Chapter 15 #3
The pleasure built and built, warm and rolling, nothing like the kitchen.
It didn’t tear through her. It rose like a tide.
And when it finally broke, it went on and on, and she cried out, and held his hand so tight her knuckles hurt, and he didn’t stop until she pushed at his shoulder, shaking and laughing and saying please, please, come here.
He came up her body and kissed her, and she could taste herself on his mouth, and she pulled him down on top of her with both arms.
* * *
When he pushed inside her, they both went still.
He held himself there, deep, not moving, with his forehead against hers. His whole body was trembling with the effort of holding still. She could feel his heart. She could feel her own.
“Look at me,” Scarlett whispered.
It was what he had said in the kitchen. She had refused, then.
She didn’t refuse now. She looked right into his eyes from two inches away, and he looked into hers, and she let him see everything. The anger that was finally, finally put down. The grief. The fear. And under all of it, rising up, so big it scared her, love.
He saw it. She watched him see it. His face broke open.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you. I love you so much. I’ve loved you every single day. I just forgot how to show it. I’ll never forget again. I swear to God, Scarlett, I’ll never forget again.”
“I know,” she said. “I love you too.”
And then he moved.
* * *
It was slow. It was so slow and so deep.
He moved inside her like the swell out past the reef, long and heavy and steady, and she wrapped her legs around him and moved with him.
Their eyes stayed open. Their mouths kept finding each other.
His hand came up and cradled the back of her head, and he kissed her face, her eyelids, her cheeks, the wet corners of her eyes.
The sheets were soaked and tangled around them. The sun climbed. Somewhere outside, far away, a boat horn sounded on the bay, and the ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and there was nothing in the whole world but this room and this bed and this man.
He whispered things to her. That she was brave. That she was the strongest person he’d ever known. That he had watched her swim every Saturday for two months and fallen in love with her all over again every single time she touched the wall. That he’d been an idiot. That she was home.
She held on to him and let every word in.
It built slowly for both of them. There was no hurry anywhere in it.
When she felt it coming, she held his face in her hands and made him look at her, and she didn’t close her eyes, and he didn’t close his.
And when it broke for her a second time, she was saying his name, and he was saying hers, and he came with her, deep inside her, holding her so tight she could hardly breathe, his face pressed into her neck, and his whole body shook, and he said, broken and wet against her skin, thank you, thank you, thank you.
* * *
Afterward they lay tangled in the wet sheets for a long time.
The sun was all the way up. It came through the white curtains and lay across the bed in a long warm stripe.
His head was on her chest. Her fingers were in his hair.
Neither of them had said anything in a while.
It wasn’t the silence of the kitchen, full of everything they couldn’t say.
It was the other kind. The kind that didn’t need anything.
After a while, Scarlett spoke.
“I’m going to tell you how it’s going to be,” she said.
He lifted his head. He propped his chin on her breastbone and looked up at her, and he looked about twenty years younger, and very serious.
“Okay,” he said.
“This isn’t a trial,” she said. “I’m not giving you ninety days. I’m not putting you on probation. I’m not watching you for a year to see if you mess up. I’m choosing this. It’s done. It’s the marriage.” She touched his face. “But this is the shape of it.”
“Tell me.”
“You answer. Always. That doesn’t stop because I came home.”
“Always.”
“When I’m lonely, I tell you. Out loud. Before it’s a year. Before it’s a text to Jess at three in the morning. I tell you, and you stop whatever you’re doing and you listen.”
“Yes.”
“You keep going to Dr. Moss. And we go together, too. Once a week. For as long as it takes.”
“Yes.”
“SwimSafe is mine. It stays mine. The company is yours. Neither of us works for the other one, and neither of us writes the other one’s checks. I’m building the program in the islands. I’ll be gone a few weeks every spring and summer.”
“I’ll come,” he said. “If you want me. I’ll carry kickboards.”
“You’ll be terrible at it.”
“I’ll be terrible at it,” he agreed.
“And we sleep in the same bed,” Scarlett said. “Every night. No study couch. No landing. No salon. When we fight, and we’re going to fight, we fight in this bed and we don’t leave it.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And you come home,” she said. Her voice shook, finally, on the last one. “You come home for dinner. At the table. With me. You don’t take the call on the patio.”
Ryan put his face down against her skin, over her heart, and held on to her.
“I’ll come home,” he said. “Every night. For the rest of my life. That’s a promise, Scarlett. Not a try. A promise.”
She put her arms around him and held him there in the stripe of sun, in their bed, in their house, and she believed him.