Epilogue
THE THE TUB IN HIS bathroom is the size of a stock tank and twice as decadent, and it isn’t his bathroom anymore, it’s ours, and I’m sitting in it up to my collarbones in water gone bath-warm and still, eyes shut, feeling like the single most ridiculous woman in the state of Texas.
A forty-year-old bride. Married four hours. Soaking in the bath.
I’d like to claim I’m in no hurry, that a woman is entitled to a long soak on her wedding night and it means nothing at all, but the truth is my heart has been going quick under the warm water for a solid ten minutes, and it has nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with the man who is, at some point very soon, going to come through that door.
A month. That’s how long the whole impossible business took, start to here.
The deal died on that train and stayed dead.
Artie bought him out, the sanctuary’s back forty is in my name now and the lights will stay on past winter, and Loukas came home from signing it all away lighter than I have ever seen him, a man who’d set down something he carried so long he’d stopped feeling the weight until it was gone.
He won’t talk about what he walked away from. I’ve decided not to make him, since the only thing either of us is selling anymore is the truth, and the truth is that I married him and he married me and none of the rest of it signifies.
I’m still smiling about that, eyes shut, somewhere far inside the warm and the steam, when the water moves.
A splash, low and unmistakable, a wave of displaced warmth against my shins, and that’s the only warning I get.
My eyes come open.
“You took your time,” I tell him, since one of us has to have the last word and it was always going to be me.
He settles into the water across from me, this proud impossible man, easy and assured and in no rush at all, his black eyes gone the shade they only go for me, and he reaches through the steam and takes my hand the way he took it on a porch a lifetime ago, like it was always going to be his.
”Agapi,” he says, low, the accent thick with it. “I have only just begun.”
And then he shows me what he means.
There was a line, all those nights. The one he swore he wouldn’t cross and didn’t, through the storm and the jealous quarrel and the tender wordless dark, the one he held like a breath he refused to let go.
And tonight, for the first time, it is ours to cross, the two of us, on purpose, married, and he crosses it the way he does everything, in his own time, as though we have the rest of our lives and he means to use every hour of them.
I had forty years of theories about what this would be and not one of them survives him. I had no idea. None.
He is patient in a way that undoes me worse than any urgency could, his mouth and his hands learning me like a language he had decided long ago to be fluent in, the warm dark closing over the pair of us, his low voice at my ear telling me in two tongues how long he has wanted exactly this.
And the having of it is nothing my careful life prepared me for, this rising, this unspooling, this place he takes me where there is no line left between us and nothing held back and no version of it that counts as the job.
When it breaks over me I say his name into the slowing drum of his heart, and there is no one in the whole soft enormous night to hear it but the man who swore he would never use it against me, and never has.
I spent two decades certain that wanting was a tax I couldn’t afford, that the having of things never lasts and only sets you up to be robbed.
I built a whole life on going without. And the cruel joke of it, the one I’d have denied to my own grave, is that I wasn’t protecting myself from disappointment at all.
I was simply starving, very slowly, and calling it discipline.
I cry a little, after, which I will deny.
He doesn’t tease me for it. He gathers me in and holds on like a man finally handed the very thing his ruthless life never once thought to want, and we lie tangled and quiet while the night goes soft around us.
And I understand, distinctly, that this is what he meant all those weeks ago, about whether it’s real when you do it. That the words were never the point. That a man can keep a promise in the dark, and break one on purpose in the dark, and have both mean more than any vow ever said for cameras.
And I think the waiting was worth it. That if a woman has to go forty years to arrive here, then forty years is simply the price, and it was always going to be worth paying, and I’d pay it twice over to arrive exactly here, in this water gone cold and these arms gone permanent.
We’re going to argue forever. He promised me that, dressed as a proposal, on a train, and I mean to hold him to every word, having seen the alternative, the quiet poisonous marriage where everyone performs the loving and nobody means it.
We aren’t going to have that one. We’re going to have the loud, true, daylit kind, with a one-winged kite who bites him and a stack of paid invoices and a man who learned how to bend the knee he swore he never would.
And I’m going to win some of the arguments. I’ve given that part a great deal of thought.
I wake before he does, which never happens, and lie very still in the gray light learning the unfamiliar weight of an arm across me and the even breathing of a man who has finally run out of things to guard against.
When he stirs, I’m ready.
“Good morning, husband.”
It’s my first time saying it, and it makes me feel shy and flustered and also so thrilled and giddy that I have to bite my lip, and oh. Oh. Is that—
I mean—
Am I—
“Don’t say it,” Loukas warns, his voice still rough with sleep.
But when he speaks it only gets more visible, so I can’t possibly be mistaken, that faint dark stain climbing the high bones of his cheeks—
“Don’t say it, Blythe,” he growls, “or you’ll be—”
“You’re blushing!”
Silence.
And what was it he started to say, just then? That if I said it, I would be—
“You’ve always been curious how I mean to punish you,” my husband says, pleasantly.
Punished.
The instant the word goes off in my head I panic and try to roll away—
“Where do you think you’re going?”
But of course it’s too late. Loukas already has me caught, unhurried and certain and not the least bit sleepy anymore, and oh. So. Oooooh.
So this is what it means to be punished.
The End
Thank you for reading The Rancher’s Fiancée.