Chapter 41
JOEL
It felt like the aftermath of an earthquake.
Like the world had rearranged itself, and Joel had settled along with it.
Everything was different now. Everything would be different.
Dawn blushed through the window, though the hotel was still quiet.
They had time to sleep, but he and Shay were both awake.
She seemed more like her old self now, steady and calm as her breathing. Her cheek rested against his chest.
“There’s a little bit more of you now,” she said.
“Is that a nice way of telling me I’ve gained weight?”
“No. Well, yes. But only in good places. I couldn’t really tell before, but I like you better this way. You were kind of a greyhound in college.”
“You’re the same.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. In the ways that matter, at least. In the ways that I would want you to be.”
He kissed the side of her forehead, and Shay made a faint noise—of assent or protest, he was not sure—and tugged lightly at a dark hair near his nipple.
He thought of how it would feel to roll over on his bed in New York and find her there, her hair growing longer.
To come out of the shower and see her frying an egg, or reading the newspaper, or ironing one of her shirts.
It would feel like he had come to the end of a long, difficult race. It would feel like home.
“I could go to work at my father’s company,” he said.
She laughed. “Why would you do that?”
“If that was important. I’d call him tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about? It took so much, to walk away from all of that, and you love your job.”
“I don’t love it.”
“Of course you do. It’s who you are.”
“Well, they pay me next to nothing, and I don’t—I want you to have all the things you want. You won’t have to give anything up. I know how much that matters to you, to not live like you did growing up.”
Shay was silent. Her fingers were no longer tangled in the hair of his chest, her whole body so still that he tilted his chin down to see if she was asleep. But no, there she was, her eyes open and fixed on the window.
“Are you ever surprised to see how you look in a photograph?” she asked.
“What, like an unflattering one?”
“No. Like every once in a while, I’ll see a photo of myself, one where I’m unaware of the camera, where I’m standing in the background holding a glass of wine as someone blows out a birthday candle, or there’s one from Newport where I’m in the corner of the frame, rubbing sunblock onto my shoulder, and you have this glimpse of yourself you’ve never seen.
Because even in the mirror, you’re presenting yourself in some way, even when you’re alone.
You see, in a brief flash, how everyone else sees you, and you realize that person is more of a stranger than anyone else in the world possibly could be. ”
Outside the window, there was birdsong. He wanted Shay to move again. He pressed the warm skin of her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger.
“Isn’t that the beauty of love, though?” he asked. “To have that person be so deeply known by someone else?”
“Maybe. But maybe that has to come after.”
“After what?”
“After you have a better sense of yourself.”
“I think you know yourself better than you realize.”
She buried her face in the dip between his chin and collarbone.
They had said it to each other in the night, hadn’t they?
Jack had once remarked that it didn’t count if you said it during sex, or even right before—hormones and pheromones stripped the words of any meaning—but Joel had never agreed with that.
Those were the moments when it was easiest to say nothing, so if you needed to tell someone you loved them then, it was because that love was urgent, inescapable.
Shay’s breath was slowing. They still had time, and in the true light of morning, they would decide what exactly they had to do.
He would marry her that afternoon if she’d let him, even if it was by the captain of the ferry en route back to the mainland.
But now he simply tried to match the rise and fall of her chest, and soon they were both asleep.