25. Fran #2
Soap. His hands on my shoulders, my back, the taut drum of my belly that he maps like he’s still surprised it’s real.
I wash the sawdust out of his hair. I wash the fence off his arms. I get to the scar on the left one and I don’t flinch and he doesn’t flinch and that, more than anything, is what no walls left looks like.
“Wait,” I say, as things start to escalate, his mouth at my collarbone, my soapy hand doing something unhelpful to his hip. “I need to say something first.”
He stills immediately, his hands going to my waist. Water running over both of us. “What is it?”
“I’m keeping this. I’m keeping you.” I meet his eyes. “Not because I feel obligated, or grateful, or anything like that - because I love you, and I trust you, and this is the thing I’m choosing.”
“I know,” he says softly.
“I need you to know I know that you know.”
He laughs, surprised. “That’s a lot of knowing.”
“I just-” I take a breath. Steam, such as it is. His eyelashes wet. “For so long, everything between us was complicated. Obligations and contracts and expectations. I don’t want this to be complicated. I want it to be simple.”
“Okay.” He traces a line down my cheek. “What’s the simple version?”
“I love you, and I want you, so let’s finally do something about it.”
His smile could light up the whole county. “That’s very simple.”
“I’m a simple woman.”
“You’re the most complicated woman I’ve ever met.” He pulls me closer, belly and all, the water making us clumsy. “But I like complicated.”
Kissing in a shower this size is a contact sport.
My back hits tile. His knee finds the edge of the tub and he makes a noise that is not sexy and we both lose it, laughing under the spray.
I get my hand around him anyway because I want to, and he is already hard, which I am going to be insufferable about later.
“The water is going to go full ice,” I mutter against his mouth. “I am not coming in a falling mercury situation. Bed. Now. I have a mattress and I intend to use it.”
“Bossy.”
“Pregnant, hungry, in love - pick a crisis.”
He shuts the water off with his elbow, which is the most competent thing anyone has ever done, and we do a job with towels that can only be described as theoretical.
We’re still damp when we hit the bedroom.
Afternoon sun slants through the curtains in that particular gold that makes everything look like it was always supposed to happen this way.
The bed is small. The bed has always been small. We have never cared less.
I shove him down first because I can, because he lets me, because watching Logan Davis land on my quilt with wet hair and a look like he’s been handed the rest of his life is a religious experience I did not have on the syllabus.
I climb after him, graceless, the belly taking up the middle of the composition like a third party who was consulted this time and voted yes.
“This is a terrible bed for this,” I say.
“It’s the bed you brought me back to after you said it.” His hands settle at my waist, careful, reverent, like he still can’t quite believe he’s allowed. “I’m not going to complain about the square footage.”
“You’re allowed to touch me like you mean it,” I tell him. “You said the words in a field. We’re past careful.”
His mouth finds the corner of mine. “Then tell me how you want it. You on me, on your side - your back’s been at you all week and I’m not making it worse just because I’ve wanted this since the dahlias.”
“Me on you.” I’m already climbing over him. “I want to watch you when it lands that this is real. That I meant it. That I’m keeping you.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me when I’m about to sit on your-”
He laughs, and I swallow the laugh with my mouth, and then I reach down and wrap my fingers around him, and he groans, low and wrecked and entirely mine.
There is no lock to worry about here. No recess clock.
No one to be quiet for. It is the strangest luxury I have ever been handed, getting to be loud in my own house, in the middle of the day, with a man I’ve decided to keep.
I notch him against me. The head of him slides through the mess. We both go still.
“Okay?” he asks, because he always asks now, because the asking is part of how I know he changed.
“Less talking.” I sink. Slow. The give of it is obscene in the quiet of my own house, a sound the dahlias would faint over.
My mouth falls open. No faucet biting my spine.
No cheap little lock. Just afternoon sun laid warm across his chest and my hands braced there and the stretch of him filling me like the whole point of the design.
“Fran.” His voice is scraped. His hands huge on my thighs. “You - fuck. That’s-”
“Breathe, Davis. You’ve done this before.”
“Not like this, I haven’t.”
I take him to the hilt and stay there, shaking, laughing into it because of course I am, because I told this man I loved him in a field two hours ago and now I am seated on him in daylight like a person who has lost the plot on purpose. His forehead against mine. His breath punched.
“I meant what I said out there,” he says, plain, wrecked, no poetry, which is how I know it’s true. “There is no contract. There’s you. There’s her.” His palm spans my belly. “There’s me trying not to come in the first thirty seconds like a teenager because you laughed.”
I grin down at him. Hair dripping on his collarbone. “You still have to propose.”
He grins up at me then, helpless and bright, hips twitching up into me until we both hiss.
“I will.”
“Say it again.”
“I will. God, I love you. I’ll get down on a knee that isn’t currently occupied, and I’ll mean every word of it.”
“I love you too.” I say it out loud, in daylight, for real, with him inside me and the curtains doing nothing useful about the sun. “Now move. I did not take the afternoon off of dahlia logistics to have a committee meeting.”
He does, or I do, or both of us at once.
I roll my hips and he meets me, short and careful at first because the belly has a height and I have a center of gravity and neither of us wants to explain a pulled muscle to a midwife.
It is nothing like anywhere we’ve done this before.
It is slow in a way that feels chosen rather than stolen, no clock, no crowd, no wall to keep up, and it is filthier for the patience, the slick noise of it too loud in a quiet house, my hands spread on his chest over the place his heart is going too fast. The I love yous still warm in the air between us.
This bed I’ve slept in alone for months, and now he’s in it because I asked him to be.
“God,” I breathe, and then I look down, because of course I do, the place we meet, the belly round and undeniable between us, his face turned up to me open and wrecked and mine. I don’t cover my mouth this time. There’s no reason to. The sound I make is just for him.
“You keep looking at me like that,” he says, rough, wrecked, hands flexing on my thighs, “and this is going to be embarrassingly short. I’ve wanted you to look at me like that in daylight for two years.”
“Then hold on.” I take his right hand and guide it to where I need it, awkward under the curve of me. “And put this to work. I love you, but I’m not finishing on eye contact alone.”
He gets it, thumb finding my clit like it’s the one piece of me he’ll never need instructions for.
The circles are slow and merciless and timed to the roll of my hips, and I have to brace on his shoulders.
Tea still on both our mouths. Sun on the quilt.
I am going to come in my own bed, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, having said the thing out loud, and the rightness of it undoes me.
“There she is,” he says, wrecked and warm. “Let go. I’ve got you. We’ve got all day.”
“You look very pleased with yourself right now,” I tell him, breathless, and it’s not a complaint.
My next breath catches. I come with my mouth open on his name, out loud, no hand over it, not hiding from anyone in my own house.
I shake over him. I clamp down so hard he chokes, hips stuttering, his hand still working me through it until I catch his wrist and he stops immediately, always, the way he does everything I ask now.
“Okay. Okay.” I am laughing and also possibly crying, which is the pregnancy’s fault and also not. “In me. I want all of it.”
“In.” No debate. His voice is scraped. “If that’s - yes. In. Fran-”
“Yes, I love you, come on. For good, always, whatever you want - just-”
He lasts four more thrusts, ugly and shallow and perfect, and then he comes with his mouth mashed to my shoulder, a groan he tries to eat and doesn’t quite, pulsing into me in hot wet pulses I can feel while I watch us in the afternoon light like a person who has found the plot and decided to keep it.
His hand spans my belly the whole time. His other arm locks around my back so I don’t tip off the side of my own too-small bed.
What comes after is quiet.
I shift off him and settle onto my side, catching my breath. He follows, careful of the belly, of his scarred arm, of the fact that my legs have opinions about sudden movement. We lie there for a moment, letting the afternoon resettle around us.
The ceiling has a water stain shaped like Rhode Island. I’ve looked at it a thousand times, but I’ve never been lying here like this before, afternoon light striping across the quilt, not alone.
“That stain,” I say, pointing up. “I used to think it looked like a dog.”
“It’s clearly Rhode Island.” He squints at it. “The proportions are exact.”
“You’ve never been to Rhode Island.”
“I’ve seen maps.” He rolls his head to look at me. “Your ceiling has a cartographically accurate water stain. That’s rare.”
“I’m keeping it.” I stretch, claiming more of the mattress. “It has character. The stain stays.”
“I wasn’t going to argue.” He’s smiling at the ceiling now. “I like that you have opinions about water damage.”