Chapter Thirty-Seven #3
We look straight at each other again. The stars sigh in their blackness; to them we are nothing, this moment is nothing.
For me, though, it is both an opening and a closing.
Because I do love this man, who has traveled more than a thousand miles to be with me—I always did.
I can’t remember how I trained myself to believe otherwise.
But I only want to be free now. No man, no bind: just me and my children and the healing we will need to do.
I can’t allow anyone else into that. Not one person. Even him.
After a few seconds, understanding this without me needing to say a word, Johan turns away. He’ll be gone in the morning, and I must find a way to get to Maeve and Raffy.
We walk back to my house and I hand him the hire-car keys so he can drive back to the airport tomorrow. I direct him to the spare bed and I thank him for his great kindness in traveling all this way to support me. We hold each other, briefly, then I make myself walk away.
—
It’s close to 4 a.m. now and my call is ignored by eight taxi companies before I give up. I tried, I whisper to my children’s empty beds. I’ll be with you in the morning.
I’m so tired I feel nauseous. My hands shake; my vision sways and fuzzes at the edges.
Our bed is empty except for one of Robin’s earplugs and Maeve’s purple koala. I take off my clothes and climb in, cuddling the koala while listening to the wind in the thatch, but sleep doesn’t come.
I don’t know how long it is before I put my dressing gown on and walk down the landing to the spare room where Johan is lying on the bed, still fully clothed, staring at the ceiling.
I don’t know how long I stand there in the doorway, looking at his face in the moonlight.
All I know is that time passes while we stare at each other, enough time for a conversation with no words to take place.
He gets up, comes to stand right in front of me.
My back is to the doorframe and he moves in, closer, almost touching me.
His breath is warm on my face in this cold, still room, but he stops there and waits, inches from me.
Inches from the thing neither of us has ever managed to quite let go of.
He, too, is desperate, but he understands that the first step must come from me.
I know that this cannot happen. I also know that it must. I can’t say goodbye to this man without knowing, one final time, what we feel like together. But here? In my house?
He watches me, one hand braced against the doorframe above me as if to stop him moving any closer. I open my mouth, although I’m not sure I trust myself to speak. But now, as always, he knows.
“Not here,” he says.
I nod gratefully and my body hums into life.
It knows what’s coming. I duck under his arm and leave the room, hand outstretched behind me.
He takes it. I almost run down the stairs, through the kitchen, out of the door.
I have a vague notion that we will go up the track to the field but before we’ve even crossed the garden he pulls me around. “Carrie.”
And then we’re together. He kisses me hard, almost frantically, and I press myself into him, running my hands up his back.
Then as now, I have never known anything like this feeling.
My dressing gown has come open and his hands are on me, all over my body.
It’s a sensation my conscious mind had slowly forgotten, but my body has not.
After a minute or two, I pull away, gasping. I’m unmoored, burning. But can I do this? Really?
It is my right is what comes back. I feel the energy of that truth flow into my bones.
It is my right to say goodbye in this way.
To have the wedding night I never had. I have permission to do whatever I want in this moment, this night of reckonings.
And this—him, us—this is what I want. This is what I have always wanted.
I drag him over to the stone barn and we kiss harder, my back against the pitted granite wall.
The edges of the night are fading to gray scale.
There is a bird testing out its first few notes somewhere nearby; next to the barn the ancient hedgerow is swarming with silent life as morning readies for its first breath.
I pull him harder against me, then I back him up so I can take off his jeans.
Johan pulls off my dressing gown and I have a sudden thought that our Roof guests are meters away, fast asleep in the Pig Shed, but I can’t stop now.
It has to be here; it has to be now. Without a word he lifts me onto the stone stile that joins the hedge to the side of the barn, a freezing slab of granite behind which the fields drop down to the lower reaches of the open moor.
The cold of the stone is an unrecorded detail because I’m pushing him into me already, my legs splayed out into the beginnings of the day, and I’m aware only of the agonizing, exquisite pause before he starts moving. I have only ever known this feeling with him.
Only him.