26. Harry
— ? —
Harry
The drive home is most of an hour of her hand on my thigh and neither of us talking.
Every red light feels endless, and every slow driver in front of us feels like a personal insult. My hands are tight on the steering wheel and my jaw is clenched, and my whole body is wound so tight I can barely draw a full breath.
She said our room. She didn’t say the guest room. She said ours.
I haven’t slept in our bedroom since our anniversary night. I’ve been in and out of it for clothes, and that’s all.
But I haven’t slept in that bed. I haven’t let myself pretend that room was anything but a record of everything I almost destroyed.
The garage door takes forever to open. I pull in, kill the engine, and turn to look at her.
She’s already getting out of the car.
I follow her through the house, past the guest room where she’s been sleeping for more than two months, and past the living room and the kitchen, to the stairs that lead up to the bedroom we used to share.
She stops at the bottom of the stairs and looks back at me.
“Second thoughts?” I ask.
“No.” She holds out her hand. “Just making sure you’re still with me.”
I take her hand and follow her up the stairs and down the hallway.
She stops in the doorway of our bedroom.
Nothing has changed.
The bed is made, crisp and unwrinkled, the way I left it on day three, because no one has slept in it since.
Her book is still face down on the nightstand, with the spine cracked at whatever page she was reading before everything fell apart.
And draped over the chair by the window, exactly where I left it when I came up to pack her bag, is the green dress.
It’s the one she wore to our anniversary dinner, and it’s been waiting here for her ever since.
My eyes move to the closet. The hole in the door is still there. I never fixed it. I couldn’t bring myself to erase the evidence of how close I came to losing everything.
“You haven’t slept in here,” she says quietly.
“No.”
“This whole time?”
“I’ve been on the study couch. Or the chair outside your door.” I swallow. “I couldn’t be in here without you. It felt wrong.”
She turns to look at me, and her eyes are bright.
“I forgive you,” she says.
The words hit me physically. I feel them in my chest, and in my throat, and in the backs of my eyes.
“Jules…”
“Let me finish.” She steps closer and takes both my hands in hers. “I forgive you. Not because you almost lost me and it scared you into listening. Not because Avery confessed, or because you fired her.”
I don’t trust myself to speak.
“I forgive you because of the phone you put in my hand before I finished asking,” she continues. “Because I watched you start toward those boys today and stop yourself. Because you stood in front of a field full of people and said you were wrong, out loud, when nobody was making you.”
My jaw is working and my eyes are burning. I have to tip my head back and stare at the ceiling for a moment before I can look at her again.
“I forgive you because you’ve been choosing me,” she says. “Every day. Without being asked, and without anyone forcing your hand. On ordinary days when nobody was watching and nothing was at stake except us.” She squeezes my hands. “That’s what I needed to see. And I saw it.”
I can’t speak and I can’t move. I can’t do anything but stand here and take it in.
“Harry.” Her voice is soft. “Look at me.”
I look at her.
“I love you,” she says. “I never stopped. Even when I hated you, even when I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with you, I never stopped loving you. And I want to come home. I want to sleep in our bed and wake up next to you and build a life that doesn’t have her in it anywhere. I want us.”
I have her off her feet before she finishes the sentence.
She wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, and I carry her to the bed. It’s our bed, the one I haven’t touched in months, the one I’ve been dreaming about every night while I slept on couches and in chairs and anywhere that wasn’t here.
I lay her down on the sheets, and she pulls me with her.
“We’re really doing this,” she says.
“We’re really doing this.”
I kiss her slowly at first, savoring it. We have time now. We have all the time in the world.
Her hands find the hem of my shirt and tug. I help her, pulling it over my head and tossing it behind me. Her shirt follows, and then the bra underneath, and then her jeans and her underwear, and I ease them down her legs carefully even though the boot has been off for weeks.
I take my time, because I’ve seen her body a thousand times, and tonight I’m seeing all of it.
The scars on her palms are pink and shiny now, healed but permanent. I turn her hands over and kiss each one, on the places where she burned herself on that bathroom door. She watches me do it, and when I look up her eyes are on mine, and they don’t look away.
Her left calf is still a little thinner than the right.
The break healed clean, and Soren was good at his job even if I wanted to punch him every time he touched her, but I know exactly how many weeks of pain it took her to get this leg back.
I run my palm down the length of it and then follow with my mouth, all the way to her ankle.
“You don’t have to,” she says quietly.
“I want to. Every part of you. Every mark. I want all of it.”
Her breath catches.
“My wife,” I say.
I’ve said those words to other people all day. Saying them to her, naked in this bed, feels like being allowed to again, after months of wondering if I’d lost the right. I say it against the inside of her thigh as I spread her legs.
“My wife.”
I settle between them and drag my tongue through her in one slow pass.
She’s already wet. I’ve thought about this every night for a month, about finishing what I started on that kitchen counter, and I lick her again, slower, and close my mouth over her clit.
Her hips jerk. I hold them down with one hand and keep going, with my tongue flat and steady the way I know she likes.
The sound she makes starts low and climbs.
Her fingers slide into my hair and tighten.
I suck gently and then harder, and she starts to shake, and I slide two fingers inside her and keep my mouth exactly where it is. Her thighs clamp around my head.
“Harry,” she says, and then she’s coming, loud and sudden, with her pussy pulsing against my tongue. I don’t stop until she pushes at my shoulders because it’s too much, and even then I press one last kiss there before I move up her body.
She pulls me the rest of the way with her hands on my face. “Inside me. Face to face. Eyes open.”
I get rid of the rest of my clothes fast and settle over her.
She wraps her legs around my hips. I line myself up and push in slowly, inch by inch, watching her face the whole time, and I have to stop halfway because the heat of her closing around my cock is almost too much.
I breathe through it and keep going until I’m all the way inside her, with my forehead against hers, feeling every small shift she makes.
“Say it,” I tell her.
“I’m your wife.”
“Again.”
“I’m your wife, Harry. I’m yours.”
I start to move, still slow, rolling my hips so I stay deep. Every time I pull back and sink in again she makes that soft sound in the back of her throat that I’ve missed more than I can say, and I keep saying it against her mouth, my wife, my wife.
“I love you,” I tell her. “I love you so much it scares me. You were the first person who wasn’t afraid of me. You were the first person who saw past the money and the reputation and treated me like a man instead of a prize. I knew I was going to marry you before you left that interview.”
She laughs, breathless, with her hands sliding down my back. “You did not.”
“I did. I canceled a date from the elevator. I never looked at another woman again.”
“You never told me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
She tightens her legs around me and digs her heels into the backs of my thighs.
“Then stop being so careful with me,” she says. “Fuck me like you’ve missed me.”
It doesn’t stay slow after that. I drive into her harder and deeper, and I give her everything I’ve been holding back since the morning I told her my rule.
The bed we haven’t touched in months takes all of it.
She’s so wet that every thrust makes a sound, and I reach between us and rub her clit with my thumb, and she arches up to meet me.
“You’re so fucking wet for me,” I say against her ear. “Your pussy feels so good. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this bed with you.”
“Harder,” she says. “I’m yours. Come inside me.”
I give her what she asks for. Her hands are on my ass now, pulling me deeper, and she’s right there with me, meeting every thrust.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere. Go on.”
She comes the second time with her whole body locking up around me and her voice breaking on my name. I follow her over, pushing in as far as I can go and staying there while I come, groaning against her throat.
We lie there afterward, tangled together, breathing hard. Her head is on my chest and my arms are wrapped around her, and neither of us wants to move.
“Harry?” she says eventually.
“Yeah?”
“My rings.”
I go still.
“I want them back,” she says. “I want to wear them again. I want everyone to know I’m yours.”
I look at my pants on the floor, where the small plastic bag is sitting in the pocket, the same as every day.
“No,” I say.
She lifts her head. “No?”
“Not out of a plastic bag. Not lying down.” I ease out from under her. “If I’m giving them back to you, I’m doing it right. Stay there.”
I get out of bed, completely naked and slightly ridiculous, and I don’t care. I find my pants and pull the creased plastic bag from the pocket. It’s the one I’ve been carrying for months, the one I refused to let go of even when she told me she was done.
I go down on one knee on the cold hardwood floor.
Jules laughs, a wet, surprised sound that’s half joy and half tears. “Harry, you’re naked.”
“So are you.”
“We look ridiculous.”
“I don’t care.” I open the bag and let her rings fall into my palm.
There’s the engagement ring, with the diamond that caught the light and made her cry the first time I gave it to her, and the wedding band that a paramedic cut off her swollen finger in the back of an ambulance.
“Jules Rivers Winslow. Will you marry me again?”
She’s crying now, really crying, with tears streaming down her face. But she’s smiling too, so wide it looks as if it might hurt.
“Will you marry me,” I continue, “and let me do it right this time? Let me be the husband you deserved from the beginning?”
She slides off the bed and kneels in front of me on the floor, and takes my face in her hands.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I’ll marry you again.”