Chapter 16 #2
"Therapy. Not as a phase. Not as something you do until you feel better and then stop.
As architecture. The way you go to the office, the way you eat breakfast. Part of how you live.
If your therapist says couples sessions, we do couples sessions.
If you need to go three times a week, you go three times a week. "
"I already go twice a week. I'll go as often as I need to."
She held his gaze. "And if you ever lie to me again.
About anything. Not just another woman — about a deal, about a phone call, about where you were last Tuesday.
If you lie to me about anything, I will leave, and I will not come back.
There will be no second conversation. No cottage visit.
No keynote confessional. I will be gone. "
"I understand."
"I need you to say it."
"If I lie to you about anything, you'll leave. And you won't come back." He said it without flinching. "I won't lie to you. But I'm not asking you to believe that based on a promise. I'm asking you to watch me and decide."
She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
"I have one of my own," he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
"I will never again assume I know what you need without asking. Not about the label, not about the Foundation, not about what kind of day you're having. I'll ask. Every time."
It was such a simple thing. Such a small, obvious thing that should never have needed to be said out loud in a marriage.
And yet it landed in her chest like something heavy and warm, because he'd found the exact place where the damage had started — not with Lana, not with the affair, but with all the years of quiet assumption that had made the affair possible.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay as in you agree, or okay as in you heard me?"
"Okay as in I choose this." She looked at him across the narrow table.
His gray eyes. His rough hands. The shadows under his eyes and the way his shirt collar sat open and loose, no tie, no armor.
"I choose you. Not because you wore me down.
Not because of the keynote, or the Foundation transfer, or the Aldrich deal, or any of the grand gestures.
I'm choosing you because you did the one thing I never thought you could do. "
"What's that?"
"You changed. Actually changed. Not performed change. Not managed change. You looked at the ugliest thing about yourself and you said it out loud in front of three thousand people, and then you called me and said it again with no audience at all."
His jaw worked. She watched the muscle flex and release. He was trying not to cry. She had seen Everett Montclair do many things in eight years of marriage, but she had never seen him try not to cry.
"Come here," she said.
#
He stood. She stood. The table was between them, and then it wasn't — he moved the chair back and she stepped around the table's edge, and then they were standing in the narrow kitchen with the last amber light coming through the window, and his hands were at his sides because he was waiting for her to close the distance.
She did.
Her palm on his chest first. His heart beat through the wrinkled cotton — fast and hard, the same way hers had been when she opened the door. He exhaled at the contact, a short, broken sound.
She slid her hand up to his jaw. The sharp angle of it. The stubble he hadn't shaved. She traced the line she used to know by heart, and his eyes closed.
"Look at me," she said.
He opened his eyes.
She kissed him.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't tentative. It was eight years of knowing this mouth and six weeks of missing it and all the rage and grief and love that had been churning inside her since the night she found the voicemail.
She kissed him and he made a sound against her mouth — low, desperate, like something breaking open — and then his hands came up.
One at the small of her back, the other in her light brown hair, and he kissed her back with the same thing she was feeling.
Not heat alone. Memory. Loss. The weight of everything they'd almost destroyed.
She pulled back an inch. His forehead against hers. Both of them breathing hard.
"Bedroom," she said.
He followed her down the short hallway. The cottage's second bedroom, the one she slept in — not the master, which she'd never used. A queen bed with a white quilt. The window open to the vineyard. The dying light catching the tops of the vines outside.
She turned to face him. He stood in the doorway like he was asking permission to enter.
"Stop standing there like a guest," she said.
Something cracked in his expression — not amusement, exactly, but the ghost of the man she'd married. The one who used to laugh at her directness. He came into the room.
She pulled his shirt from his jeans. Her fingers found the buttons and worked them open, one by one, and he stood still and let her.
She pushed the shirt off his shoulders. He was thinner than before.
She could see the outline of his ribs in a way she hadn't in years.
He'd been running on coffee and guilt, and it showed.
She pressed her mouth to his collarbone. He shuddered.
"Linnea." Her name in his mouth, cracked open.
"Don't talk," she said. "Not yet."
She pulled her own shirt over her head. His eyes moved over her — not the appraising glance of a man seeing something new, but the hungry recognition of someone seeing something he'd been sure he'd lost. She unhooked her bra and let it fall.
His hands came up slowly. Carefully. Like he was handling something fragile.
His fingers traced the line of her collarbone, then lower, the curve of her breast, his thumb brushing her nipple.
She inhaled sharply. Her body remembered him.
Every nerve ending remembered him, and she hated that a little and was grateful for it a little more.
"I missed you," he said. "Every day. I missed —"
"I said don't talk."
She unbuckled his belt. Unzipped his jeans. Pushed them down with the flat of her palms against his hips, feeling the muscles tense under her touch. He kicked them off and she pushed him toward the bed. He sat on the edge and she stood between his knees and looked down at him.
Everett Montclair, sitting on her bed in a Napa cottage that belonged to her, looking up at her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered. She wanted to remember this. The power of it. The choice of it.
She pushed him back and climbed over him.
His hands found her waist, her hips, the button of her jeans.
She helped him work them down and kicked them to the floor.
Then she was on top of him in nothing, and the shock of his skin against hers — warm, familiar, the same body she'd slept beside for eight years — made her eyes sting.
She kissed him again. Slower this time. His mouth opened under hers and his tongue found hers and the kiss deepened into something that made her hips rock against him.
He was hard beneath her, and the familiarity of that — the specific shape and heat of him — sent a wave through her that was grief and want tangled together so tight she couldn't separate them.
"Look at me," she said again. Because she needed him here. Not in his head, not performing, not managing her pleasure the way he used to manage everything — with competence and distance. She needed him present.
His gray eyes found hers. Open. Terrified. Wanting.
She reached between them and guided him inside her, and they both went still.
The feeling was — she didn't have a word for it.
Coming home was too simple. It was more like finding a room in her own house that she'd locked shut and boarded over, and opening the door, and discovering everything inside was exactly as she'd left it.
The same. And not the same at all, because she was different now, and so was he.
She moved. Slowly at first. His hands tightened on her hips — not directing, just holding on.
His breath came in short, ragged pulls. She braced her hands on his chest and found a rhythm, and his head tipped back against the pillow, and she watched his face the way she'd asked him to watch hers.
Every flicker. Every crack in the composure he'd spent his whole life building.
"Open your eyes," she said.
He did.
She held his gaze as she moved. His hands slid up her sides, her ribs, her breasts — touching her like he was learning her again, like all the years of assumption and autopilot had been stripped away and he was starting from the beginning.
His thumb circled her nipple and the pull of it settled low in her belly, a tightening that spread outward.
He sat up without breaking rhythm. Arms around her, his mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him against her and they moved together, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air.
The pace built. She could feel him holding back — not out of control, but out of something more raw.
He was waiting for her. He was following her lead.