Epilogue
The fragile white paper crinkled under Carly’s legs as she sat down on the table, watching Angela pull on her rubber gloves. Next would come the Q-tip test, then the lube. She lay back and shifted under the sheet until her lower back was happy with her position, then waited for Angela to sit on the rolling stool at the foot of the table and get to work.
“I’m going to touch you now, okay?” Angela said.
“Okay,” Carly nodded, and she didn’t even flinch as Angela ran the Q-tip over her vulva.
“Any pain?” Angela asked.
“Nope,” Carly grinned, just like she had at every appointment for the last few months, and Angela responded with a satisfied hmm.
Next came Angela’s first finger, then a second, and Carly lay there, breathing deeply and keeping her pelvic floor relaxed, as Angela pressed on various points around her opening and on her vaginal walls. She felt no pain and no resistance. She’d practiced this so many times in the last year with her dilators, and her body had become accustomed to this kind of penetration. Last month, she’d leveled up to the biggest dilator the clinic offered, a thick white cylinder that had felt like a stretch, but that, to her relief, hadn’t caused her any pain.
After a few minutes of internal massage, Angela slowly withdrew her hand and peeled off her gloves.
“Things look pretty good to me,” she said, tossing the gloves in the bin. She sat down on the stool and wheeled it along the table so Carly didn’t have to crane her neck to see her. “How is it feeling when you do your exercises?”
“It feels fine,” Carly said. “Good even. I didn’t realize how much of a difference it would make to stop dancing all day. The rest of me feels weaker, but I think my pelvic floor is the strongest it’s ever been.”
Angela nodded as Carly spoke, then gave her a tiny I told you so shrug. “Well, you’ve been extremely diligent about your exercises, which obviously helps a lot.”
Carly felt a swell of pride. Some people would call her stubborn, but Nick preferred “persistent.” She’d persisted at this, and look at the results.
“I think,” Angela said slowly, “that if you wanted to attempt intercourse now, it would probably be okay.”
Carly stared at her. It had been well over a year since Angela had told her to stop having penetrative sex, since that disastrous final date with Carter. She and Nick had had a lot of sex since then—like, a lot—because it turned out that there was plenty of sex to be had without putting a penis in a vagina. It was something she probably should have realized a long time ago, something Nick had helped her to understand: Sex wasn’t a hierarchy with penetration at the top. Sex was just sex, and as long as everyone was enjoying it, it didn’t really matter which body parts were going where.
All the same, Angela had just said something she’d been waiting a long time to hear.
“Are you saying I no longer have a broken vagina?” Carly blurted.
Angela laughed and shook her head indulgently, but when she replied, her voice was firm. “I wouldn’t say you ever had a broken vagina, so I can’t say you no longer have one. I think you’ve worked hard to retrain your muscles and to strengthen them, and that penetration with my finger or your dilator no longer hurts. So it stands to reason that with proper preparation, and enough lube, other kinds of penetration won’t hurt either.”
Carly pulled at the sheet so that it covered her legs, and turned Angela’s words over in her mind. She’d hoped this day would come eventually, but now that it had arrived, she didn’t know what to do with it. She liked her sex life with Nick, and if the look on his face as they’d dried each other off after their shower this morning was anything to go by, he liked it, too. What would he say when she told him the news, though? As Angela jotted down some notes on her clipboard, Carly sat up and felt a flicker of foreboding. She assumed he’d be happy, but what if he was jubilant? What if he’d been waiting and hoping this whole time, putting up with her limitations but secretly hoping they’d be able to fuck soon?
She bit her lip, then remembered what he’d told her when he’d come to her apartment in Sydney, iced coffee in hand. I want whatever you can give me. He’d taken it, too. He’d taken all all her chaos, all her mess, all her persistence, and any kind of sex she was willing to share with him. He’d treated them all as gifts. She gave her head a tiny shake and reminded herself of what she knew to be true, now. She was enough for him, as she was. She was enough, period.
Out in the reception area, Carly booked her next two appointments with Angela, then grabbed a bite-size Reese’s cup from the bowl on the counter and headed out into the warm spring day. On her way to the bus stop, she texted Heather.
Carly, 9:13 AM: Huge news: I’m cleared for ~~intercourse~~!
By the time her bus had arrived, Heather had texted back.
Heather, 9:21 AM: OMG, so exciting! But be careful, or you’ll end up like me
Carly grinned and rolled her eyes. As if Heather hadn’t planned her pregnancy as carefully as she planned everything else in her life. That baby was coming out of the womb with a spreadsheet in her hand. Still, Carly thought, she should figure out her birth control situation, and soon.
As the bus trundled across town, she pulled up her calendar and looked at the day ahead. She and Catherine had a meeting with the director and deputy director of the NYB school, then lunch with a potential donor, and then Catherine wanted to stop by a rehearsal to observe a choreographer who was making her first ever work on the company.
Carly was fully adjusted to office life now, and for the last nine months, she’d been acting as Catherine’s assistant and right-hand woman, watching how Catherine made decisions about promotions and casting, about which choreographers to hire and which donors to cultivate. The learning curve had been steep, but once a month Catherine sat down with her and answered her questions and explained anything Carly felt she hadn’t understood in the moment. Carly doubted she’d ever be put in charge of NYB, but she was developing the skills and knowledge to run something, and she liked how competent she felt, even when she came home from work exhausted by all the information swirling around her brain. It was a different kind of exhaustion than the kind she’d felt at the end of a day of rehearsing or a night of performing, but she was getting accustomed to it. Tonight, though, she’d try not to come home exhausted, because Nick had planned a belated celebration dinner, since he’d been on a weeklong shoot in the Caribbean on the one-year anniversary of them getting together for real.
The bus pulled up beside Lincoln Center, and Carly hopped off, waving at a few of her former colleagues as they headed to the theater for company class. There were days when she missed dancing, she conceded as she walked toward the administrative building on the other side of the plaza, but most days she only felt gratitude. For her new life, for her new future. And for the fact that she was choosing them for herself.
The workday passed at its usual breakneck pace, and at 5:15, Catherine popped her head into Carly’s cubicle and told her to go home.
“You’re sure?” Carly asked, even though she was itching to throw her bag over her shoulder and race to the subway.
“Mmhmm, I’ve got a few more hours of work, but nothing you need to worry about. Plus I know you’ve got a special occasion to get to,” Catherine said with a smile, which widened as Carly leapt to her feet.
“Okay, thanks, see you tomorrow, bye!” she said quickly, grabbing her bag and nearly knocking a pile of binders off her desk as she rushed to the elevator. She might be an office worker now, but she was still occasionally, as Nick had once lovingly described her, a human hurricane.
Nick checked his reflection in the mirror for what must have been the forty-seventh time that evening and straightened his collar yet again. Everything was in place. The chicken was in the oven. The candles were lit, a bottle of champagne, the same exorbitant French brand they’d drunk the night of Carly’s retirement, was chilling in the fridge, and his anniversary present was wrapped and waiting on the coffee table. It had taken longer than expected for it to arrive from Australia, and Nick was secretly grateful that they’d had to delay their anniversary celebration. He hoped she liked the gift, even though it was goofy. If she didn’t like it, he reminded himself, she’d certainly like the other present he had for her.
He checked the mirror one last time, then resumed pacing. After a few laps of the living room, his phone buzzed.
Carly, 6:17 PM: Almost home, 1 train was delayed again
Nick let out a shaky breath and kept pacing. He didn’t know why he was nervous. After all, he knew what her answer would be. He’d sent some potential ring designs to Heather, who had encouraged him to “add more sparkle,” and he knew their friendship well enough to suspect that this piece of feedback was not, in fact, from Heather. Still. He’d never proposed to anyone before, and the gravity of what he was about to do made him feel like his lungs were too big for his body and his skin too tight.
The past year had made a lot of things clear to Nick. The first was that he could make a home anywhere, if he wanted to. Living in New York had been utterly draining at first; the city had everything you could possibly want or need, but in exchange it took all your energy. Getting to know Carly’s hometown made him understand Carly better, in that respect. That first summer, as she’d been settling in to her new job, Nick had spent the weeks he wasn’t on location walking around the city trying to get his bearings, trying to learn the subway system, trying to adjust to the pace of New York, which was faster and more demanding than either Paris or Munich. But after a few months, he’d started to feel at home. Now, every time he returned from a shoot, he felt a sense of calm settle over him when he sank into the back seat of an airport cab and gave the driver the address of Carly’s apartment.
The second thing that had become clear in the last year was that he really was a talented photographer. When his Vogue contract had come up for renewal at the end of a year—after his photos had been featured in five issues, and once on the cover—he’d found himself more in demand than he’d ever imagined possible. He’d shot three luxury brand ad campaigns and had several more lined up. Carly’s parents had been impressed by those campaigns, but Carly herself had been more excited when he’d been approached by a nonprofit photography collective that was trying to diversify stock image footage of ballet dancers. His first shoot, with a group of Black, brown, fat, and disabled dancers, was scheduled for next week.
The final thing, and the only thing that truly mattered, and the reason he was pacing anxiously around the living room they now shared, was that he wanted to spend the rest of his life making Carly Montgomery happy. Furious, occasionally, if the last year was anything to go by, but happy. She was still a human hand grenade at times, but he knew now that when she exploded, it was usually because she was feeling insecure or misunderstood. It helped that she had switched from a free meditation app to actual therapy. Ballet companies still had hang-ups about dancers who needed mental health care, but no one thought twice about an office worker who needed a therapist. And now when she exploded, she didn’t storm out. She stayed, and they talked things out until they understood each other.
And the better he understood her, the more he loved her. He wanted years and years of her rolling her eyes at his bad puns and fierce, loving disagreement. Decades of waking up in the morning with her hair invading his pillow. He knew there had been years of his life, a whole career on a whole different continent, when he didn’t love Carly. Didn’t even know she existed. But it was hard to remember that time now. It was impossible to imagine his life, or his heart, without her, and he had no interest in trying.
He heard a key in the lock and froze, midstride, and turned towards the front door. A second later, the door swung open, and Carly appeared, her low ponytail draped over the shoulder of her sleek floral-print dress. Her cheeks were a little flushed, as though she’d rushed from the subway and all the way up the tight, dimly lit stairwell. The moment she entered the apartment and smiled at him, his nerves vanished. His lungs returned to their normal size, and his skin felt perfectly fine. He slipped his hand into his pocket and squeezed the small velvet box as she dropped her bag on the table in the entryway and walked towards him.
“Happy anniversary,” she said, rising up on her toes to kiss him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her close.
“Belated anniversary,” he said apologetically.
“Pedant,” she said, “and I don’t mind. Sounds like you had a great time over there. Next time take me with you.”
“Deal,” he agreed, and he kissed her back gently, mentally adding Anguilla to a list of potential honeymoon destinations.
“Mmm,” she murmured against his mouth, then pulled away and glanced towards the tiny kitchen. “Something smells good.”
“Roast chicken,” he said. “It needs another twenty minutes or so. And I’ve got a present for you in the meantime.”
She pulled back and frowned. “We said no presents! Remember, a nice meal, no gifts necessary?”
“I remember,” he said, “but then I thought of the perfect gift for you and I couldn’t resist.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked slyly. “Is it a sexy gift?”
“Absolutely not,” he said firmly, and her smile faltered a little. “In fact, I hope you don’t find it sexy.”
She raised her eyebrows, looking mystified, and watched him cross the room to the coffee table and return with the strangely shaped package. He handed it to her, and she weighed it in her hands curiously, then gave it a testing squeeze. Then she flipped it over and slipped her finger under the tape, and a second later the paper fell away to reveal—
“Oh my God, no!” she laughed. She threw her head back and cackled, hugging the horse-head pillow to her chest in delight. “How did you get this?”
“I emailed the BB and asked them where they bought their hideous, cursed pillows, and they gave me the name of their deranged interior decorator. Don’t worry, I didn’t phrase it like that,” he added.
Carly grinned down at the absurd pillow and shook her head in stunned disbelief. “It’s awful, and I love it. It’ll go perfectly with my T-shirt. Thank you. I’m going to go see how it looks on the bed.”
She all but skipped off to the bedroom, and he followed her, thrilled by her response. He stood in the doorway and watched as she rearranged the other throw pillows—simple, tasteful, normal throw pillows—to make room for the new addition. She stood back to admire her work and cackled again, and as he watched her, he put his hand back in his pocket.
“It’s perfect,” she sighed. “We’re going to wake up in The Godfather every single morning.” She turned around and saw him standing in the doorway, with a box open in his hand and an opal ring winking in the light, and froze.
Nick loved the sound of her voice, but he still enjoyed the sight of Carly Montgomery speechless.
He slowly lowered himself to one knee, feeling his quads shake a little from the sudden rush of adrenaline.
“I love you more than I ever imagined possible,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady against the emotion that was clogging his throat. “You once told me that we only get so much luck in this life, and I didn’t know it at the time, but the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was getting run over by your luggage cart. Wherever I am in the world, however far I go, you’re home for me. You’re it for me. You are indispensable to me. And I want to spend the rest of my life loving you. Will you—”
“Yes!” she blurted, and he couldn’t resist a laugh.
“God, you’re not impatient at all, are you?”
“Sorry, sorry, you were saying. You love me and you want to spend the rest of your life with me.”
He shook his head and smiled up at her, then got to his feet and pulled her to him. He pressed his forehead to hers and took a deep breath, taking in the scent of her and thinking of all the thousands of breaths he’d have with her.
“I love you, too, Nick Fucking Jacobs,” she whispered. “And I insist on spending the rest of my life with you.”
She nipped at his bottom lip, and Nick held her as tight as he dared. She kissed him deeply, fiercely, and with her whole body, and he chuckled against her mouth, finally feeling rooted and secure—and, as always, a little dazed by her. By Carly Montgomery, human hurricane, and his, forever.