6. All You Can Eat #7
"Toi, tu avais peur. Et moi..." I stopped. Made myself finish, because tonight was for finishing things. "Moi, j'attendais que tu me choisisses au lieu de te demander."
Me, I was waiting for you to choose me instead of asking you to.
She looked at me a long time.
I took both her hands. Brought them together between mine like something I was warming.
"Aurelia." My voice came out low and trembling. "Regarde-moi." Look at me.
She looked at me with tears drying on her temples, my whole life sitting on a counter in a ruined kitchen.
"Est-ce que je peux te faire l'amour?" Can I make love to you?
She breathed in to say something back and never got to the out. I watched it hang there in her chest, waiting on her to remember how the rest of it worked.
"Pas comme ?a," I said, and tipped my head at the counter, the wreckage, the beautiful mess of what we'd just been. "?a, c'était sept ans qui explosent. C'était la faim."
Not like that. That was seven years exploding. That was the hunger.
"Je te demande autre chose. Je te demande lentement. Dans un lit. Avec le temps qu'on n'a jamais pris."
I'm asking you for something else. I'm asking you slow. In a bed. With the time we never took.
My thumbs moved over her knuckles, and my voice cracked straight down the middle, and I did not repair it.
"Je ne t'ai jamais rien demandé, Ru. Sept ans. Je t'ai nourrie, je t'ai portée, je t'ai attendue, mais je n'ai jamais demandé."
I've never asked you for anything, Ru. Seven years. I fed you, I carried you, I waited for you, but I never asked.
"Alors je demande maintenant."
So I'm asking now.
And that's when I felt it. Heat at the bottom of my eyes, pressure I'd been outrunning since the doorbell, since February, maybe, since the last time I let anything fall in front of another living person, and this time I didn't will it back.
I let the first one go. Felt it cut down my face like something breaking out of a long sentence, and her eyes went wide, because in seven years she had never once seen it, nobody had, and her hands came up out of mine and caught my face like she was catching something dropped.
"Dillion." Barely a sound.
"I love you. I don't know how to say how much.
I've been trying to say it for seven years in every way except the words, I said it in tagliatelle, I said it in ferry rides, I said it in a mustard jar and a shower temperature.
I have been saying it, Ru, the whole time, in everything, to everybody, they all heard it except you, and that's my fault, because I hid it in things instead of handing it to you, because things can't get rejected. "
"I heard you, Dilly." Tears fell, and she didn't wipe them. "I was just…I was so scared."
My breath went ragged and I pushed through it, her thumbs moving on my cheekbones, catching what fell.
"You want to know what I want? You asked earlier.
Besides overdosing on this peach tonight?
" I joked through it, making me laugh. "I want to love you out loud for the rest of my life.
I want to be tired with you and bored with you and old with you.
I want to cook for you every day and I want you to ask me to, and I want to stop being the strongest man everybody knows, and you're the only place I've ever wanted to put any of it down. "
She began crying harder.
"And I'm not saying that in a way where you might think I'm trying to burden you, or that my favorite parts of you are what you do for me.
" She wiped at her cheek with the back of her wrist, didn't stop talking long enough to do it right.
"I'm saying you make me feel. You make me laugh.
You make me look forward to things. I can relax with you.
We can be silly and talk about dumb shit and none of it has to mean anything and somehow all of it means everything.
I feel... I'm safe with you, Aurelia. I like who I am when you're around, because just having you near me lets me be exactly what I already am, without performing none of it.
You existing is enough for me. It really is.
But I want you to exist alongside me, Ru.
I want that so bad it scares me some nights. "
"Alors demande encore," she whispered. Then ask again.
I pressed my forehead to hers as I closed my eyes.
"Est-ce que je peux te faire l'amour, Aurelia?"
Can I make love to you, Aurelia?
"Oui." Her mouth found mine, soft, salt, seven years. "Oui, Dillion. Depuis toujours, oui."
Yes. Yes, Dillion. It's always been yes.
I picked her up off that counter, and she wrapped around me and put her face in my neck, and I turned for the hallway.
For a bed, so I could love her the right way this time, slow, chosen, no man waiting on the other end of it, no morning text coming, nothing between us anymore but the time we'd finally decided to take —
"Dillion? I fell asleep waiting for you. What's taking you so long to come to bed? And I keep hearing weird noises, is it the house settling from the storm?"
The voice came out of the dark hallway like a blade through a ticket and I froze.
Everything froze. Aurelia's breath stopped against my neck, her whole body going stone in my arms, and somewhere in the half-second before I turned, I did the math a man does when the walk-in door swings open and he already knows what he forgot to close.
I turned around and Madeline stood at the edge of the kitchen, still in the lingerie she'd saved for tonight. The hallway light was behind her, edging her in gold, mostly silhouette.
Then she reached over and flipped the overhead light on and the click was the loudest thing that had happened in that house all night.
The kitchen jumped out of the candlelight into full white, all of it — the broken glass, the nightgown on the floor, the tears, and the naked woman in my arms with legs wrapped around me with her face lifting out of my neck into the light.
The rain had stopped. That was the worst part. The storm had finally passed, and the house was dead quiet, and there was nothing left to cover any of us.
"Madeline," I croaked.