25. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
The screen door slaps shut behind us, and the world disappears.
No cameras, no sirens, no Odette in her cream silk, being escorted off my land like the trespasser she’s always been. Just the kitchen, warm and quiet, and Mal’s hand still in mine.
I don’t let go.
“Sit,” I say, pointing to the kitchen chair. Then I change my mind. “No. Stand. I can’t do this sitting down.”
He stands, and he waits, patient as the oak tree in the front yard, the one that’s been here longer than either of us.
“You said you’d answer for everything.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “Out there, you said you’d answer for every way you failed me.”
“I did.”
“You didn’t finish.” I press my palm against my belly, where the babies are doing their morning gymnastics. “My father.”
The color drains from his face.
“Gracie-”
“He died at 4:47 in the afternoon. I was holding his hand. The nurse was changing his IV, and his monitors started beeping, and I called you.” My throat burns, but I keep going.
“I called you, and you didn’t answer, and I left a voicemail that said ‘Daddy’s dying, please come,’ and you didn’t call back for six hours. ”
“I know.”
“You were at an opening. The Brennan retrospective. Champagne and canapés and people telling you how brilliant you are, while my father-” My voice cracks.
“While my father’s body was getting cold, Mal.
I sat with him for two hours after he died because I didn’t know what else to do, and you were back in New York at that opening, drinking champagne. ”
He doesn’t defend himself or explain.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know it’s not.” His hands hang at his sides, and his eyes are wet, and I’ve never seen him like this, stripped bare, no canvas to hide behind, no brush to put between himself and the world.
“I was a coward. I saw the voicemail notification, and I told myself I’d call you back after the speech.
Then after the first round of press, then after the dinner.
I kept telling myself another hour wouldn’t matter, and by the time I called-”
“My father was already gone, Mal.”
“He was dead.” His voice breaks on the word.
“And you’d been alone with him for hours.
And I couldn’t - I didn’t know how to-” He stops.
Breathes. “I told myself it was because the flight would have taken too long anyway. That I couldn’t have made it in time.
But that was a lie. The truth is I was scared. ”
“Name it.”
“Of watching him die. Of not knowing what to say to you. Of feeling what I couldn’t put on a canvas and pretend I’d dealt with.
” He laughs, but it’s a hollow sound. “I’m good at paintings, Gracie.
I’ve never been good at being present. And your dad - your dad saw right through me, from the very first day.
He knew I wasn’t good enough for you. He told me so, the week before the wedding. ”
I stare at him. “He what?”
“Pulled me aside at the rehearsal dinner. Said if I ever made you cry, he’d feed me to the pigs.” The ghost of a smile crosses his face. “I told him you didn’t have pigs. He said he’d buy some special.”
My eyes burn. “That sounds like Daddy.”
“I was so scared of proving him right. And then I did, over and over, and I couldn’t face it. So I just - didn’t. I stayed away. I made myself busy. I let you grieve alone because I was too much of a coward to sit in the mess with you.”
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, I can hear Denny’s tractor rumbling somewhere in the distance, the sound of normal life going on.
“You left me alone,” I say. “For years. Not just when he died. Every gallery show, every interview, every time someone called me ‘Malcolm Koch’s wife’ like I didn’t have a name of my own - you left me alone in the middle of a crowded room.”
“Yes.”
“I had a career. Did you know that? I was a veterinary surgeon. Top of my class, recruited by three different hospitals before I finished my residency. And I gave it all up to follow you to the city, and then I shrunk myself down to fit into the corners of your life, and you never even noticed.”
“I noticed.” His voice is rough. “I told myself you were happy. That you liked the parties, the travel, the-” He stops, shakes his head.
“I lied to myself. You were miserable, and I could see it, and I kept thinking I’d fix it later.
After the next show, the next tour. There was always going to be a later, and then one day there wasn’t. ”
“No.” I swallow hard. “There wasn’t.”
The babies kick again, both at once, and I press my hand against the curve of my belly. Mal’s eyes drop to the movement, and his face changes.
“What are you scared of?” I ask. “With them.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then: “Everything.”
“Be specific.”
“That I’ll do to them what I did to you.
That I’ll miss their first steps because I’m locked in a studio.
That I’ll teach them their father’s love has to be earned through silence and good behavior and not needing anything.
” He’s barely audible now. “That’s how my dad was, and that’s what I learned.
And I swore I’d never be like him, and then I grew up and became him anyway. ”
“Mal-”
“I don’t know how to be a father, Gracie. I don’t know how to be a husband. I thought I did, and I was wrong about everything, and I’m terrified that I’ll be wrong about this too.”
My chest aches. Not the old ache, the one that lived under my ribs for years while I smiled for cameras and pretended everything was fine. This is newer and rawer, and it might actually be able to heal.
“You want to know what I was scared of?” I say. “When I found out about the babies?”
He nods.
“I was scared I’d have to do it alone. That I’d raise them on this farm by myself, and they’d grow up asking where their daddy was, and I wouldn’t know what to tell them.
” My voice breaks. “I was scared that I loved you too much to ever really get over you. That I’d spend the rest of my life comparing every man I met to the one who broke my heart. ”
“Gracie-”
“And then you showed up, and you stayed, and you worked my farm and slept in my bunkhouse and never once tried to buy your way back into my life with money or fame or any of the things that used to matter so much to you.” I take a step closer. “You just - stayed. And waited. And let me be angry.”
“You had a right to be angry.”
“I still do.” I reach up, touch the chain at his neck. “But I’m also tired, Mal. I’m so tired of being angry, tired of sleeping alone in a bed that still has your shape in it, tired of pretending I don’t love you when I love you so much it makes me crazy.”
He makes a sound, low in his throat, and I watch his hands clench at his sides, not reaching for me, not taking what I haven’t offered. Just holding himself still.
“Can I-” He stops. Swallows. “Can I hold you?”
I answer by stepping into his chest.
His arms come around me, and I bury my face in his shirt, and he smells like Texas dust and engine oil and warm skin, the scent I’d know blind, just Mal, the scent I used to fall asleep breathing and wake up missing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers into my hair. “I’m so sorry. For all of it. For everything.”
“I know.” I’m crying now, tears soaking into his shirt, and I can feel his chest shaking too. “I know you are.”
We stand there for a long time. The kitchen settles around us, the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of old floorboards, the hens still complaining about the morning’s disruption.
His hand finds my hair. Strokes through it, slow and careful, like one wrong move might shatter whatever this is.
“Gracie.” His voice is rough. “I need you to hear this.”
“What?”
“I’m not going back. To any of it. The galleries, the openings, the life we had in the city - I’m done. I already told Elias to put the studio on the market.” His hand stills in my hair. “I want to paint here. On this farm. With you, if you’ll have me.”
I pull back just enough to look at his face. “You’re serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”
“What about your work? Your reputation?”
“My work is better here. It’s honest here.” His thumb traces the line of my jaw. “And my reputation can go to hell. I’d rather be known as Gracie Tate’s husband than Malcolm Koch the painter.”
The laugh that escapes me is wet and broken. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Yeah, well.” His mouth tips up at one side. “I’m learning.”
I reach up and fist my hand in his shirt, pulling him down to my level. “Shut up and kiss me.”
He does. And this time there’s nothing tentative in it. His mouth opens over mine, hot and certain, one hand fisting in my hair to angle my head exactly where he wants it, and the low sound he makes when I catch his lip in my teeth goes straight through me.
“Careful,” he warns against my mouth, and I can hear the grin in it, and the threat.
“Or what?”
His answer is to grip my hips and haul me to the very edge of the counter, flush against him, so I can feel exactly what this is doing to him through his jeans.
My breath goes ragged. Whatever tired, tearful thing was in me a minute ago has burned off, and what’s left is five months of wanting with nowhere left to put it.
“Off.” I’m already dragging his shirt up his stomach. “Now, Mal. I mean it.”
He strips it over his head and throws it, and then his hands are on the buttons of my shirt, and when I make an impatient sound he stops being careful and just pulls, and a button skitters across the kitchen floor.
“That was my shirt.”
“I’ll buy you ten.” His mouth is already on my throat, my collarbone, the top of my breast. “Bill me.”
He gets my bra off with more coordination than a man that worked up has any right to, and when his mouth closes over my nipple I grab a fistful of his hair and hold him there and stop pretending I’m in charge of the sounds coming out of me.
My breasts are heavier now, aching and oversensitive, and every pull of his mouth lights a wire straight down to the ache between my thighs.
“Mal.”
“I know.” He switches to the other side, one big hand palming the weight of me. “I’ve thought about this every goddamn night in that bunkhouse. You have no idea.”
“Tell me.”
He lifts his head. His eyes are dark, pupils blown, mouth slick. “You want to know what I do out there thinking about you?”
Heat floods low in my belly. “Yes.”
“Later.” He pushes my skirt up my thighs, hooks my underwear, drags it down and off, and drops to his knees on my kitchen floor without an ounce of hesitation. “Right now I’ve got a better use for my mouth.”
The first drag of his tongue makes my whole body jerk.
He grips my thighs and holds me open and works me with a focus that has nothing gentle in it, and I brace one hand behind me on the counter and the other in his hair and rock into his mouth shamelessly, chasing it, telling him exactly where, exactly how, faster, there.
He groans against me like he’s the one falling apart, and the vibration nearly finishes me on the spot.
“You taste like mine,” he says, rough, and slides two fingers into me while his tongue keeps working, and the stretch of it, the fullness, the filthy wet sound of it in my quiet kitchen tips me straight over.
I come hard around his fingers with my thighs clamped around his head, and he doesn’t stop, works me through every pulse of it until I’m shoving weakly at his shoulder.
He rises, mouth glistening, looking unbearably pleased with himself, and I grab the chain at his neck and pull him in and taste myself on him and don’t care.
“Jeans,” I pant against his mouth. “Get them off. I’m not done with you.”
His laugh is wrecked. He shucks them, boxers and all, and then he’s bare and hard and hot against my thigh, and I wrap my hand around him and stroke, slow, watching his jaw go slack.
“Gracie.” It comes out strangled. “If you keep doing that this ends embarrassingly fast.”
“Then get inside me.”
“You’re sure it’s safe, with-”
“Doc cleared it, I’ve told you, and if you ask me one more careful question I swear to God.” I tighten my grip. “I don’t want careful, Mal. I’ve had careful. I want you to remember whose you are.”
His restraint snaps. He drags me to the edge, lines himself up, and pushes in on one long stroke that punches the air out of both of us.
He’s mindful of my belly, one forearm braced to keep the angle right, but there’s nothing tentative left in how he moves.
He fucks me slow and deep and merciless, forehead dropped to mine, both of us breathing filth and love into the space between.
“Look at you,” he grits out. “Taking me like you were made for it. My wife. Carrying my kids and still wringing me out.”
“Harder.”
“Yeah?”
“You heard me.”
He gives it to me. My hand fists in the chain, my ring swinging warm between us, and I hook my heels behind his thighs and meet him and tell him I love him in a voice that has nothing polite left in it, and he says it back like a man cursing, I love you, I love you, mine, always, and reaches between us to press his thumb exactly where I need it.
“Come on,” he says against my ear. “Let me feel it. Soak me.”
I do. It rolls through me hard enough that a sound tears out of me I don’t recognize, and the clench of it drags him under with me; he buries himself deep and comes with my name in his teeth, hips stuttering, both arms caging me so I don’t slide off the counter.
For a moment neither of us can speak. His heart slams against my chest. My ring, warm from his skin, sits caught between our bodies where it’s been all along.
“Okay,” I manage, when I can. “That was better than careful.”
His laugh shakes both of us. “Noted.”
We stay like that for a long time. My legs wrapped around him, his hands splayed across my belly, both of us breathing hard in the warm kitchen light.
“Don’t move,” I whisper.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
I laugh, and he laughs, and it turns into what might be crying, and then we’re just holding each other again, forehead to forehead, the ring pressed warm between us.
“Stay,” I say.
“Forever,” he answers.
The kitchen is quiet. The circus is gone. Somewhere outside, Denny’s tractor rumbles past, and the hens are arguing, and the world keeps turning like it always has.
But in here, it’s just us. Just this. Just the two of us choosing each other, finally, after everything.
He kisses my forehead. I close my eyes.
Neither of us needs to say it. Not yet.