Chapter 30 #2
He drew her closer and found the zip at the back of her dress and drew it down slowly, his mouth at her throat, her jaw, the soft place beneath her ear, and she tipped her head back and exhaled long and even, a sound that was nothing like patience and everything like trust. The dress went.
He took his time. He had a hundred years of restraint to spend and he spent it learning her with his hands and his mouth, every place that made her breath change, every place she reached for him instinctively, the way her body had been keeping his name all along in the spaces between her ribs.
She said his name and he heard three lifetimes of it, Charlotte's voice and Delia's voice and hers, all three of them folded into the same two syllables, and he pressed his mouth to her collarbone and held it there until the century of it settled back into the present tense.
She pulled him down to the bed and he went, and when they stretched out together he lay over her and looked at her face in the amber light for one long moment, making sure she was there, making sure she was looking back, making sure this was real and present and now and not a thing about to be taken.
She held his face in her hands and waited for him to finish looking.
She understood what he was doing. She had always understood him better than he had understood himself.
"I am here," she said.
"I know," he said. "I am learning to believe it."
"Believe it," she said, and drew him down.
He had made love to her before with care and heat and want, but always with one hand on the door, always with some last room in him shut against the full weight of it.
There was no door now. He gave her everything he was, steadily, unhurriedly, the way he did everything when he finally stopped holding back — completely, without apology, with his whole attention and his whole self, nothing parceled out and nothing protected.
She rose to meet all of it. She had always been the one willing to meet all of it, in the garden and the boarding house and the little apartment above the shop, every time the same soul arriving at the same door with the same open hands, and every time he had let her in as far as he dared and no further.
He let her in all the way now. He let her all the way to the last room.
She moved under him and above him and against him and he went where she led him and led where she would follow and the whole of it was different only in this: that he was not somewhere else at the same time.
For two hundred years he had lived behind his own life, watching it through the glass of his own grief.
For the first time in all of those years he was inside it, all the way inside it, present down to the bone, and the room around them and the light going red in the shutters and the sounds of the city below and her voice saying his name were all simply real, not a thing he was watching but a thing he was living, and the difference was so vast it cracked him open all over again.
He said her name into her shoulder and meant all three of them and only her.
She said his into the dark above him and meant every version of him she had ever known and only this one.
When she came apart her hands tightened in his hair and she said his name again, and it rang through him like a bell struck true, and he followed her, and when he did he was not braced for anything at all. He was only there.
Afterward they lay tangled and still in the blue dark, her head on his chest and his hand in her hair and neither of them in any hurry to be anywhere else.
The amber had gone from the shutters. The city had turned its evening shift.
He could feel her heartbeat against his side, steady and present, and his own under her ear, and the two of them keeping time together in the cooling room, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world and the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him.
She traced a shape on his chest with one finger, idle and content, and he closed his eyes and let the silence be what it was.
They talked, after, in the low voices of two people with nowhere to be and no reason to sleep, and they did not talk about Heaven, and they did not talk about death, and they did not talk about a single fire.
They talked about tomorrow. She lay with her head on his chest and asked him, idly, tracing shapes on his skin, what he wanted now, now that it was all over and the truth was told and there was nothing left to solve or hide or hunt.
He was quiet a moment, considering it honestly, and then he laughed under his breath, because the honest answer surprised even him.
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “I have never once let myself think that far ahead. Two hundred years, and I never planned past the next loss, because I never believed I would get to. I do not know the first thing about what I want, because I have never been allowed to want anything.”
She lifted her head and looked at him, and smiled, and it was the smile that had been undoing him across three centuries. “Then I suppose,” she said, “we will just have to figure it out together.”
And he believed her. That was the thing that struck him, lying there in the dark with her weight warm against him.
He believed her, all the way through, without a shadow of the old dread.
There would be a tomorrow, and a next summer, and years of ordinary figuring-out with this woman at his side, and he was going to be there for all of it.
He was allowed to want it. He had finally been given leave to want it.
He held her while she drifted toward sleep, and he did not lie awake bracing for the end, and somewhere past midnight he slept too, deep and dreamless, a man at rest for the first time in two hundred years.
He woke once, near dawn, to find her asleep on his chest and the room gone gray-blue with the coming light, and he lay still so as not to wake her and let his eyes drift to the low table, where the small worn box sat exactly where he had placed it, closed, waiting.
For more than a century he had carried that box because he could not make himself let go of the past, because it was the last hard proof of everything that had been taken from him.
He looked at it now in the early light with the woman he loved breathing slow against his heart, and he understood that he had it backward, that he always had.
He had never really been holding on to the past at all.
He had been holding a promise. Tomorrow, he thought, watching the light come up.
Tomorrow he would open it, not because he could not let go of what he had lost, but because he finally, after two hundred years, believed in what was still to come.