CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Alex
Now
We didn’t leave until almost midnight.
Della had tried twice to shoo the last of the club out of her kitchen and failed twice, and it was Price, of all people, who finally stood up and announced that a married man had better things to do than listen to Lackey’s opinions on carburetors, which got Riley up out of his chair faster than anything else could have.
We drove home with the windows down.
Arthur was staying at Della’s. A fact negotiated weeks earlier, with a thoroughness on his part that suggested he’d understood exactly what he was arranging for us and had decided, generously, not to mention it.
Martina had gone ahead of us in her own car, humming something under her breath as she left, which from Martina was as good as a blessing shouted from a rooftop.
The house was dark and quiet when we got there. Ours, now, in every sense that mattered, though it had been ours in the ways that counted for months before a piece of paper caught up to the fact.
Riley didn’t turn on the hallway light.
He turned me instead. Gently, by the hand he was still holding from the drive, and kissed me the way he’d kissed me at the end of the aisle.
Unhurried, like a man who had waited years and intended to take exactly as long as he wanted now that the waiting had a ring on it.
“Mrs. Panzolini,” he said against my mouth.
“Don’t,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t decided yet if I’m keeping my own name.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I like the sound of it either way.”
He walked me backward down the hall without breaking the kiss, unhooking one boot against the door frame and then the other, and I worked the buttons of his shirt loose one at a time because my hands, for once, weren’t in any hurry either.
There was no church parking lot urgency to it, no fumbling with foil in the dark.
Just his mouth at my jaw, my collarbone, the hollow of my neck, and the unhurried thoroughness of a man who had decided, a long time ago in a dust cloud on a desert highway, that I was worth doing slowly.
“I used to think about this,” he said, low, his forehead against mine in the dark of our bedroom. “Not the wedding. This part. You, in this house, not going anywhere in the morning.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Not this time.”
“I know,” he said. “I still like hearing it.”
He undid the zipper of my dress with a patience that undid something in me far more effectively than speed ever could have, and when the dress was gone he stood back for a moment just to look at me, the way he used to look at the mountains at dusk, like something he still hadn’t gotten tired of and didn’t expect to.
“Riley.”
“I’m looking,” he said. “Let me look.”
I let him.
Later, in bed, the patience ran out the way a tank does. Not all at once. Then all at once.
I pulled him down by the back of his neck. His mouth found mine like it had been waiting in the hallway for permission the house had already given.
There was no church lot in it. No caution. His hand at my hip. The other braced beside my head. When he pushed into me, I made a sound I did not try to swallow.
He went still.
Not careful the way the boy in the Jeep had been careful. Present. Checking the room with his body.
“Look at me,” I said.
He did.
Then he moved.
Years do not stay polite. They came up through his shoulders and into the pace of him. I matched his pace with my heels at his back. The headboard knocked once against the wall and then found a rhythm that belonged to our house and not the last one.
Goosebumps rose along my arms. I let them stay.
I came with an intensity that redefined the subject, his name escaping my lips barely made a sound. He followed, finishing inside me with a curse-laden prayer. He stayed exactly where he was until the bed was just a bed again.
Neither of us had reached for the nightstand.
I had noticed it. Distantly. The way you notice a decision already made somewhere below the part of the brain that likes to hold meetings.
He had noticed me notice it. “Is this—”
“Yes,” I said, before he could finish asking. “God, yes.”
The laugh against my shoulder might have been relief. After that there was not much room left for words.
Afterward I lay with my head on his chest and listened to his heart come back down to something ordinary. His hand moved along my spine like he was memorizing the road of it.
“We might have just started something,” I said, into the dark.
“Good,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.
I felt it in his chest more than I heard it.
He cleared his throat. “About time we did this part right. From the beginning. The two of us knowing exactly what we were doing.”
“We didn’t know what we were doing the first time around,” I said, half laughing. “Not really.”
“No,” he agreed. “But we got a hell of a kid out of not knowing.” His hand stilled against my back. “Wouldn’t mind finding out what we get when we actually mean to.”
I fell asleep like that. His heartbeat under my ear. The desert going quiet outside the window the way it always did once the night had fully settled.
For the first time in longer than I could accurately measure, I did not lie awake afterward calculating all the things that could still go wrong.
There was nothing left that I could find that was still wrong.