Chapter 18 #2
I look through the windshield.
“Tonight I thought maybe I could have it back. Not the marriage. Just that.”
“The speech.”
“The room. Granddad.” My voice wavers, and this time I don’t correct it.
“Something that was mine before you and Ashley and all of this. I got through it. For a moment, I was just proud of myself. I wasn’t your wife.
I wasn’t the woman Ashley hated. I was his granddaughter, and I’d done something he would have been proud of. ”
“You should have had that.”
“I thought I did.” I look out the window. “Then she was there again.”
The silence between us changes.
“She won’t touch you again,” he says, careful.
I give a tired little laugh with nothing funny in it. “That’s not what I mean.”
He looks over.
“Ashley will always be in my life if you are.”
“No.”
“She was in the bathroom tonight before you ever came upstairs. She told me I was too big for the dress.”
“What?”
“Not exactly. She said the cut was too close through my hips. That women soften as they get older and I’ve always been fuller. She suggested something less fitted would be more forgiving.”
His expression goes frighteningly blank. “She said that to you tonight.”
“Yes. It wasn’t the first time.”
“When?”
“The week before our wedding.” His eyes stay on me too long, and a horn sounds behind us, and he jerks his attention back to the road. “I was shopping for something to wear. I had a plum silk dress over my arm.”
His eyes drop to the dress under his jacket. “The same color?”
“Almost. She took it out of my hands and told me you preferred a cleaner line. She said you’d never been drawn to anything that made a woman look fuller. Then she picked out a gray column dress and told me it was more what you actually liked.”
“She had no fucking right. She did not get to speak for me.”
“Maybe not. But I believed her.”
Whatever he was about to say disappears. “Why?”
“Because she sounded like she knew. She’d had years with you, Cade.
She talked about what you liked as if it was fact.
She knew what made you laugh. She knew things about you I didn’t even know enough to ask about.
” I look down at my hands. “I bought the gray dress. I hated it. I never wore it out. Every time I put it on, I felt ugly. But after that I didn’t need Ashley standing in a fitting room with me to tell me that anymore. I did it myself.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means every time I bought something I knew I’d wear beside you, I asked myself what you’d think.
Every dinner. Every gala. Everything. I’d turn sideways and look at my stomach.
I’d look at my hips and hear that word. Fuller.
I’d wonder if something showed too much of me, or if the color was too bright, or if you’d look at me and wish I’d chosen something less fitted.
I stopped buying things I thought Ashley would call brave. ”
“Jesus Christ.”
“She said one stupid thing to me and forgot it. I built a wardrobe around it.”
“There has never been one second when I thought you were anything but beautiful.”
“I don’t think you’re lying.” That makes it worse for him. I can see it. “You told me on the porch. You told me tonight. But you never told me when we were married.”
He doesn’t answer. He already knows that.
“Ashley never had that problem. She told me what you found beautiful every chance she got. What you liked. What you didn’t. And she made it very clear I wasn’t any of it. She was.”
“She was wrong.”
“I believe you now. I just had no way to know it then.”
That seems to hurt him more than if I’d argued.
“Sienna, she had no right to tell you what I wanted.”
“Maybe not. But you left the job open. Her voice was the only one I had telling me what my husband found attractive. So I listened.”
He is quiet for a long stretch of road. Then, “You had to know I wanted you.”
I turn toward him. “I knew you liked having sex with me. That’s not the same thing.”
“It was to me.”
“That was the problem.”
He looks as though I’ve put a knife between his ribs.
For half a breath, I want to take it back.
Then I remember our bed. How deliberate he was until I finished, and how fast he withdrew once I had.
No hand on my skin after. No kiss. Two feet of mattress between us, and my husband already asleep on the far side of it.
The pity dies in my throat.
“I wanted you,” he says. “Every time.”
“I don’t doubt that anymore. But I don’t think you understand, Cade. Hearing it now doesn’t give me those years back. It doesn’t put the words in the rooms where I needed them.”
He faces the road again. “I thought what I felt was obvious.”
“It wasn’t.”
He nods once. “I see that.”
The heater is blowing too warm now, but I leave it alone.
After a while he says, “What else did she say to you tonight?”
I lean my head back against the seat. “That she was the authority on you. That she always had been. I told her she wasn’t anymore. I told her you came to the cottage. I told her why. I told her what you said about her.”
“You told her I never loved her.”
“Yes.”
“You told her the truth.”
There is no hesitation in it.
“I think that’s when she really lost it.” The next part comes out smaller than anything else I’ve said. “I just wanted one night where she couldn’t take something from me.”
Cade doesn’t answer. For once, he doesn’t reach for a solution. He just drives.
The first familiar turn appears in the headlights a few minutes later. Cade takes it, and neither of us says anything after that, the whole way.
At the cottage he follows me inside. His gaze goes to the dark hallway, the back door, the windows. He checks the door I checked before I left.
“Cade.”
“Humor me.”
I do.
He wets a clean cloth under the tap and brings it to me. “For your lip.” I take it. He puts the kettle on and opens the wrong cabinet for the mugs, then another. He has never been farther than my front doormat. I sit at my own kitchen table with his jacket around my shoulders and let him look.
When the tea is in front of me I stand, because I want out of this dress. Out of the boning and the pins and everything that held me upright tonight.
“I’m having trouble with the zipper.”
Cade doesn’t move. “Turn around.”
I slip his jacket off and turn around.
His fingers brush the top of my spine before they find the tab. Barely anything, but my skin knows him. Warm fingertips, the faint scrape of a knuckle, then the slow sound of the zipper coming down. He stops when I can manage the rest myself. His hand stays there for half a second.
“I love this color on you,” he says, to the back of my neck. “I should have said it the second you walked out of that bathroom.”
Then his hand is gone, and he steps back, and I take my dress and go.
In my bedroom I change into leggings and the softest sweater I own, and none of it makes me feel any sturdier.
When I come out, he’s still here. There’s a glass of water on the coffee table next to my tea, and the blanket from the back of the couch is in his hands. I stop at the far end of it.
“You can go,” I say.
He looks at my face. “Do you want me to?”
I can’t answer. I press my lips together, and it makes the cut sting, and somehow that’s worse.
“Sienna.”
“Don’t.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t move.
The first tear comes anyway. Then the next. I fight them the way I fought them on that stage, jaw tight, and it doesn’t matter. My whole body is shaking with it.
“Can I hold you?”
I nod, because my throat won’t work.
He drops the blanket on the couch and crosses the room to me, and his arms close around me, careful, one across my back, one around my shoulders. He holds me like that, standing, until my legs start to go.
Then he picks me up.
One arm behind my back and the other under my knees, and I know this.
I have seen it from a stage. I never once let myself wonder what it felt like from inside his arms, and now I know.
He carries me across my own living room like I weigh nothing, his chest solid under my cheek, his arms closed around all of me, and it’s the safest I have felt since I was small enough for someone to carry.
He sits with me still in his arms, and I put my face against his chest because there is nowhere else for it to go, and then I’m crying too hard to pretend otherwise.
Cade says nothing. His hand moves slow over my back. When my breathing catches, his fingers slide into my hair and hold the back of my head.
I have slept beside this man. I have had sex with him. I have woken in the night and found him asleep beside me.
He has never held me like this.
“I’m getting your shirt wet.”
“I don’t care about the shirt, Sienna. Stay.”
The sob comes out of me as one wet, broken sound, and then I’m crying harder.
I don’t know how long we stay like that. Long enough that I stop trying not to. His hand keeps moving the whole time.