19. Rhett
Rhett
There’s a road game Thursday, which means we get a whole night, and a whole night is a thing we’ve never had.
It’s how an affair runs, if you want to call it that, which I don’t.
Stolen ninety seconds. A morning that ends at a back staircase.
Inches. But the team flies out Thursday for a Friday game I’m not traveling to until Friday morning, some scheduling quirk with a charity thing the front office wants me at, and so for one Thursday night the building empties and the city forgets us and Maren comes to my condo and doesn’t set an alarm.
She shows up with wet hair and takeout, wearing the gray hoodie of hers I keep stealing and she keeps reclaiming, and the sight of her in my doorway in it does the thing to my chest again, the thing I've stopped fighting.We eat on the floor because I still haven’t bought a table.
I keep meaning to. I bought this place after the divorce, lake view, good light, and I never furnished it past the necessary, because furnishing a place is something you do when you’re planning to be a person in it, and for five years I wasn’t planning to be a person, I was planning to wait.
The walls are bare. There’s a leather chair I’ve sat in maybe twice and a television I use for tape and a kitchen with two pans, and Maren looks around at all the empty I’ve been living in and doesn’t say anything sad about it, just, “You really do live like a man who thinks he’s leaving. ”
“I was.”
“And now?”
I look at her, cross-legged on my floor in my hoodie eating noodles out of the carton, the lake going dark and silver behind her through the glass. “Now I’m thinking about a table.”
She goes still. It’s a small thing to say, and it’s the largest thing I’ve said, and she hears the size of it, the way she hears everything.
For a second I think she’s going to make a joke, the deflection she keeps in her back pocket, and instead her eyes go bright and she looks down at her noodles and says, very quietly, “Buy a round one. Round tables are friendlier. Nobody’s at the head of a round table.
” And I understand she just told me she’s been imagining sitting at it, and I have to look at the lake for a minute so I don’t say something that scares us both.
Later, in the bedroom, I take my time.
She undresses me without hurry and I undress her the same way, and we lie down facing each other, just her hand on my chest over the heart that's been running hot since September. For a while we don't do anything but look. In the lamp light. At each other. Close enough to count years.
"You're looking at me like the tape again," she says, quiet.
"I like the tape."
"What do you see?"
And I tell her, because she asked, because it's a Thursday with no alarm and I'm done being careful with the true things.
"I see a woman who runs an entire building and lets nobody carry her.
Who turned herself into the most useful person in any room so she'd never have to find out if she's wanted for anything else.
" I move a piece of hair off her face. "You're not useful to me, Maren.
That's the whole thing. You're the part I'd burn the useful down for.
The useless human middle of you. That's the part I —"
"Say it."
"I love you." Plain, the way I say everything. "I'm fifty-three and I learned how too late for everybody else and right on time for you, and I love you."
She kisses me, and there's nothing slow left in it.
I get a hand between her thighs and she's already wet, already opening for me, and I drag my fingers through her slow while she bites down on my shoulder.
"Look at that," I murmur against her throat.
"All this for me." I work two fingers into her and she clenches around them, her breath breaking, and I take my time with that too — curl them, find the spot that makes her hips chase my hand, my thumb working her clit until she's shaking and swearing into my neck.
Then I move down her body. Throat, the tight peak of her breast drawn against my tongue, the flat of her stomach, the cut of her hip — and then I've got her thighs over my shoulders and my mouth on her, one long drag of my tongue through her that makes her arch clean off the bed.
"Rhett —"
"Eyes open." I look up the length of her until she does, until she's watching me, and I close my mouth over her clit and suck, slow and filthy and patient, two fingers buried in her, and I don't stop when her thighs start to shake, I don't stop when she fists a hand in my hair and pulls, I keep her right at the edge and then over it, and she comes on my mouth saying my name like it's the only word she's got left.
She's still trembling when I move up over her and line myself up, the head of my cock right where she's slick and swollen and ready, and I push in slow, one long stroke that splits her open and seats me deep, and we both go still at the size of it, the fact of it, her around me and me in her and neither of us hiding a single thing.
"There you are," I breathe. "Eyes on me."
She keeps them there. I start to move — deep and unhurried, all the way out and all the way back, her legs locked around me, her hands mapping my back.
"That's it," I tell her, low. "Take me. You feel that?
That's mine. You're mine." It's not the armor we usually keep even here, no banter, no game, just the raw fact of me moving in her and her open face under me letting me watch every second of it, the most naked anyone has ever been in front of me.
I get a hand under her hips and change the angle, and she sobs out my name, and I feel her start to tighten around me again.
"With me," I tell her. "Come with me, Maren — let me feel it —"
And she does, clenching down hard, dragging me over with her, and I empty into her with my forehead dropped to hers and her name in my mouth, both of us shaking, both of us undone, my arms barely holding me up so I can keep watching her come apart, because I've been adored from a distance my whole life and this is the first time anyone's let me see them at the exact moment they couldn't perform.
For a while neither of us moves. I stay in her, softening, my weight on my forearms, her heart going hard against my chest and then slower, and slower, until it falls into step with mine.
When I finally ease out of her she makes a small sound of complaint and chases the loss of me, and I huff something that's almost a laugh into her hair.
"Greedy," I tell her.
"You started it. In a press room. Months ago." Her voice is wrecked, sex-rough, and I feel it everywhere. "I'm just finishing what you —"
I kiss her quiet.
I get up and come back with a warm cloth and clean her up slow, and she lets me, which is its own kind of surrender from a woman who has never once let anybody do a single thing for her.
Then I pull her back against my chest, the lake out there in the dark, and I press my mouth to the top knob of her spine and feel her go boneless under it.
"We didn't," she says after a moment. Not an accusation. A noticing.
"No." I flatten my hand over her stomach, where I just was. "First time I haven't in twenty-five years. I wanted to feel all of you. Nothing in the way." A beat, because even now the old caution reaches for me out of habit. "Tell me that was okay."
She laces her fingers through mine. "It was the most okay I've ever been."
We lie there with that, her heartbeat under my palm, the streetlight cutting the room into stripes, and neither of us says the obvious thing, so I say it.
“This is real,” I say. “It stopped being a fire we were managing a while ago. You know that.”
“I know.”
“That’s the part that should scare us. Not the cameras.
Not your job. Not my son.” I press my mouth to her hair.
“A fire you can put out. This isn’t a fire.
This is the thing the fire was about. And that’s the dangerous one, because nobody walks away from this clean now.
We’re past the part where it stays small if it ends. ”
She’s quiet a long moment. Then, into my chest, so quiet I almost miss it: “I have something I have to tell you. Not tonight. I can’t tonight, I can’t put it in the same night as this.
But soon. There’s a thing, Rhett, and when I tell you it’s going to test whether you meant the part about loving the useless human middle, because the thing I have to tell you is the least useful, most human, worst thing I’ve ever —”
“Hey.” I tip her chin up. “Whatever it is.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I know what you are.” And I do; I’d bet the banner on it; I’d bet my whole second life. “Whatever the thing is, you’re the woman who got down in the foxhole. That doesn’t come apart over one bad secret. Tell me when you can. I’ll be here. I bought the lake view. I’m not going anywhere.”
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh and she holds onto me tighter, and I feel her decide, again, to keep whatever it is one more night, and I let her, because I’ve got time, because we’ve got time, because I’m a man lying in the dark next to the thing he came back for and I have never in my life been so sure of a thing I had so little right to be sure of.
I lie awake a while after she’s gone under, her breath even against my ribs, and I think about the table.
A round one. Two chairs to start, maybe three someday if my kid ever forgives me enough to sit down.
I think about the fact that I’m planning furniture for the first time in five years, planning a life with edges and people in it, and that I’m doing it next to a woman with a secret she’s terrified will end us, and that I told her it won’t, and that I meant it.
I fall asleep certain, next to the thing I came back for. Certain has never once in my life turned out to be the same as safe. I fall asleep that way anyway, because she’s warm and she’s here and I’m too old and too far gone to want it any other way.