Chapter 24
Nora remained in the kitchen. She had spent almost thirty years knowing where the door was in any given room.
There was a door here, only a few feet away, and then out across the cold grass to the safety of her house.
She didn’t go to it. She put her hand on the counter beside the toast neither of them had eaten and she stayed.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Rognar said. “I want that on the record. I didn’t say it to make you—”
“Stop talking.”
He stopped. Charlie was in her room, deep in the boneless amoxicillin sleep.
The kettle clicked once more as it cooled.
She looked at the little white box with her daughter’s—with his daughter’s—name spelled out by a machine.
She made herself start talking before she’d finished arranging what she wanted to say, even though she hated doing it in that order.
“When I was nine, the power went off,” she said.
“In the apartment on Corliss Street. Third one that year. My mother had… There was a reason. There was always a reason. And the reason was never that she didn’t love me.
I want to be clear. She loved me the entire time, spectacularly, at the top of her lungs.
The power just went off. And I knew where she kept the letters, because I always knew where things were.
That was already my job by then. So I found the account number, and I took a quarter to the payphone on the corner, and I called the company and read them the number and told them we’d pay.
And I got the electricity turned back on.
” She moved the box on the counter, the way she’d watched him do it a few minutes ago.
Then she noticed she was doing it, and left her hand there.
“I was nine. I’ve never told anyone that.
I told it to you at The Broken Stick like it was a funny story about a resourceful child. ”
“You did.”
“It isn’t a funny story.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
He didn’t reach for her. He sat where he was with his elbows on his knees and his daughter asleep down the hall, and he listened.
She recognized the quality of the listening, because she’d seen it once before—on her couch that first night, when Charlie finally slept against his chest and he’d stopped being the fun one for anybody’s benefit.
That same stillness, his enormous attention pointed at her and asking for nothing back.
“Twelve addresses before I was eighteen,” she said.
“I wrote them out once. There was a van, for four months, when I was eleven. She called it an adventure and it was. That’s the trap.
It was genuinely wonderful. We saw the ocean in November and ate fries out of the bag, and she made it feel like the most brilliant idea anyone had ever had.
And it was. Right up until it was December and the van didn’t have heat and I was the one who worked out we couldn’t stay in it.
And she was so proud of me. She kept telling people. My Nora sorts everything out.”
Her voice did something on that last part that she hadn’t authorized. She let it.
“So I built this.” She lifted one hand off the counter and pointed at her house.
At the ordered quiet life with the paid bills and the stocked fridge and the keys that were always on the hook.
“All of it. On purpose. And then you moved in next door with your parties and your teammates and your… You charmed the mailman, Rognar. You charmed my mailman. He tells me things about you now. And I looked at you and I thought, there’s the van.
Charming. Spontaneous. Wonderful to love.
” She made herself finish it. “And somebody else always ends up being the one who works out we can’t stay in it. ”
He didn’t defend himself. She had braced for it—for the reasonable case, the evidence, the but I did the paternity and the childcare and the pediatrician. It didn’t come. He just looked at her, and didn’t argue, and her throat went tight.
“I’m not telling you this so you’ll say something kind,” she said. “I’m telling you because you said what you said, over there, with the antibiotics, and you’re owed the reason it’s taken me eight weeks.”
“Okay,” he said.
“That’s it? Okay?”
“You told me to stop talking.” A small tilt at the corner of his mouth, gone as fast as it came. “I’m being agreeable. That’s my thing.”
She didn’t laugh, but it was close.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said it, not weaponized, but laid down on the counter beside everything else.
“Nora. Name one.”
“One what?”
“One time.” He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t sharpen it.
He handed it to her the way she’d handed him both options in the hall at two in the morning—here, choose.
“Eight weeks. Name one time I asked you to be the one who works it out. One thing I dropped that you had to catch. One bill you paid. One egg you kept in the house because I couldn’t.
” A beat. “You keep a ledger for everything. You’ve got one for the hours I cost you, I’ve seen the notebook.
I’m not mad, I’d have kept one too. So run it. Name one.”
She ran it.
She was good at ledgers. She was the best she knew at ledgers; four years of it as a living, and a lifetime of it before that from nine years old and a payphone.
She ran the eight weeks the way she’d run Rosa’s shoebox, line by line.
The evenings he’d turned up with dinner and not stayed.
The porch light he’d fixed without being asked.
The way he’d taken her name off Deb’s laminated schedule.
The way he’d learned Charlie’s whole vocabulary in eight weeks rather than asking her to teach him.
She looked for the entry, the single debit, the moment the charming male next door had turned around and made her responsible for him.
There wasn’t one.
She stood in his kitchen and audited eight weeks of a professional hockey player. The ledger came out clean. She felt what she’d been holding shut for eight weeks come open all at once, with no procedure attached to it at all.
“There isn’t one,” she said.
“No.”
“That’s—” She stopped. Started again and it came out as the worst-constructed sentence of her adult life, and she heard it going wrong and couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to.
“That’s why. That’s… You never once. In eight weeks you never once, and I kept waiting, I had a whole…
I was ready. I’ve been ready since the eggs. And you never—”
The words gave out and she abandoned them, which she never did. She always finished the sentence. “That’s why I love you. Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had four hours’ sleep.”
He was looking at her like that.
“I mean it,” she said, “I will leave,” and it was a lie and both of them knew it was a lie. She was already crossing the floor towards him. It was possibly the first thing she had said to him in eight weeks that she didn’t mean, and it was the truest.
He caught her at the counter. He stood up out of the chair as she came, and she got a fist in his shirt and he got one enormous hand at the back of her head.
It was nothing like their other kisses. It had eight weeks in it and a whole night of fever in it and that’s why I love you still hanging in the air over the toast.
“The baby,” she got out against his mouth.
“Is asleep. On drugs. In the other room.” He pulled back half an inch, and the grin arrived, the one that had charmed her mailman. “I’m not going to pretend the house is empty, Nora, we live here.”
We live here. He said it like the box said Stonebreaker, C.—like an ordinary fact about the world.
“The monitor,” she said.
“On the windowsill. Volume up. If she needs me I’ll hear her over you, and believe me, that is going to be a challenge.” He kissed the corner of her jaw. “You want to write anything down first? Terms? You usually have subheadings.”
“Shut up—”
He laughed. He laughed, against her throat—that big warm helpless laugh with real delight in it—and she froze, the way she’d frozen the very first time it happened. He felt it happen and stopped.
“No,” she said, before he could ask. “No, it’s fine, keep… Do that again.”
“Which part?”
“The laughing. Don’t make it a thing.”
“You’re the one keeping records.” But he did it again, and he walked her back against the counter until the cold edge of it caught the small of her back.
She gasped and he grinned and murmured sorry in a voice that was not sorry at all, and turned her.
He put his hand between her shoulder blades to urge her gently down onto her folded arms on the counter as he brought his mouth to the back of her neck.
He kissed her there, open-mouthed, and she lost her breath as every inch of her body reacted.
His hand slid down her spine and curled around her hip, and she felt his breath shudder as his fingers found the band of her leggings.
His other hand gathered up her hair, pulling it back over her shoulder, and his mouth moved down the bared line of her throat.
Slowly, so slowly, and she wanted to beg him to go faster and was almost too proud to. Almost.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want it slow.”
“You think you don’t,” he murmured, and kissed her again, and she felt the smile against her skin. “Trust me.”
“I do.” She had no idea what she was promising. “I trust you. Hurry.”
His hands went to her waistband, his fingers hot against her skin, and he tugged the leggings down, down, and she had to lift her hips to let him.
He stayed right there, both hands at her hips, and she could feel him looking.
Looking at her, half-undressed, bent over the kitchen counter.
Looking at her bare legs and her ass in her plain white underwear and the look was hotter than hands would have been.
She gripped the edge of the counter, her fingers going white, and arched her back the smallest bit to give him a better view.
He groaned. “Fuck, Nora—”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He bent down over her, braced above her, and the sound he made was low and hungry, and his cock pressed against her bare ass through his jeans and she pushed back against it, and he swore again.
One hand came between her legs, and she opened her thighs for him.
He pulled her panties aside and put his fingers in her, and she was so wet that they went straight in, and she cried out.
“Quiet.” His voice was rough against her ear. “Bite your sleeve if you have to. You don’t want to wake her.”
She bit her sleeve.
He stroked her, once, twice, and she was so ready that the third time she came, clenching around his hand and the counter and her teeth in her sleeve. She was still gasping when he tugged her leggings the rest of the way off and freed his erection. “Hold on.”
She was still too shaky to obey, but he put his hands on her hips, supporting her effortlessly as he worked himself in.
When he was seated deep inside her, he leaned over her and moved one hand to cover hers, lacing their fingers together on the counter.
She hadn’t expected the tenderness of it, the gentle hold, the careful way he moved in her.
His other hand slid beneath her, taking her weight.
She could feel the smile in his voice when he said, “Ready?”
She pushed back against him and heard him gasp. “Fuck, you feel good.”
“So do you.”
He thrust into her, his enormous body curving over hers, holding her up with his hand beneath her and his cock in her and his breath hot on her neck.
He moved faster now, just like she asked, driving her up and up again, and when she came this time he came with her, groaning her name.
He leaned over her, still buried deep, and nuzzled her neck. “I love you, Nora.”
The monitor stayed quiet on the sill.
He didn’t move off her for a long moment, just breathed, that furnace-heat against her back, and their fingers laced together.
“For the record,” he said, muffled, “I want it noted that I had a very good morning.”
“Noted.”
“You’re not writing it down.”
“Rognar.” She was laughing, still bent over the counter, wrung out and warm and entirely undestroyed. “I’ll never need to write this one down.”