26. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The farmhouse was still dark when we pulled up, the sky only starting to gray behind it after a night of highway.
I’d left the porch light off by accident, and now the whole place was just a shape against the last of the dark, familiar and waiting and more mine than anything had ever been. Hunt cut the engine and we sat there in the quiet, neither of us moving.
“I should walk you in,” he said finally.
“You should come inside.”
His hand went still on the steering wheel.
“Nora.”
“I know what I’m saying.” I reached across the console and touched his wrist, felt his pulse jump under my fingers. “I’m inviting you in. To my house. To my bed. The one where no man has ever been.”
He turned to look at me, and even in the darkness, I could see him processing what I was offering. More than a night, more than even this. Everything that came with crossing that threshold into the space I’d built for myself when I thought I’d never trust anyone again.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve been sure for a while. I was just too scared to say it.”
We got out of the truck.
He came around to my side and took my hand, and we walked up the porch steps together. I fumbled with my keys, and he waited patiently while I unlocked the door, and then we were standing at the threshold and he stopped.
I looked at him.
“What now?”
“I need you to hear this first.” His hands came up to frame my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones, and his eyes were fierce in the dim light.
“I don’t want tonight. I want the rest. I want the next fifty years, or however many I’m lucky enough to get.
I was a terrible husband and I’m not asking you to forget that.
I’m telling you, out loud, that I’m trying to win my wife back.
And I’ll keep trying whether or not you ever let me past this door again. ”
My throat was tight.
“It’s been clear,” I said. “Every day since you showed up at my gate. It’s been very, very clear.”
I pulled him through.
The house was dark and quiet, familiar shapes emerging as my eyes adjusted. The kitchen table where I ate my solitary dinners. The couch where I fell asleep with textbooks in my lap. The hallway that led to the bedroom I’d made my own.
I led him down that hallway.
He followed.
My bedroom was small, the bed pushed against one wall, the quilt my grandmother had made spread across the mattress. I’d chosen this room because it had the best light in the mornings and because the window looked out on the back pasture where Waffles liked to stand and judge the sunrise.
Hunt stood in the doorway, taking it in.
“This is where you’ve been,” he said softly. “All those months. This is where you were.”
“This is where I put myself back together.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s small and drafty and the pipes make noise when the wind blows.”
“It’s yours.” He stepped closer. “That makes it beautiful.”
I reached for the zipper at the back of my dress.
He caught my hands.
“Let me.”
He turned me around, gentle, and I felt his fingers find the zipper. The sound of it sliding down was impossibly loud in the quiet room. The red fabric pooled at my feet, leaving me in nothing but my underwear and the pearl earrings I’d inherited from my grandmother.
His breath caught.
“You’re different,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Five months different.”
“No.” His hands settled on my shoulders, warm and careful. “Every inch of you. Different. More.”
He turned me to face him, and I watched him look at me in the low light. My breasts, fuller now. My belly, rounded with the daughter growing inside me. My hips, wider than they’d been. All the changes pregnancy had brought, laid bare for him to see.
“You’re the best thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You were beautiful before, but this. Nora. This.”
I reached for his tie and pulled him down by it.
I undressed him the way he’d undressed me, slow, taking my time, because this was my room and my bed and my rules, and I wanted to look at him.
The jacket, then the shirt. The undershirt, dragged up over a chest gone broad and hard from a summer of hauling hay, marked with the healing pink of the bear scars.
I set my mouth to one of them and felt his stomach jump under my lips.
“Nora.” My name came out of him like a warning and a prayer at the same time.
“My room,” I said against his skin. “My pace.”
I got him out of the rest of it and pushed him back onto the quilt my grandmother made, and I let myself do the thing I’d spent months refusing to want.
I mapped him with my mouth. The line of his throat.
The flat of his sternum. The cut of muscle low on his stomach, and the sharp jut of his hip where I bit down just to hear the sound he made.
He was hard against his belly, and when I wrapped my hand around his cock he swore, low and helpless, head going back, the tendons in his neck standing out.
“You don’t have to-”
“I know I don’t.” I looked up at him from between his thighs. “I want to.”
I took his cock in my mouth and he unraveled in pieces, one hand fisting the quilt and the other hovering at my jaw like he didn’t trust himself to touch.
I pulled his hand into my hair and let him feel that I wanted it there.
He watched the whole time, gone, saying my name and filth in the same broken breath, until his hips started to chase and he dragged me up off him with a groan.
“Not like that, not the first time back in this bed. I need to be inside you.”
That was the danger of letting him this close.
The sex wasn’t the danger, I’d already given him that twice in the dark.
The danger was this, the wide-open want of it, the way I could feel myself unlatching every lock I’d spent months installing.
I should’ve pulled back. I let him roll me under him instead.
He kissed his way down my body like the night belonged to him, and it did, and he used it. His mouth found the inside of my thigh, then the underside of my belly where our daughter slept, and then his tongue was on me and every reason I’d ever had to be careful went straight out of my head.
“Let me hear you,” he said against me, and this time there was no hand over my mouth, no reason on earth to stay quiet. “We’re home. Let me hear all of it.”
I let him hear all of it.
He worked me open, slow and relentless, hands hooked under my thighs to hold me open, eyes lifting to my face like my falling open was the only thing in the world worth watching.
The first orgasm broke over me hard and I cried out his name without a shred of shame.
He didn’t stop. He gentled and kept going, dragging me through the aftershocks and straight up the next climb.
“I need you inside me,” I gasped.
“Soon.” His voice was rough against my slick skin. “You’ll get everything. Let me have this first.”
The second one built slower and deeper, wound up out of my core until it wrung me out completely, and I was crying by the end of it, tears sliding hot into my hair, my hands twisted in his. He crawled up my body and kissed the salt off my face.
“Too much?”
“Not enough.” I pulled him down and wrapped my legs around him. “Now.”
He pushed inside me, careful of the belly between us, and went still when he was seated deep, both of us shaking with it.
Then he moved.
It was slow and it was devastating, the unhurried kind we’d never once made time for in the life we’d wrecked, and every drag of him against me undid another knot. His forehead pressed to mine. His breath was my breath.
“I love you,” he said, ragged, right into my mouth.
“I’ve loved you since a fence at dawn, since powdered sugar and gas-station donuts and me going red to my ears telling you you were the best partner I’d ever had.
I’ve loved you every stupid day since, even when I was too much of a coward to show it.
And I’m never going to make you wonder again.
I’ll tell you every morning. I’ll show you every night. ”
I was crying again and I didn’t care. I held him tighter and rocked up to meet him.
“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t. He drove into me with his control finally cracking, my name breaking apart on his lips, and when the third one caught me it took him with it, and I felt him let go inside me, wrapped around me, murmuring my name against my temple like a word he’d been handed back after years of going without it.
After, we lay tangled together in the dim light.
His hand was on my belly, tracing idle patterns, and I could feel our daughter shifting under his palm. The quiet was complete, perfect, the silence that only comes when two people have said everything that needs saying.
“I love you.”
He went still. “Nora.”
“I love you. You know I do, that was never the problem.” I turned to face him, and his eyes were wide in the darkness.
“But I’m scared, Hunt. The words are easy and the staying is what broke us.
So don’t hear them as forgiveness, or as an ending.
Hear them as a fact. I love you. I never stopped loving you.
And that’s exactly what made it hurt so much. ”
“I know it did.”
“I’m not giving you the rest until I stop bracing for the door. Until I stop waiting for the morning you realize this isn’t enough, this life isn’t enough, I’m not enough. You taught me what the words cost when the actions don’t match. So the rest is yours when you’ve earned it. Not before.”
He kissed my shoulder, soft and unhurried.
“Then I’ll be here when you stop bracing,” he said. “I’m very good at showing up now. I’ve got a notebook.”
I laughed into his chest, unexpected and bright.
“You have a notebook?”
“June gave it to me. I write down things I need to remember. Showing up when I say I will, asking instead of deciding, saying the hard things out loud.” He paused.
“Also your favorite kind of tea and the exact way you like your eggs, because apparently I never learned those properly the first time.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m thorough.”
“You’re a menace.”
I fell asleep with his arms around me, his hand still spread across my belly, his heartbeat steady against my back.
When I woke up, the bed was empty.
The old fear surged through me, immediate and brutal. Three years of cold sheets in one breath, all the mornings I’d woken alone while he was already gone, already working, already somewhere more important.
I sat up and listened.
The stove.
Someone was in my kitchen.
I grabbed his flannel from the chair where I kept it and pulled it on as I padded down the hallway. The smell of cooking reached me first. Then the sound of the radio, playing softly. Then a voice, humming along off-key to a country station.
I stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Hunt was shirtless at my stove, his back to me, a spatula in his hand. The counters were spread with ingredients: eggs, butter, the fresh bread Mrs. Patterson had dropped off last week. My mug was out, tea steeping. A plate was set at the table. Saltines were fanned out in a neat arc beside it.
He’d read an article about saltines. He’d probably read a dozen articles about saltines.
But that wasn’t what made me stop breathing.
Waffles was leaning against Hunt’s leg.
My chaos demon, my sworn protector, the goat who had tried to kill this man on at least four separate occasions, was standing in my kitchen with his eyes closed and his head tilted back while Hunt scratched behind his ears without looking.
The goat had forgiven him.
The goat had forgiven him before I’d even woken up.
“Morning,” Hunt said without turning around. “Tea’s almost ready. I made extra eggs because the internet says you might be hungry, and there’s toast with that jam you like from the farmer’s market.”
I didn’t answer.
He glanced over his shoulder, concerned. “Did I get it wrong? I know this is your kitchen, I probably should’ve asked before.”
I shook my head.
Waffles opened his eyes and looked at me.
I swear to God, that goat was smug about it. He pressed closer to Hunt’s leg, making a sound that might’ve been contentment, and Hunt’s hand moved automatically to scratch a different spot.
“He showed up about an hour ago,” Hunt said, turning back to the stove. “Just walked in through the back door and stood there staring at me. I figured if I fed him, he might not try to murder me. Turns out he just wanted attention.”
My chest unclenched.
I stood in the doorway in his flannel and watched my husband cook breakfast in my kitchen while my goat leaned against him like they’d always been friends. June was going to lose her own pool. The whole town was going to talk about this for weeks.
It didn’t matter.
None of it mattered.
What mattered was this morning, this man who had shown up and stayed and learned and tried, who’d written in a notebook so he wouldn’t forget how I liked my eggs, who’d fanned out saltines like he’d researched the optimal arrangement for morning sickness.
What mattered was that he was here.
“Hunt.”
He turned.
I crossed the kitchen in three steps and wrapped my arms around him from behind, pressing my face into his back, feeling the warmth of his skin through my tears.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“For what?”
“For showing up.”
His hands covered mine where they rested on his stomach.
“I told you,” he said softly. “It’s in the notebook.”
I laughed against his back, and Waffles bleated his approval, and the morning sun streamed through the kitchen windows of my grandmother’s house while my husband made me breakfast.
The fear was gone.