19. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
He comes back after dark.
I’m on the porch, because I couldn’t stand being inside anymore, couldn’t stand the quiet, the waiting, the not knowing what’s happening out there in the dark where I sent him.
The rocker creaks under me, and the night air is cold enough to see my breath, and I’ve got a quilt wrapped around my shoulders that doesn’t do a damn thing for the chill in my chest.
His boots on gravel are the first warning. Then his shape, emerging from the darkness of the back pasture, moving toward the house.
He doesn’t make it to the porch.
He stops at the bottom of the steps, and I can see his face now in the light from the kitchen window, eyes red, cheeks wet, dust tracked through with tear-marks like someone dragged fingers through dirt.
And then he goes down.
Not falling, kneeling. One knee, then the other, right there in the dirt at the base of my porch steps, like a man in church, like a man at an altar.
“Gracie.” His voice is wrecked. Scraped raw. “I’m sorry.”
“Mal-”
“No, let me - I have to-” He swallows hard, and his hands are shaking where they rest on his thighs. “I spent three hours walking that fence line. Three hours trying to figure out what to say, how to explain, how to make you understand that I - that I-”
He stops, breathes, starts again.
“I’m not sorry you didn’t tell me. I mean, I am, but that’s not - that’s not what’s killing me.
What’s killing me is that you had to decide at all.
You were pregnant, and alone, and you had to sit in some room somewhere and ask yourself whether the father of your children even deserved to know, and the answer wasn’t obvious. ”
My throat closes.
“The answer should have been obvious, Gracie. It should have been yes, of course he deserves to know, because he’s a good man who loves me and shows up for me and makes me feel like the center of his world. That’s what the answer should have been. And it wasn’t. Because I didn’t - I didn’t-”
His voice breaks. Actually breaks, like a bone has snapped inside him.
“I didn’t show up. For years. I was so busy being seen, being applauded, being the painter that people talked about at parties - and I forgot to be the husband who comes home.
Who asks about your day. Who notices when you’re tired, when you’re sad, when you’re slipping away from me inch by inch because I’m too goddamn self-absorbed to see it. ”
Tears are running down my face now. I can’t stop them.
“You should have been at every appointment,” he says.
“Every scared 3 a.m. Every first kick, every weird craving, every moment of wondering if the babies are okay. I should have been there. Holding your hand. Rubbing your back. Telling you you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, because you are, you always have been, and I was a stupid man being applauded in rooms that didn’t matter while the only room that mattered was wherever you were, and I wasn’t in it. ”
He looks up at me. The mountain, undone. Tears cutting through the dust on his face like rivers through canyons.
“I’m here now,” he says. “I know that’s not enough.
I know I can’t make up for the months, the years, the - the everything.
But I’m here. And I’m not going away. Not ever.
Not if you rage at me, not if you file the papers, not if it takes the rest of my life.
I’ll be here, on this farm, in that bunkhouse, in whatever corner you’ll let me occupy, for as long as you’ll let me stay. ”
His voice drops to barely above a whisper.
“Please. Please let me be part of this. Let me know them. Let me - let me be their father. I’ll do it however you want, whatever terms you set, I don’t care, I just - please, Gracie. Please.”
I’m crying so hard I can barely see him.
I stand up. The quilt falls off my shoulders. I walk down the porch steps, one at a time, until I’m standing in front of him where he kneels in the dirt.
He looks up at me, wrecked and waiting, not reaching for me or pushing, just there. Open. Shattered and offering me all the pieces.
I take his face in my hands.
His eyes close. A sound escapes him, relief or grief or the space between.
I kiss him.
It starts soft, a question and an answer. His hands come up to my wrists, not pulling, just holding on, like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
And then it changes.
His mouth opens under mine, and the kiss deepens, and the lock I’ve kept on myself for months finally, finally breaks open.
I’m crying and kissing him and he’s kissing me back, tasting like salt and dust and Mal, and when I pull back to breathe he follows me, forehead pressed to mine, hands sliding up my arms to my shoulders to my face.
“Gracie-”
“Take me inside.”
His whole body goes still. “Are you sure?”
I kiss him again instead of answering, and that’s apparently enough, because he’s standing, lifting me, and I’m wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs would wrap around his waist except there’s a bump in the way now, so he carries me bridal-style instead, up the porch steps, through the door, down the hall to my bedroom.
Our bedroom, once.
He lays me on the bed like I’m precious, like I’m breakable. Stands there in the lamplight looking at me like he’s memorizing me.
“You’re sure,” he says again. Not a question this time.
“Mal. If you ask me again, I’m going to-”
He’s on me before I finish the sentence.
It’s slow.
I expected desperate, months of distance, of wanting, of watching each other across rooms we weren’t allowed to cross, and to be devoured.
But he’s slow. Reverent. Like he’s relearning me from scratch.
His mouth finds my jaw, my throat, the spot below my ear that makes me shiver. His hands work the buttons of my flannel, his flannel, the one I stole, and when it falls open he goes still.
“You’re showing.”
I tense. Can’t help it.
He presses his palm flat to the swell of my stomach, gentle, warm. “You’re showing,” he says again, and his voice is full of wonder. “God, Gracie. Look at you.”
“I look like I swallowed a cantaloupe.”
“You look like you’re growing our children.” He bends down, presses his mouth to the curve of my belly, and I feel tears prick my eyes again. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s always true.”
His mouth traces lower, and I forget to argue.
He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a gift he’s afraid to tear, and I let him, which is maybe the biggest surrender of all.
The flannel goes first, then the tank top underneath, then the bra that’s been killing me all day because my breasts are bigger and more tender and nothing fits right anymore.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” he murmurs against my skin. “Tell me if I do anything you don’t like.”
“Mal-”
“I mean it.” He looks up at me, eyes fierce. “Your body’s different now. I don’t know what feels good anymore. So you tell me. Every second. Okay?”
I nod, throat tight.
He takes his time with my breasts, gentle, barely-there touches that make me arch into his hands. When his mouth closes over one nipple I gasp, and he pulls back immediately.
“Good gasp or bad gasp?”
“The kind that means don’t you dare stop,” I manage.
He doesn’t stop.
By the time he works his way down my stomach, pressing kisses to every inch of the swell where our children are growing, I’m shaking. Wet. Aching in a way I haven’t let myself ache in months.
“Please,” I hear myself say. “Mal, please-”
“I’ve got you.” He pulls my jeans down my hips, my underwear with them, and then I’m bare and he’s still fully clothed and the imbalance should feel wrong but it doesn’t. It feels like worship.
His mouth finds the crease of my thigh. The inside of my knee. The soft skin of my inner thigh that no one’s touched in half a year.
And then, higher.
The first stroke of his tongue makes me cry out.
“There,” he murmurs against me, and does it again, and I’m gripping the sheets and arching off the bed and making sounds I’d be embarrassed by if I could think.
He knows me, knows exactly how to take me apart, slow and relentless, two fingers sliding inside me while his mouth works my clit, and when I come it’s like breaking open, like a knot cracking loose in my chest, like months of grief and want and loneliness shattering all at once.
He works me through it. Doesn’t stop until I’m pushing at his shoulders, oversensitive and gasping.
“Too much-”
“Okay.” He kisses his way back up my body, and when he reaches my mouth I can taste myself on his lips. “Okay. I’ve got you.”
I reach for his shirt. “Off.”
He pulls it over his head, and there’s the body I’ve been watching through windows for weeks, the tattoos, the muscles, the chain around his neck with my ring resting against his sternum. I reach for it, close my fingers around the warm metal.
“You kept it.”
“Every day.” He kisses me again, soft. “It’s yours. It’s always been yours. I’m just holding onto it until you want it back.”
There’s no answer for that, so I kiss him harder and reach for his belt.
He helps me, shucking his jeans and boxers, and then we’re both bare and he’s braced over me and I can feel the length of him pressed against my hip, insistent.
“Is this okay?” he asks. “With the - is it safe?”
“Doc says it’s fine until the third trimester.”
“You’re sure?”
“Mal.”
He laughs, low and shaky, and shifts his hips, and then he’s pressing into me, slow, so slow, giving me time to adjust, and the stretch is familiar and new all at once.
“God,” he breathes. “Gracie-”
“I know.”
He starts to move.
It’s different than it used to be. My body’s different, fuller and more sensitive, and he’s so careful, checking in with every stroke, watching my face like it’s a map, adjusting his angle when I wince and doing more of whatever makes me gasp.
“You feel incredible,” he says against my throat. “You always feel incredible. But like this - carrying my children, taking me inside you - Gracie, I can’t-”
“Then don’t.” I wrap my arms around his shoulders, pull him closer. “Don’t hold back. I want to feel you.”
He groans, low and broken, and his hips snap harder, and I’m meeting him thrust for thrust, the heat building low in my belly again, coiling tighter with every slide of his body against mine.
“I love you,” he says, ragged. “I love you, I love you, I should have said it every day-”
“Say it now.”
“I love you.” His forehead drops to mine. “I love you. I love these babies. I love this farm and that stupid donkey and the way you look when you’re covered in mud and yelling at me about fence posts. I love all of it. I love you.”
I fly apart.
He follows, burying himself deep and groaning my name into my throat, and for a long moment there’s nothing but this, his weight on me, careful of my belly, his breath harsh in my ear, his heart pounding against my chest.
After, he cleans us both up with a warm cloth, then pulls me against him in the dark.
My head finds its old spot on his chest. The ring on its chain presses against my cheek, cool and familiar. His arms wrap around me, one palm curved low over my stomach where our children are sleeping or kicking or doing whatever twins do at four months.
I don’t know how long we lie there. Long enough for my heartbeat to slow and the sweat to cool on my skin.
I say it quietly, into the darkness.
“We’re not back together.”
His arms tighten. I feel his chest rise and fall beneath my cheek.
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.