Chapter 14 Milk and Honey #2
It was the slowest thing I’d done all season and one of the best. The water did the work, lifting her on the rise and settling her back down with a warm slow push, and she rode me at her own tidal half-speed, in no rush anywhere, her arms looped around my neck and her belly warm and firm against my stomach and her breasts swaying full and dripping at my face.
The white water swayed with her, almond and milk and warm stone, the lamps gilding every drop that ran off her shoulders.
I could feel her all around me, hot and slick and gripping, and the only sound was the soft lap of the bath against the marble and her breath against my ear.
I caught one heavy breast in my mouth mid-thrust, sealed my lips around the dripping nipple and drank her again, milk and the salt of her skin together, sucking in time with the roll of her hips, and she gasped and clenched tight around my cock and laughed low all at once, her hips grinding down harder for it.
“Greedy,” she whispered, delighted. “Good. Be greedy. Nobody’s greedy for me, everyone’s so careful, I’m so tired of careful.
” Her pace climbed, by tides not bursts, the water sloshing soft against the marble, the lamps low and gold, her gold hair coming fully down now and floating around us both.
“Harder, you can, I won’t break, I’m not made of glass, I’m made of, of milk and stubbornness… ”
I gripped her wide soft hips under the water and gave her what she asked for, deeper, the buoyancy letting me drive up into her while she settled down to meet each thrust, my cock filling her completely on every stroke, and she finally stopped narrating and just held on, her face in my neck, her breath going ragged and high, and when she came it was the long shaking near-silent kind, her cunt rippling tight around me, her body bowing slow over the swell of the belly, her hands fisting in my hair.
And as she came down she made her own version of the gesture, the one that meant something different in her hands than in anyone else’s.
She took my hand from her hip and pressed it flat against her belly, not over an empty place asking to be filled but over the child already there, the proof of the last man who’d done this work, a hand laid in worship on a thing already accomplished, and held it there while she rolled down onto me and milked me to my own finish inside her, deep, the water settling glassy around us, her hand over my heart and my hand over the future, and I emptied into her held there, spending hot and deep, every drop spilling into her while she breathed yes, that’s it, all of it, give me all of it into the steam, the same way she gave everything, like there was always more.
When the water had gone calm and her breathing had come back down, she didn’t settle back to float.
She’d had enough of weightlessness for one evening, she said; the bath was a mercy on her back, but the thing she wanted to ask wanted stone under it, something solid, and she let me draw her up out of the white water and onto the broad warm lip of the basin.
I wrapped a towel around her shoulders and folded another beneath her, and she sat on the marble with her feet still trailing in the bath, the milk-water sheeting off her skin in slow ribbons, the column of mountain light finding her there on the stone instead, dripping and upright, one of my work hands held loosely in both of hers in her lap.
“I have to ask you a thing,” she said, not to the light now but to me, plainly, the way she’d told us about the chair, deniable on purpose so I could choose freely. “And you don’t have to answer it now. You don’t have to answer it ever, and we’ll still be exactly this, I promise you that first.”
I waited. Behind us the bath lapped quiet against the marble.
“The season’s over in two weeks. The baby comes in a couple of months.
Midsummer, near enough, in Malm?.” She turned my hand over in hers, studying it, the work hand, and then looked up at me, warm and easy and entirely without performance.
“There’ll be one chair beside the crib. And I find, lately, that I would very much like there to be a person in the birthing room who saw the beginning.
Not the donor or the cure or the man on the chart.
Someone who was there before any of that.
” Her thumb moved once across my knuckles.
“Adam. If I asked you to be there. As Adam.”
The almond steam rose off the water at our feet. I didn’t answer. She watched me not answer and smiled, completely unbothered, because she’d built the ask so I wouldn’t have to. She built everything to give the other person room.
“And I want to say the part I’m not supposed to say, so it’s said and you can do what you like with it,” she went on, easy, drawing the towel a little closer around herself with her free hand.
“It isn’t the logistics. I could hire a doula, fly my sister down.
I’m a woman who solves logistics.” She turned her head and looked at me, the warmth gone very direct.
“It’s that I want the hands in that room to be the ones that kissed my belly like it was mine, and drank from me in a milk bath, and asked me the day we met, before you knew anything at all, whether the radiator was bothering me.
That’s the want, naked. You can leave it on the marble if you like.
I won’t mind. I’ll still send the postcard. ”
“You’ll send a postcard either way.”
“With a smiley,” she agreed, “that I’ll deny drawing.
” She squeezed my hand and let her gaze drift up to the high window, to the clean blue past it.
“You don’t have to answer,” she said again, and let it go, sitting there full and certain on the warm stone, the holiest water in the building draining off her into the basin.
“Henrik never once saw what he made. Twenty-two years and he never went, not once, to a single birth, a single christening, a single anything. He was invited every time. Every single time. He sent a card.” She leaned her wet shoulder lightly into mine, settling, the asking done.
“Sit with me a minute now. The thinking’s for later, and I’m warm and I’m heavy and the light’s good, and that’s enough for one bath. ”
So I sat with her on the marble lip, under the column of light, the bath cooling slow at our feet, and I didn’t answer, and she didn’t need me to.
Later, in my room above the boiler house, I opened the banking app out of the habit that calms me, the way I recite figures when I can’t sleep, and I looked at the number, and the number had changed.
The debt was half gone. Weeks ago it had been a final-demand letter in my duffel, €19,212.40, a figure I knew to the cent because knowing it to the cent was the only control I had over it. Now it was half that, eaten down by the retainer and the bonuses, melting like the snow on the south face.
I set the phone down and lay back. The number could keep, for once. The chair beside the crib could not, and I knew it, and I let it sit there in the dark unanswered.
In the morning Bianca read my face across the kitchen table in about one second, set down her coffee, and pointed her toast at me.
“She asked you,” she said, and didn’t bother to make it a question.
“She asked me.”
“Good.” Bianca took a bite of toast, watching me, and said it around it, warm and certain and absolutely unhelpful. “Say yes, idiota.”