CHAPTER THREE #2
"I've known you since you were tall enough to see over the counter.
So I'm allowed." She smoothed the collar flat.
"This man loves you. I've watched him drive three and a half hours to sit in my diner and look at you like you hung the porch light.
I'm not doubting the love." She met Sharon's eyes in the cracked mirror.
"I'm asking whether a love that has to hide is gonna teach you to hide, too.
That's all. Then I'll shut up and I'll cry through the whole thing, because I will. "
Sharon didn't have an answer. She was twenty-five and she was in love and the man was waiting on the other side of the door, and the question was too big for a courthouse bathroom, so she did what she did with everything too big.
"You'll ruin your mascara," she said. "You always cry ugly."
"I cry beautiful. You cry ugly. This is established."
But the question went in with her. It stood next to her while she said the words.
It watched Jack say his, watched his voice not shake once, watched him slide the resized ring onto her finger like a man who'd finally gotten one thing exactly right.
And when the clerk said the part about husband and wife, and Jack kissed her, and Dolores cried ugly in the corner, Sharon was happy, she was so happy it frightened her, and underneath the happy the question just sat there, patient as a thing that knows it has years to be answered.
They had a peach pie instead of a cake. Dolores made it.
It was, Jack said, the best thing he'd ever eaten at his own wedding, and Sharon said it was the only thing he'd ever eaten at his own wedding, and he said that was how she'd get him to keep coming to weddings, one pie at a time, and for a minute the question went quiet and it was just the two of them and Dolores and a pie, married, and it was enough. It was almost enough.
POV: Jackson
He'd booked a room at an inn two towns over, a real inn, old and creaking, because a hotel felt like work and he wanted, for one night, to be nowhere near anything with his name on it.
He got the key wrong twice in the lock. His hands weren't steady, which embarrassed him, a man who'd signed for buildings without his pulse changing, standing in a hallway fumbling a brass key while his wife laughed at him.
"Give it here."
"I've got it."
"You do not have it." She took the key and got the door on the first try and looked back at him over her shoulder, still in the green dress, and whatever he'd been about to say went out of him entirely.
Inside, the moment turned shy on both of them.
That was the part he hadn't expected. They'd been together a year.
This wasn't new. But something about the ring and the courthouse and the word wife had made them strangers for a second, standing on opposite sides of a bed with a quilt somebody's grandmother had made, and neither of them quite knew how to cross it.
"This is stupid," Sharon said. "Why is this stupid. We've done this."
"We haven't done this."
"We've literally"
"Not married." He crossed to her. He put his hand against the side of her face, and she leaned into it the way she leaned into almost nothing, guard down, and the shyness broke. "You're my wife," he said, and heard how the word came apart in his mouth, and didn't care that it did.
He got the zipper of the green dress halfway down and it stuck, and he swore under his breath, and she was laughing again, and he was laughing, and the laughing was somehow the thing that undid the last of the distance between them.
He stopped fighting the zipper. He kissed the back of her neck instead, the knob of bone at the top of her spine, and felt her go still, felt the laugh change into something with weight to it.
He took his time. He'd spent his whole life being efficient and he had no interest, tonight, in being efficient.
He learned her the slow way, the way she'd once told him she read the diner, one small true thing at a time.
The place under her jaw that made her breath catch.
The scar on her knee from a bicycle when she was nine, which she'd told him the story of a year ago and he'd kept.
The way she said his name, the real one, Jack, not because it was his name but because it was the one she'd chosen before she knew the other, and hearing it in the dark undid him more than anything her hands were doing.
The dress finally came the rest of the way off.
So did the careful man, the room voice, the coat of calm.
There was no one in the room to be a Scott for.
There was just this, her mouth and her hands and the old bed complaining under them, and the frank astonished want of two people who had waited longer than they'd meant to for a night that belonged to no one else.
Afterward she lay with her head on his chest, and he had his hand in her hair, and neither of them said anything profound, because there was nothing profound to say. The window was open. Somewhere a dog barked and gave up.
"Your heart's going like a rabbit," she said.
"You did that."
"I know. I'm bragging." She pressed her palm flat over it, as if she could hold the beat still. "Slow down. I want you to last."
She didn't mean the night. He knew she didn't mean the night. He put his hand over her hand over his heart, and he wanted to promise her something the size of what she meant, and for once he had the sense not to make a speech about it.
"I'll try," he said, which was smaller than a vow and more honest than one, and she seemed to understand the difference, because she didn't answer.
She just breathed against him until the rabbit slowed, and the inn creaked, and the green dress lay in a heap on a stranger's floor, and for one whole night nobody in the world knew where Jackson Scott was, and it was the freest he had ever been or would be for a long time.
POV: Jackson
She told him about the baby wrong, on purpose, because she was angry, and Jackson deserved it.
It was four months into the marriage. He'd cancelled a weekend at the last minute, the second one that month, because his father had scheduled something that couldn't move, and Jackson had used the word unmovable about his father's calendar to a woman who had rearranged her entire life around his, and he'd heard it come out of his mouth and known it was a mistake and said it anyway.
So when he drove down the following Tuesday with flowers, apologetic, ready to be forgiven, Sharon let him in and let him get halfway through the apology and then said, flatly, not looking up from the sink:
"I'm pregnant."