26. Slowly, This Time
Twenty Six
Slowly, This Time
He undressed me slowly, like a man relearning something he’d once known by heart and wanted to be sure he still remembered correctly — pausing at my collarbone, at the curve of my waist, murmuring my name like it was the answer to a question he’d been asking himself all year.
“I missed this,” he said, against my skin. “I missed you. Not the idea of you. This. Exactly this.”
“Show me,” I whispered, and he did — with a patience that hadn’t always been there in the earlier years of our marriage, a deliberateness that felt like its own kind of apology, every touch asking a question and waiting, actually waiting, for the answer written in my breath and my hands pulling him closer.
We moved together the way you move when you’ve been apart long enough to have forgotten nothing and learned everything — familiar in the shape of each other, new in the care we were finally, fully bringing to it.
He kept his eyes on mine, checking, present in a way I don’t think he’d been present for years before any of this happened, and I understood, somewhere in the middle of it, that this was what he’d meant by choosing you, on purpose, every time — not a metaphor anymore, but an actual practice, happening in real time, in his hands and his mouth and the low sound of my name.
Afterward, we lay tangled in the dark, my head on his chest, his heartbeat slowing gradually beneath my ear.
“I’m not going to pretend that fixed everything,” I said quietly.
“I know.” His hand moved slowly through my hair. “I don’t need it to have fixed everything. I just need us to keep doing the rest of the work, the unglamorous, ordinary, Thursday-phone-call kind of work, for as long as it takes.”
“That’s the right answer.”
“I’ve been practicing,” he said, and I felt him smile against my hair. “I have a very patient teacher.”
I laughed, soft and real, and pulled the blanket higher against the winter cold outside, and let myself simply exist in the quiet of that moment — no headline waiting to distort it, no seating chart to decode, no photograph anyone else would ever get to caption.
Just the two of us, choosing each other again, slowly, on purpose, in the dark.