CHAPTER FIVE
Shelby
He found me in the bathroom that night, taking my earrings out in front of the mirror, and came up behind me with both hands sliding around my waist before I’d even heard him cross the room.
“You smell good,” he said against the back of my neck, and I felt the words more than heard them, low and warm against my skin.
“It’s the same soap I’ve used for ten years, Gibson.”
“I know. I still notice it.” His mouth moved to the curve of my shoulder, unhurried, and his hands spread flat against my stomach, pulling me back against him. “Come to bed.”
I turned in his arms so I was facing him, and for a moment, just looking at him, I let myself remember exactly why I’d fallen for this man in a gravel parking lot at a county fair when I was twenty-four.
He still looked at me like that sometimes.
Like I was something he couldn’t quite believe he got to have.
“I have to finish the feed order first.”
“It’ll keep.” He kissed me before I could argue further, slow and certain, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my head, and every ounce of the argument I’d been about to make dissolved somewhere around the second kiss.
He walked me backward toward the bed without breaking contact, unhurried in the way he’d always been unhurried with me, like we had the entire night and nowhere else on earth to be.
My back found the mattress and he came down over me, and I reached up and pulled his shirt loose from his waistband, wanting his skin under my hands the way I’d wanted it since the very first time, thirteen years and one child and a thousand ordinary mornings later, still wanting it exactly that much.
“I love you,” he murmured against my collarbone, working the buttons of my blouse open with unhurried fingers. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“Tell me you know it.”
“I know it, Gibson.” I arched into his mouth as it found the newly bared skin below my throat, my fingers threading into his hair. “Show me.”
He did. He always had, in this room, in this bed, been generous and attentive and thoroughly present in a way that made the rest of the day’s smaller absences easier to forgive.
His hands knew every place on my body that made my breath catch, knew them the way you know a piece of land you’ve walked ten thousand times, and he took his time with all of it, undressing me slowly, kissing his way down my body like he had something to prove and all the patience in the world to prove it with.
“Gibson,” I said, and it came out as half a laugh and half something closer to a plea.
“I’ve got you,” he said, and then there wasn’t room for words anymore, only the slow building heat of him, the weight of him settling over me, the rhythm we’d built together across thirteen years that still, even now, could make me forget every single item on the list of things I needed to worry about tomorrow.
He kissed me deep and slow between the shifting rhythm of our bodies, one hand braced beside my head, the other tracing a line down my ribs like he was memorizing the reality of me all over again for the first time.
My hips rose to meet his, and he groaned low against my mouth, and for a while there was nothing in the whole world except the two of us and the particular, familiar heat building between us, unhurried and certain and entirely ours.
Afterward, I lay tucked against his chest with his heartbeat slowing under my ear, his fingers moving idly through my hair, and for a while, a genuine while, I had all of him.
No phone between us. No fence line waiting somewhere on the Sutton property.
No Delaney needing a second opinion on a contractor’s bid.
Just my husband’s arms around me and his mouth pressed to my temple and the quiet that comes after wanting someone and getting exactly what you wanted.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, my hand tracing the line of his collarbone, “we should talk about summer. Maggie’s camp decision, and I wanted to ask you about maybe taking a few days, just the three of us, before the Hendricks deal closes and things get impossible.”
“Mm. Yeah. Let’s do that.” His voice was warm and drowsy and entirely unconvincing in the way that voices get when a person is agreeing to make you stop talking rather than actually agreeing to the thing you said.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I felt him go still before he even reached for it.
Not a dramatic stillness, nothing anyone watching from outside the marriage would have caught, just a small readiness in his shoulders, a shift in his breathing, and then his hand was moving toward the phone almost before I’d finished my sentence about Maggie’s camp.
He glanced at the screen. I watched his face change, just slightly, into the alertness I’d learned to recognize.
“It’s Delaney,” he said. “Probably about the fence again. I should just check real quick.”
“Gibson.”
“One second, I promise.” He was already sitting up, already reading, already thumbing out a reply with the same fingers that had been tracing patterns on my hip forty seconds earlier.
I lay there in the dark next to my husband, still warm from him, still able to feel exactly where his mouth had been, and watched the blue light of his phone screen wash across his face while he answered a text from another woman about a fence line, and understood with a clarity that felt like cold water that he had no idea, none at all, that anything had just happened.
To him it was nothing. A quick check of his phone in the middle of an otherwise ordinary night with his wife.
To me it was the entire shape of my marriage in miniature: he could give me his body completely, unreservedly, with real tenderness and no reservation at all, and still reach for someone else’s problem the instant it crossed his screen, without a flicker of understanding that the two things weren’t supposed to exist in the same thirty seconds.
“Everything okay?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
“Yeah, just a question about the contractor’s timeline. I’ll answer it in the morning.” He set the phone down and reached for me again, easy and warm, like nothing had happened at all. “Where were we?”
“I think I was asking about summer.”
“Right. Yeah. Let’s definitely figure that out.” He pulled me back against his chest, already half asleep, already somewhere I couldn’t quite follow him to.
I lay awake a long time after his breathing evened out, staring at the ceiling, trying to name the ache sitting in my chest. It wasn’t jealousy of Delaney, exactly, not yet, not fully.
It was something closer to grief for a version of intimacy I’d thought we still had.
I had believed, until roughly ninety seconds ago, that what happened between us in this bed meant I still occupied the center of his attention in a way nothing else could touch.
Now I understood that even the center of his attention had a fence line in it somewhere, and I had no idea when that fence line had gone up, only that I hadn’t noticed it happening until I was already standing on the wrong side of it.