Chapter 8 #3
It had been months. Longer. She couldn’t remember the last time, and that was its own kind of wound. It stretched and burned for a moment and then it was perfect, it was so perfect it made her furious, the way he filled her, the way her body opened for him like it had been waiting.
He held still inside her. He put his forehead against hers. He was shaking.
“Move,” she said. “Ryan. Move.”
He moved.
It was hard and fast and not kind at all.
The island was the wrong height and it didn’t matter.
She held on to his shoulders with her nails and he held her hips and pulled her into every thrust, and the sound of it filled the kitchen, skin and breath and the soft slap of their bodies.
She bit his shoulder through his open shirt.
He said her name over and over, and she hated how good it sounded.
She hated how much she had missed hearing it.
“Look at me,” he said.
“No.”
“Please. Look at me.”
She looked at him.
His face was wide open, completely bare, every wall down. He looked at her the way he had looked at her across the pool deck that morning. Like she was the only thing in the world that had ever been worth anything, and he knew exactly what he’d almost thrown away.
She couldn’t stand it. She pulled his mouth down to hers so she wouldn’t have to see it.
* * *
It built fast. Faster than she was ready for.
His hand slid between their bodies and found her, and he touched her exactly the way she liked, because of course he remembered, because he remembered everything about her body even when he’d forgotten how to be in the same room with her.
The pressure climbed and climbed. She stopped kissing him.
She dug her fingers into the back of his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder and made sounds into his skin she would have been ashamed of if she’d had room left to be ashamed.
“Let go,” he whispered into her hair. “I’ve got you. Let go.”
I’ve got you. The words Cooper had said to her in the water.
She came apart.
It tore through her, hard, and she cried out against his shoulder. Her whole body clenched around him and shook and shook. And the second it hit her, he lost it too. He pushed deep and held there, gasping her name, his arms locked around her, shuddering into her.
* * *
For a long time neither of them moved.
She sat on the edge of the kitchen island with her dress bunched around her waist and her legs still wrapped around him. He stood with his face buried in her neck. They were both breathing like they’d swum a mile. His heart was pounding against hers.
Slowly, the world came back. The hum of the refrigerator. A lawn mower somewhere down the street. The gold light moving on the wall.
Her underwear on the floor by the stove.
Ryan lifted his head. He looked at her. His face was wrecked, and soft, and so full of hope that she couldn’t bear it.
“Scarlett,” he said. “I—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”
He didn’t.
* * *
They went upstairs, later.
She didn’t invite him. She didn’t not invite him. She walked up the stairs with her dress held together in one hand, and he came up behind her, and when she got to the top he stopped at the line on the top step the way he always did.
She looked back at him.
She went into the bedroom and left the door open.
The second time was slower. In the bed. With the sun going down through the thin white curtains.
It was quieter and it was deeper and it was, somehow, worse, because it was closer to love, and she felt that, and she let it happen anyway.
He kissed every inch of her he was allowed to kiss.
He kissed the scar at her hairline. He kissed her shoulders and her ribs and the insides of her wrists, and when he reached her back, he stopped, and he kissed the back of her neck instead.
She fell asleep afterward with her face against his chest.
* * *
She woke at three.
No dream. No black water. She woke, all at once, the way she used to wake before a big race.
Ryan was asleep beside her. He was on his back, one arm flung out across her pillow, the other on his stomach. His breathing was slow and deep. In the dim light from the dock he looked peaceful. He looked like a man who had come home.
Scarlett lay on her side and looked at him.
Her body felt good. Loose and warm and sore in all the right places. Her body was perfectly happy. Her body had apparently decided that the whole thing was over and settled.
Her heart was a completely different story.
She lay in the dark and made herself say it, silently, to the ceiling. You slept with him. Twice. And you have not forgiven him. Not for the calls. Not for the ten minutes. Not for the couch. Not for the dock. Not for one single thing.
She had wanted him. She had needed him, in some animal way she couldn’t explain. She had missed his body so much that it had felt like drowning.
But nothing had been fixed. Nothing had been earned. Her anger was still there, exactly where it had been, under her ribs, hot as ever. She had put it down for a few hours, and now she could feel it again, waiting.
Beside her, her husband slept like a man forgiven.
Scarlett lay awake until the sky went gray.