Chapter 16 #3
He undressed her standing in the light and he was not careful about it this time, and she was glad, because careful was the fifth week and this was not that.
He got the shirt off her shoulders and stopped with his hands on her collarbones exactly the way he had in December, and she said, "Say it."
"You're thinner."
"So are you."
"Yes." His thumb moved along the ridge of bone. "I've thought about this every day. Not this. You. In the hall, in that flat, in a room on Weybosset Street at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Every day, Imogen, without a single day off, for nineteen months."
"I know."
"You don't."
"Cormac." She got his belt open. "I do. You wrote it down four hundred times. Now stop talking."
He put her back on the bed and got over her and then stopped, braced up on his forearms, looking at her face in the flat noon light.
"What," she said.
"Nothing."
"Don't do that."
"I'm looking at you," he said. "I'm going to look at you. If that's unbearable you'll have to tell me."
So she looked back.
That was the difference, and it went all the way through her: the last time, in December, she had told him not to look and he had said no, and she had made herself hold it.
This time there was nothing to hold. She lay in her own bed in the middle of the day with the sun on both of them and looked at a man who had told a courtroom the worst true thing about himself two days earlier, and she did not have to brace against a single thing.
She got her hand around the back of his neck.
"Come here," she said.
He came down onto her and she felt the whole weight of him and heard her own breath go, and his mouth found her jaw and her throat and lower, and she stopped being able to construct a sentence for a while.
He took his time. He had always taken his time and it had always been a kind of showmanship, and it was not that now; it was slower than that and worse, in the best way, because he kept stopping.
His mouth on her breast and then his forehead down against her sternum for a second, breathing.
His hand sliding over her hip and then just resting there, spread, like a man steadying himself.
"You keep stopping."
"I know."
"Why."
"Because I keep having to check that it's happening," Cormac said, into her skin, and she got both hands into his hair and held on.
When his mouth went lower she was already most of the way gone.
He knew — he had always known, that was the wound and the weapon and it had survived everything — and he put one forearm across her hips to hold her still and did not hurry and did not change anything when she said his name, and when it took her it took her from somewhere under the floor and went all the way up and out, and she heard herself and did not care at all.
She was still coming down when she pulled at his shoulders.
"Now."
"Imogen—"
"Now."
He came up her body and she got her legs around him and he pushed into her, and both of them stopped breathing for a second, and then he said, "oh," very quietly, like a man who had been hit.
She held his eyes.
It was not gentle and it was not brutal.
It was nineteen months and eight years and four hours and forty-one seconds, all of it, going through her at once, and she felt her own face go and let it, and he saw it and did not stop and did not say anything and did not look away, which was the only correct response and the one he had learned.
"Don't close your eyes," she said.
"I won't."
"Say my name."
"Imogen."
"Again."
"Imogen."
She went over on the third one, hard, with her forehead against his jaw and her nails in his back, and she felt him try to hold on and fail — felt everything in him lock and then go — and he said something into her hair that was not a word at all, and then the whole weight of him came down and stayed.
Neither of them moved for a long time.
Her hand was going up and down his spine without any instruction from her whatsoever, the way it had for eight years, the way it had in December, and she noticed it and let it keep going.
"Imogen," he said, eventually, into her shoulder.
"Mm."
"I'm home."
"Yes," she said. "You are."
They lay in the light afterward with the curtains open and the water going past outside.
At some point she turned her head on the pillow.
"The room at the top of the back stairs," she said.
"Mm."
"There's two hundred square feet up there with a window nobody's seen out of since 2021."
"There is."
"I want the books in it."
He was quiet for a second.
"The library's downstairs."
"The library's downstairs and it's dark and it faces the wrong way and it's where a man pushed a bookcase across the floor," Imogen said.
"I want the books at the top of the back stairs, in the light, in that room.
And I want it done properly, with the floor levelled first, and I want a door on it. "
"A door."
"A door," she said. "A wooden one, with a brass handle, that opens both ways and doesn't lock. I've thought about it a great deal."
Cormac lay very still beside her.
"Yes," he said.
"Don't cry, it's a room."
"It's not a room."
"No," Imogen said. "It isn't."