so, and he said, "That's a design flaw," and she said, "That's you," and he said, "I have never once been the one carrying you when that happened," and she said, "Liar," and he set her down on the bed still arguing about it.
Then it stopped being funny.
He came down over her and stopped, up on his forearms, and looked at her, and she watched him try to say something and not manage it.
"I know," she said.
"You don't."
"I do."
"Georgia, I didn't think I was ever gonna get to —"
"I know," she said. "Come here."
When he pushed into her they both went still, exactly as they had a year ago in this bed, and it was the same and it was not remotely the same, and she got her hand around the back of his neck and held on.
He talked. He always talked, and she had never in fifteen years told him what it did to her, and she told him now, and he made a noise like he'd been hit and did it more.
It went slow and then it did not. She said his name — the real one, the other one, the one from the parking lot at twenty-two — and this time he did not shake and hide his face. He said it back into her mouth. He said it about four times.
At the end of it she pulled him down onto her and held on with both arms and let him take all his weight off his hands, and lay there under her husband in her own bed with the window open and the frogs going down at the tank, breathing.
Afterward, in the dark, with the fan turning:
"I'm going to say no to it," she said.
"To the deal?"
"To that deal. Marlee's right and I've known she was right since the eighteenth of April." She had her head on his arm. "There'll be another one and it'll be better. And I want you to know I decided that on Thursday, at a table by myself, before you came anywhere near this house."
"Okay."
"I need you to actually hear that, Jesse. I'm not turning it down for you. I did that once."
"I heard it," he said. "I'd have believed you anyway, but I'm glad you said it out loud."
She lay there.
"And in about two years," she said, "there's going to be a tour, and it'll be mine, and it'll be long."
"Good."
"You'll be in this house."
"I'll be in this house," Jesse said, "and I'll be at every show I can get a ticket to, and if you don't want me at one, say so and I won't come."
"You'd buy a ticket."
"I would absolutely buy a ticket."
"You'd hate that."
"I'd hate it so much," he said, with enormous feeling, and Georgia laughed into his shoulder in the dark until she had to stop and catch her breath.
Then it was quiet.
"Say the thing," she said. "Plain. No song in it."
He turned his head on the pillow.
"I'm not going anywhere," Jesse said. "Not this year and not in ten years. You're it. You've been it since I was twenty-five and you'll be it when I'm eighty, and I'm going to be right here, and there's no part of this I'm still working out."
"All right," Georgia said.
"All right?"
"All right." She turned over and put her face against his chest. "Now go to sleep before you talk yourself out of it."
He laughed.
She fell asleep first, for the first time in sixteen years.