Chapter 5 #2
She had her hands on his chest and his heart was going like a man who had run somewhere.
He did not put his arms around her. He stood there with his hands at his sides — she understood, distantly, that he was not going to touch her unless she said so, that he had decided this somewhere in the last four weeks and was going to hold to it if it killed him — and she stood with her forehead against his collarbone and breathed him in and it was the first time since the fourteenth of November that her whole body was quiet at once.
"Put your arms around me," she said.
He did.
For a long time that was all it was. Two people standing up in a kitchen holding on. His hand came up and spread flat between her shoulder blades and she felt the exact shape of it, low, the place she had watched on a screen, and for about two seconds the whole thing nearly came down.
Then she tipped her head back and he was already looking down.
"Tell me to stop," he said.
"No."
"Imogen—"
"Don't make me the one who has to be sure," she said. "I've been the one who has to be sure for four weeks. Kiss me."
He kissed her.
She had forgotten. That was the thing that undid her — not that it was good, she'd known it would be good, they had eight years of knowing.
It was that he kissed her like it was the fifth week, not the eighth year.
Slow and stunned and careful, one hand along her jaw and the other still flat on her back, like a man who had not been given permission for this in a long time and could not quite believe it now.
She got her hands under his shirt. His skin was hot. He made a sound against her mouth and it went straight down through her.
"Upstairs," she said.
"Here's fine."
"It is not fine, it's a kitchen, and I'm forty."
"You're thirty-nine."
"Upstairs, Cormac."
They did not entirely make it to upstairs in one go.
He got her as far as the back stairs and then had her against the newel post with his mouth on her throat and her hand fisted in his hair, and she thought, very clearly and from a long way off: I am standing at the bottom of these stairs in the dark and I am not frightened.
That was when she stopped weighing anything at all.
He put the lamp on in the bedroom and she said leave it, and he left it.
He undressed her standing up, which he had always done, which she had always let him do because he was unhurried about it in a way that had ruined other men for her at twenty-nine.
Cardigan. The buttons of her shirt, one at a time, no rush, his eyes on hers the whole way down.
When he pushed it off her shoulders his hands stopped there for a second on her collarbones and his jaw did something.
"What," she said.
"Nothing."
"Say it."
"I thought about this every night in that hall," Cormac said. "That's the whole thing. I'd think: she's eleven feet away. Eleven feet. And then I'd think about the eighteen inches."
"Don't."
"You said say it."
"I've changed my mind." She got his shirt over his head. "Stop talking."
He stopped talking.
He put her back on the bed and took his time, and he was different — she noticed it and could not have said how, at first, and then she could: he was asking.
Eight years of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and did it, and now every single thing came with a half-second of his eyes coming up to hers first. His mouth at her breast and his eyes coming up.
His hand sliding down over her stomach and his eyes coming up.
It should have been irritating. It was not. It nearly finished her before he had properly started.
"Yes," she said. "Whatever it is. Yes."
"You don't know what I was going to do."
"Cormac, I have known what you were going to do since 2018."
He laughed — the short one, down in his chest, into the skin below her navel — and she felt it land there and thought, there, that's mine, that one was mine, and then his mouth was lower and she stopped thinking anything for a while.
He was patient about it in a way that was almost cruel.
He knew. He had always known; that was the wound and the weapon both, that a man could be a stranger in every other room of the house and know this.
When she got a fistful of the sheet he put his hand flat on her hip to keep her still and did not change what he was doing, and when she said his name he did not change it then either, and when she came it went through her from the soles of her feet up and she made a noise she had not made in years and heard it and did not care.
She pulled him up. Her hands were not steady. She got him over her and her mouth on his and tasted herself and felt him shaking — actually shaking, the long muscles of his back going under her palms.
"Imogen."
"I know."
"I need you to be sure."
"Cormac. Come here."
And he pushed into her and both of them made the same sound at the same time, and it was eight years and it was the fifth week at once, and it hurt somewhere that was not physical.
He went slow. She had thought it would be fast — she had wanted it to be fast, wanted it wordless and hard and over, wanted not to have to look at him — and instead he braced up on his forearms above her and went slow and would not stop looking at her face.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what."
"Don't look at me like that."
"No," he said.
So she looked back. That was the only thing left to do.
She got her legs up around him and her hand around the back of his neck and held his eyes while he moved in her, and somewhere in there her own eyes went and she felt it go down her temple into her hair and he saw it and did not stop and did not say anything about it, which was the single most correct thing he did in that entire month.
It built slow and then all at once. She felt it coming and heard her own breath go and said something — she never knew what — and he said her name once, out loud, and that did it.
She went over with her forehead pressed against his jaw and her hand clenched in the back of his hair, and he followed four strokes later, hard, everything in him going rigid, and then the whole weight of him came down on her and stayed.
She kept her arms around him.
Neither of them moved for a long time. His mouth was somewhere on her shoulder. Her hand was going up and down his back without any instruction from her at all, the way it had for eight years.
"Imogen," he said, into her skin.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say that."
"Don't say anything."
"Okay."
And he didn't. He rolled off and pulled her back against him and put his arm over her and the lamp stayed on, and that was the whole of it.
She woke once in the night, at some point, in the dark.
The lamp was off. He was behind her, asleep, breathing into the back of her neck, his arm heavy across her ribs and his hand loose and warm against her sternum. The house made a noise and did not make it again.
She lay there in the middle of her own bed with her husband's arm around her and thought about how easy it had been.
How fast. Thirty days from the worst night of her life to this.
Siobhan was going to be gentle about it, which would be unbearable, and her mother was going to be silent about it, which would be worse.
She thought: I don't care.
She thought: I'll tell them I don't care.
And then she lay very still in the warm dark with the absolutely certain knowledge that there was a question she had meant to ask him in the study that afternoon — one question, she had had it, it had been right there in her hand while the rain came down on the window — and that she had put it down somewhere between the study and the kitchen and could not now find it anywhere at all.
She went back to sleep before she found it.