Chapter Fourteen
Townes
He had missed her in ways he had not given himself language for.
Not her presence—she had been present, she had been there every morning and evening—but her, the full unlocked version of her that he had been allowed access to in the early years, the Winona who argued with him about landscaping philosophy at ten PM and always won, who laughed at her own jokes before the punchline, who reached for him in the dark with no agenda except warmth.
She was reaching for him now.
He was aware of the weight of the evening, the rawness of the things they'd said, the incompleteness of the repair—this was not the end of the work, they both understood that, they had made practical commitments and would honor them.
But they were here, in the lit house, and she was here, and her hand was in his, and he had been without her for so long that the nearness of her felt like something returning to him that he had thought was lost.
She leaned into him—her shoulder against his, then her head—and he didn't move. He stayed exactly where he was and let her be against him and put his arm around her and felt her exhale.
"I don't want to be careful with you tonight," she breathed quietly.
He understood what she meant. She wasn't talking about rushing the work—they had made their commitments, they would keep them. She was talking about the careful careful careful that had been their register for so long. The managed proximity. She was tired of managing.
"I don't want to be careful either," he hummed.
She lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were very clear. "Then don't be," she teased, seductively.
He kissed her.
Not carefully. With the full intention of a man who had missed his wife for two years and was no longer going to pretend otherwise.
He kissed her the way he used to—both hands in her hair, her name in his mouth, the specific relief of her kissing him back with the same unmanaged want, her fists closing in the fabric of his jacket lapels and pulling him closer rather than managing the space between them.
"Townes," she gasped, when they came apart.
"Yeah."
"Bedroom. Now."
He took the green dress off her slowly, because it deserved to be taken off slowly and because he wanted to take his time with her in the particular way that had gotten lost in years of exhausted, routine closeness.
He drew the hidden zipper down the back from neck to waist and spread the fabric open with his hands and pressed his mouth against the bare center of her back—she inhaled sharply—and then he turned her around and she helped him with the rest of it and then she stepped out of it and stood in the slate-blue bedroom in nothing but the low light and looked at him with that composed, formidable face going slowly undone at the edges.
"God, Win." Not as performance. As fact.
"Yeah, you too," she said, and reached for his tie.
She took her time with the tie and the shirt buttons—taking deliberate time, he knew, because this was how she did things, fully and with attention—and when she got the shirt off she ran her hands over his chest and shoulders with a slow thoroughness that made it hard to breathe.
He let her. He stood still and let her, because she was reclaiming something and he understood that and he wanted her to have it.
Then her hands went to his belt and she looked up at him and said, "I missed you," and it was the most devastatingly direct thing she had said to him in two years.
"I missed you," he admitted. "Every day."
She pushed him back onto the bed and followed him down and he caught her hips and pulled her in and they were finally, finally just in it together—no careful management, no measured distance, just his hands full of her and her mouth on his jaw and his neck and the particular sound she made when he touched her in the right places that he had missed like an ache.
He took his time finding every place he remembered and some he had to find again because they had been apart for so long even in their proximity, and she arched into him and said his name the way she used to, not a question or a performance but a statement of exactly where she was and what she wanted, and he gave her everything.
When she was slick and wanting against his fingers and she'd said his name twice more and bitten her lip against the third time, she pulled him up to meet her and said "now, Townes, please—" and he had missed that most of all, her asking directly, the specific intimacy of please in her voice, no management, no distance, just her wanting him and not hiding it.
He pressed into her slowly, and she closed her eyes, and he watched her face—it was all open, every careful line undone, and she was so herself in that moment, the Winona he had married and the Winona they had both worked too hard to stay near and the Winona who had walked into Madrigal Merrill's gallery and laid evidence on a table and said I am quite patient, and I am quite thorough, and he felt such love for her, the enormous specific kind, that it lived in his chest like a sustained chord.
She wrapped her legs around him and they moved together, slowly at first and then less so—she asked for harder and he gave her harder, she said there, exactly there and he stayed exactly there, and she came with her face pressed against his shoulder and his name in her mouth and her nails in his back and it was the most present he had felt in two years.
He followed her over the edge with her name on his lips, and it was less like relief than like arriving somewhere.
They lay afterward in the dark, her head on his chest, his hand moving slowly through her hair, the kind of silence that was different from the silence they had been living in. This one had room in it.
"We have work to do," she stated, after a while. Not sadly. Like a person who knows the nature of the project and isn't afraid of it.
"I know," he acknowledged. "I'm not afraid of it."
She turned her head to look up at him. "Good, neither am I."