Chapter 12
Ethan
The bedroom door closes, and the world shrinks to the size of us.
The noise from the reception fades to a distant murmur through the floorboards: Tom’s laughter, the clink of glasses, Maggie urging someone to eat more pie. Meanwhile, my wife stands by the window, moonlight caught in the lace at her wrists. She’s so beautiful that I can’t remember how to breathe.
My wife. The word is new and enormous and doesn’t fit in my mouth yet, but I’ll spend decades breaking it in.
Jenna turns from the window. Her glasses catch the low light from the bedside lamp, the only one I switched on, because I know she needs soft.
She needs time to adjust, to catalogue the room, to run her quiet arithmetic before she lets herself settle.
I’ve learned her rhythms the way I’ve learned this land, not by forcing, but by watching long enough to understand what thrives where.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi yourself.”
We stare at each other like two people who’ve just realized that every night we spent apart, longing has narrowed to this room and this bed, and the space between us that I’m about to bridge.
She pauses as her fingers go to the buttons at her throat. “I need to tell you something.” Her voice has that formal edge, the careful vocabulary she reaches for when she’s managing something too big for casual language.
“Okay.”
“I haven’t done this before.” She holds my gaze, chin lifted, braced for whatever comes next.
I know this posture. It’s the one she wears when she's handing someone information that might change how they see her.
“I know,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “You do? But how?”
“Jen. I've spent six months listening to you breathe. I know when you’re nervous, when you’re lying, when you’re about to cry, and when you’re pretending you’re not. I know you’ve never done this.”
I cross the room slowly, giving her time to track my approach, to choose whether she stays or steps back. “I also know you’ve thought about it. With me. Because your breathing changes whenever I’m near, and you think I don’t notice, but I notice everything about you.”
Her throat constricts.
“I haven’t… not in a long time,” I admit gruffly. “Long enough that it might as well be the first time.”
“How long?”
“Years.” I stop in front of her, close enough to touch. “I stopped wanting anyone. Then you happened, and I wanted so much it scared me.”
Her hand lifts to my chest. Fingertips first, then her palm, settling over my heart the way I pressed my hand against my chest after our phone calls.
She’s been doing the same thing. We held each other through walls and phone lines and miles of highway, and now there’s nothing between her hand and my heartbeat except a white shirt I’m about to let her take off me.
“I don’t know the steps,” she whispers.
“There aren’t steps. There’s just us.” I trace her jaw with my thumb.
“We go as slow as you need. We stop whenever you say. And if at any point you want to lie here and let me hold you, that’s enough.
That’s always enough. We have time. We have all night and every night after this for the rest of our lives, and I refuse to rush a single second of it. ”
Her eyes are wet. “You can’t say things like that and expect me to remain functional.”
“I’ve never once expected you to be functional, Jen. I just expect you to be honest.”
Her laugh, a wet and startled sound, is genuine. Then her hands find my shirt, meticulously working on the buttons like a data analyst tackling a complex problem.
Her fingers tremble on the third button. I cover her hands with mine, stilling them.
“Slow,” I murmur.
“I’m being slow.”
“You’re being efficient, sweetheart. Different thing.”
The smile she gives me could power every light on this ranch.
I take over, unfastening my shirt one button at a time, holding her gaze as I do so. She needs to see me choosing to be bare before I ask the same of her. The shirt falls open, and her gaze drops to my chest, her soft intake of breath hitting me like a jolt of electricity.
Her fingers glide along my collarbone, tracing down the center of my chest, skimming over the ridges of muscle sculpted by years of ranch work, and pausing at the scar on my left side, a reminder of a fence post that fought back.
She maps me the way she maps everything: carefully and thoroughly, filing every detail.
“Your turn,” I say. “Only if you want to.”
Her hands go to the tiny buttons at her throat. I watch her fingers work, and I don’t help, because this moment is hers. This is Jenna choosing to show me the body she’s hidden her entire life, and I won’t take that choice away by rushing it.
The lace parts. Underneath, her skin is flushed pink from nerves and warmth. The patches on her forearms are quiet tonight, pale rose against ivory, the calmest I’ve seen them. She pushes the dress off her shoulders, and it pools at her feet.
She stands before me in plain white underwear, arms at her sides, not covering herself. It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
The patches extend beyond her forearms. I can see them now in the lamplight on the insides of her elbows, scattered across her ribs, a faint bloom at her collarbone. Her skin tells the story of a body that’s been at war with itself for years, and she’s letting me see every battle.
“Jen,” I say hoarsely, “you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m not being kind. I’m being accurate.”
Her breath hitches.
I close the distance. My hands find her waist, and the contact sends a tremor through both of us. Her skin is warm and impossibly soft between the patches, while the patches themselves are slightly raised and rougher. I trace them with my thumbs as if reading Braille.
She shivers. Not from cold.
“Still okay?”
“If you ask me that every thirty seconds, I’m going to lose my mind.”
“Good. I’ll ask every fifteen.”
I kiss the patch at her collarbone, and she sucks in a sharp breath that sounds like pain. Yet her hands fly to my hair, holding me in place, so I stay.
“I know where every one of these is,” I murmur against her skin. “This one”—my lips move to her wrist—“gets worse when you’re tired. This one”—I trace the edge of her shoulder, moving between smooth skin and raised scars—“is almost gone. You didn’t notice, but I did.”
I kiss along the line of her shoulder, finding each place where her skin changes texture, pressing my mouth against every part of her that’s been hidden, neglected, or avoided.
Her fingers tremble in my hair. “Ethan.”
“When I was waiting in the hallway,” I murmur against her wrist, “while Maggie put cream on your arms, I swore that if you ever let me, I’d touch your skin like it was the most important thing I’d ever held.”
Her knees buckle, and I catch her. I will always catch her.
Her legs wrap around my waist as I lift her, and her arms circle my neck. Her face is buried in my throat, and she’s shaking. I carry her to the bed the way I carried her from the ditch, pressed against my chest in a moment that’s both weightless and monumental. Like she's everything.
I lay her on the mattress carefully and settle over her, my weight on my elbows.
“I thought about this moment. About what your skin would feel like, about the sound you’d make when I finally—” I shift my hips, and she makes that sound, causing my breath to hitch.
“That one. I imagined that one. But the real thing is—God, Jen. The real thing is so much more than I—”
I lose my train of thought when she finishes my sentence by pressing her mouth to mine. I kiss her deeply, sliding my tongue into her mouth to tangle with hers, committing her taste to memory.
When we break apart for air, I look at her. Really look. Her glasses are crooked. Her hair is spread on the pillow. Her chest rises and falls fast, and her eyes are wide and dark and trusting in a way that unravels something inside me.
“You looked like this as you walked toward me.” My mouth trails over her neck, moving lower, pressing words into her skin.
“The sun behind you. Your hands shaking around the bouquet. And I thought, she’s mine.
She’s walking toward me, and she’s mine, and I’ll spend the rest of my life earning that. ”
“Ethan,” she whispers, her eyes glimmering with tears.
“I love you, Jenna.”
Her kiss-swollen lips tremble. “And I love you. With all my heart.”
I grin as lightness spreads through me. “Keep your glasses on.”
She blinks. “What?”
“I want you to see everything. I want you to watch me and know exactly what’s happening and who’s doing it. No fog. No guessing. Just you and me and nothing hidden.”
She swallows hard. “You too. Keep yours on.”
I kiss her again. Not gently. There’s nothing gentle left in me. I’ve been patient for months, celibate for years, and in love with this woman since a Tuesday night phone call about spreadsheets. My patience has run dry.
My tongue finds hers, and the sound she makes goes straight to the base of my spine, a soft, desperate whimper she tries to swallow and can’t.
I swallow it for her.
My hands learn her body methodically and thoroughly, like a man dedicated to studying this exact subject for the rest of his life.
The curve of her waist. The dip of her navel.
The soft swell of her breast under my palm, and the gasp she gives when my thumb finds her nipple through the cotton of her bra.
“Off?” I ask, fingers at the clasp.
“Off. Yes. Everything off. Stop asking and just—”
I unhook it with one hand. She makes a sound that’s part laugh, part moan. “Of course you can do that one-handed.”
“I fix fences one-handed. This is easier.”
“Do not compare my bra to a fence.”
“Your bra is significantly more important than any fence.”