Chapter 12 #2
“Don’t ask me that.”
“I have to. If this is — if you wake up tomorrow and this is a thing that happened to you, I can’t—”
“Seth.” She got a handful of his shirt, the way she had on the back stairs in April, and this time she did not let go. “I have wanted you since the first of May on a staircase in a wet house and I have been lying to myself about it for three months and I am done lying. Now take your coat off.”
He took his coat off.
* * *
He knew her body the way you know a house you grew up in, and that was the whole problem and the whole point.
Nine years of it. He knew about the back of her knee and about the place under her shoulder blade and he knew — God, he knew, he had always known — that she liked to be held down at the wrists more than she had ever admitted to anybody in daylight.
There was no learning curve. There was no first-time politeness.
Every single thing he did he had done before, and it went through her like weather, because the last time he had done any of it she had been a woman who thought she had a marriage.
He put his mouth on the inside of her wrist and she made a noise she did not recognize.
“Look at me,” he said.
“No.”
“Talia.”
She looked at him. In the dark, with the street light coming through the curtain in strips and moving.
“There hasn’t been anybody,” he said. “Not her, not anybody, not once, not—”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You can’t. I need you to hear me say it while you’re looking at me.”
“Seth, I know,” she said, and her voice broke on it. “That was never the part.”
He put his forehead against her collarbone and stayed there for a second and she felt him come apart against her, and then his hands were on the buttons of her shirt and shaking so badly she had to do the last three herself.
After that it stopped being anything she could narrate.
It was not tender, at the start. She did not want tender.
She wanted his mouth and his weight and the flat of his hand and something in her that had been standing at parade rest since February finally, finally allowed to fall over.
She got her hands in his hair and pulled and he said her name against her skin like it cost him something.
Her fingertips — the three, the ones with the new skin — went white on the iron rail of her father’s bed and she did not care and did not feel them.
When he finally came into her she made a sound that she thought afterward must have been audible through the wall, and she found she did not care about that either.
It went on a long time. Twice he slowed down and she told him not to, and the second time he stopped entirely, propped over her, breathing hard.
“What,” she said.
“I’m looking at you.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to.” He brushed her hair off her face with his knuckles and it was almost worse than everything else. “Nine years. I stopped looking at you, and I don’t know when, and I’ve thought about that every night since February. So I’m going to look at you.”
She put her forearm over her eyes, and he took it away, and held her wrist against the pillow, and she turned her face into his hand and let him.
* * *
Afterward she lay with her head on his chest in her father’s room and listened to the harbor and did the thing she had promised herself she would do.
“Seth.”
“Mm.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
He was quiet for a second. His hand did not stop where it was, moving slowly in her hair.
“Okay,” he said.
“I mean it. I’m not going to pretend. I’m not going to lie here and let you build a whole thing out of it and then take it off you in the morning, that’s — I’d rather say it now, in the dark, when it’s rude.”
“I’d rather you did too.”
“I wanted you,” she said. “I’ve wanted you since the staircase.
And I’m not going to be a woman who can’t say that out loud because she’s angry.
I’m too old for that and I’m too tired and I have run a hundred and forty covers three nights this week.
” She put her hand flat on his chest. “But wanting you and trusting you aren’t the same building, and I don’t know how to get from one to the other, and this didn’t do it. ”
“I know it didn’t.”
“Do you?”
“Talia.” He said it into the top of her head.
“If you’d asked me in March what I wanted I’d have said I wanted you to be all right.
That was true and it was also a coward’s answer, because it can’t be refused.
” His chest went up and down under her ear.
“So here’s the real one. I want to be married to you.
I want it so badly I’ve been sitting in a truck in a village for five months like a lunatic.
And I know exactly what tonight was and I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and pretend it was more. ”
She lay there a long time.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Don’t be here at five.”
“No.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do,” he said.
* * *
He was gone before it got light, and the truck was not in the street, and she stood at the window in the front room with the sheet around her and found that the thing she felt was not regret and was not triumph.
It was fear.
Not of him. That was what she had to sit down on the edge of the bed and work out, with the light coming up over the harbor and the first gull going.
She was afraid of herself. She had spent five months building something out of iron — the room, the rooms upstairs, the drawer, the county dinner, the whole architecture of a woman who did not need anybody — and last night she had walked up a street in the dark and knocked the front wall out of it in about ninety seconds, and she had wanted to.
“Oh, hell,” she said, to an empty room, at half past five in the morning.