11. Home Cooked #6
I closed my eyes and let myself believe it as I lay there a long while just listening to her breathe, feeling her heartbeat settle slow against my ribs the way it does when a woman finally stops running from something and lets herself just be caught.
Thought about a night just weeks before during that summer when the storm was beating the windows, she stood on my porch soaked through and shaking, holding her heart in her hands like a peace offering.
Stone fruit. That's what she'd called us.
Called herself. Something ripe and narrow-windowed and easy to lose if a man stood too long deciding whether he was ready.
I remembered thinking that summer would end the way summers do, hot and then gone, and whatever we were reaching for would either get eaten in season or spoil on the counter same as everything else that waits too long for somebody brave enough to pick it.
It didn't spoil.
She didn't let it. Wouldn't let either one of us stand there with our hands at our sides one more day, wouldn't let a locked room or a bad ultimatum or seven years of careful distance turn ripe into rotten the way it does for people too scared to reach when the reaching's finally right there in front of them.
Sat with peaches in her mama's kitchen till the truth cracked her open.
She got on a boat in a hurricane for us.
Walked through my door dripping and certain in a way I'd never once seen her be certain about anything, including herself.
I ran my thumb slow along her spine, felt her hum against my chest, half asleep already, safe in a way that still undid me a little every single time I got to witness it.
There wasn't gonna be another summer like that one. That one did exactly what it was supposed to do. Changed everything. Cost everything. Gave back more than either one of us had any right to expect walking into it.
"You still awake?" she murmured into my chest, voice already halfway gone to sleep.
"Yeah." I kissed the top of her head. "Just thinking about how close we came to letting all this go bad."
"We didn't, though." She tilted her chin up just enough to look at me, eyes heavy but clear, sure of this the way she'd learned to be sure of everything that mattered now. "I wasn't about to let us."
"No." I pulled her in closer, closed my eyes, let the whole weight of that summer finally settle somewhere warm instead of somewhere it used to ache. "You weren't."
Outside, Westonberry kept doing whatever Westonberry does at that hour, same as it always had, same as it always would.
Somewhere out there my face was still on a magazine cover calling me the county's most eligible bachelor, a title that hadn't meant a single thing to me even when I was living inside it.
Somewhere out there some blogger with an axe to grind was still typing up whatever half-true nonsense they figured would sell, still speculating about my wife who reentered the picture like she was ever anything but the whole picture to begin with.
Somewhere out there, probably, Asher was still telling his homeboys a version of this story where he came out looking better than he did, still calling me names that didn't sting one bit different than they had that night.
Let them. Let the whole town keep talking, keep guessing, keep calling it whatever they needed to call it to make sense of something they were never gonna understand from the outside looking in.
My mama had told me, the first time she met Aurelia's eyes at that wedding, that she'd been waiting seven years to watch somebody finally do right by her son the way I'd been doing right by everybody else my whole life.
Miss Lorna had said near the same thing to her daughter, standing barefoot in the sand in a dress she picked out herself, that there wasn't a man walking who was gonna take better care of her than the one already holding her hand.
Both our mothers, looked at the two of us together and came to the exact same conclusion without either one needing to ask the other.
Some things a mother just knows on sight. This was one of them.
None of it, not the headlines, not the gossip, not a man still nursing a grudge he earned every bit of, mattered one ounce against the weight of that. Against the two women who raised us both looking at what we'd built and calling it right.
In here, it was just us. Ruined chicken, possible smoke damage, a random apron I’d never seen her with, all because she wanted to do something nice for me. Seven years, one summer, and a whole life still ahead of it, ripe and ours and finally, finally, picked.
And if I had to do it all again, every bit of it, drive her to her mama's porch and watch her walk inside without me, spend four months learning how to breathe around a hole shaped exactly like her, stand at a door in a storm not knowing if reaching for her one more time was gonna cost me everything I'd built trying not to need her, I'd do it.
Every single time. Wouldn't change one hard year of it, because the hard year was the price, and I'd have paid double.
Westonberry could keep its gossip. Asher could keep his grudge.
I was keeping her.
THE END.