Chapter 2
CLAIRE
Graham came home at twelve forty-three.
I knew because I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching the green numbers on the stove change while I drank my second cup of coffee.
He stopped in the doorway. His tie was gone, his sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and a streak of silver paint marked the side of his hand. He looked at the mug in front of me before he looked at my face.
“Coffee?”
“Apparently.”
“At midnight.”
“That's generally when twelve forty-three happens.”
He took that without trying to make me smile. The keys landed quietly on the counter, and he pulled out the chair across from mine.
“I'm sorry.”
I wrapped both hands around the mug. The coffee had stopped being good a while ago, but bitterness suited the hour. “Did Saturn survive?”
“Saturn was never in serious danger.”
“I'm glad we can all rest easy.”
Graham rubbed the paint on his hand with his thumb. “I shouldn't have gone.”
The words were so direct that some of the sharpness went out of the next thing I'd meant to say.
“Caroline could have done it tomorrow,” he continued. “Or Audrey could have used the wire in the kit instead of deciding the entire project was ruined. Theo was upset, and I reacted.”
“You always react when it's Theo.”
His gaze lifted to mine. “He lost his father.”
“I know.”
“There are things he's going to need—”
“I know what he lost, Graham.”
He leaned back slightly. I hated that the sentence had come out hard enough to make it sound as if Theo's grief annoyed me. It didn't. He was six. He'd learned too young that adults could disappear, and I had never once blamed him for clinging to the uncle who still showed up.
Graham looked toward the dark window over the sink. “I keep thinking if he asks for me and I don't go, he'll remember that.”
There it was: the reason beneath the urgency, offered late and in private, when no one else could hear it.
“He'll also remember Caroline coming tomorrow,” I said. “He has more than one person.”
“You're right.” He looked down at the silver on his skin. “Tonight was ours.”
The refrigerator hummed behind me. On its door, the calendar still said Home. No family in his handwriting. The words had been waiting for him longer than I had.
“I don't want to keep doing this,” he said.
My fingers tightened around the mug.
He saw it. “The treatment. The appointments. All of it.”
“You want to stop trying?”
“I want to pause.” He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “A real pause, Claire. No schedule on the refrigerator. No alarms on your phone. No deciding whether we can go to dinner based on what day it is.”
“We agreed on this cycle.”
“I know.”
“And you said your tests were normal.”
“They were.” His answer came without a break. “This isn't because I think it won't work.”
“Then why now?”
“Because you turned down that hotel job.”
I stared at him. “How do you know about Marisol?”
“Nina called me.”
“Nina needs to stop calling my husband.”
“She said the same thing about me calling her.”
That pulled a reluctant laugh from me. Graham's mouth softened, but he didn't reach across the table yet.
“I miss you,” he said. “I miss us doing things because we want to do them. Every time I touch you, there's an alarm set somewhere. Every trip has to fit between appointments. Your work gets whatever's left, and then my family takes another piece.”
“Your family takes the first piece.”
He lowered his head once. “Tonight they did.”
He couldn't go back and stay home. He couldn't unteach everyone at Eleanor's table that our evenings were available if they needed one of us badly enough. But he had come into the kitchen and named what he'd done without making me drag him there.
I looked at the calendar. The private marks were small enough that a guest wouldn't have understood them. I could find every one from across the room.
“How long?” I asked.
“A month. Two. However long we need.”
“And if I don't want to pause?”
“Then we don't. I'm not asking you to decide tonight.”
I picked up my phone. The next reminder was set for seven the following morning, followed by another three days later. I pressed the switch, and the bright green bar went gray.
Graham watched me set the phone down. “Are you sure?”
“No.”
He nodded as if that were a full answer.
I turned off the second reminder too.
His chair scraped back. He came around the table and stood beside me, close enough that his knee touched mine. The silver paint on his hand had settled into the fine lines around his knuckles.
“You smell like glue,” I said.
“I fought a planet.”
“Did you win?”
“It was close.”
I ran my thumb over the paint. “You still left me for it.”
“I did.”
The apology stayed in his face. So did exhaustion, and love, and the maddening certainty that if I leaned into him, his arms would close around me exactly the way I wanted.
I stood. “Take me upstairs.”
His hand tightened around mine. “Claire.”
“I turned off the alarm.”
The look he gave me heated slowly, all the way down. “That isn't what I'm asking.”
“I know.” I stepped close enough to feel his breath against my temple. “Take me upstairs because I want my husband.”
He kissed me before we made it out of the kitchen.
There was nothing tentative about the first press of his mouth. He tasted like the mint he kept in his car and the coffee he stole from my tongue. My back met the wall beside the stairs, and his hands slid under my sweater, warm over the bare skin at my waist.
Seven years had taught him every place that made me arch toward him.
Seven years had taught me the sound he made when I opened his shirt and put my mouth against the base of his throat.
We stumbled on the third stair because I was laughing and he was trying to pull my sweater over my head without letting go of me.
“Bedroom,” he said against my mouth.
“Excellent idea.”
He caught me behind the knees and lifted me. I wrapped my legs around his hips, my sweater trapped somewhere between us, and kissed him through the doorway. He set me on the edge of the bed, then paused to peel the sweater free without taking an earring with it.
“Romance,” I murmured.
“You like those earrings.”
I loved him for knowing that. I loved him when he laid them together on the nightstand instead of dropping them, when he came back between my knees and cupped the back of my neck, when his mouth slowed over mine as though the whole night belonged to us after all.
I opened his belt. His stomach tightened beneath my knuckles.
“Still angry?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good to know.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“Not even a little.”
His shirt joined my sweater on the floor. I pushed his pants down, and he stepped out of them while I moved back onto the bed. His eyes followed me, dark and familiar, lingering on the lace edge of my bra and the bare length of my thighs.
“Come here,” I said.
He did, bracing himself over me. His kiss turned deep and unhurried. He stroked my breast through the lace, thumb passing over my nipple until I shifted beneath him, impatient with the barrier. Graham smiled into my mouth and unhooked the bra with one hand.
“Show-off.”
“Seven years of practice.”
He bent his head. The first pull of his mouth made my fingers close in his hair. He knew when to tease and when I had no patience for it; tonight he moved from one breast to the other while his hand slid beneath my underwear, and he touched me as if he had nowhere else to be.
I was already wet. His fingers moved through it, opening me with slow, knowing strokes. My hips lifted. He pressed his mouth to the center of my chest, his breath hot against my skin.
“Graham.”
“I have you.”
He kissed down my stomach, taking my underwear with him. I watched him settle between my thighs, broad shoulders pushing my knees apart. Then his mouth found me, and watching became impossible.
Pleasure gathered fast under his tongue.
I gripped the sheet with one hand and his shoulder with the other, trying to stay quiet out of habit even though the house was ours and there was no one to hear.
He slid two fingers inside me, curling them in the rhythm he knew, and the last of my control broke.
I came with his name against my teeth. He stayed there through every pulse, gentling his mouth only when my thighs loosened around him.
When he rose over me again, I reached between us and wrapped my hand around him. He was hard and slick at the tip. His eyes closed as I stroked him once, then again.
“Now,” I said.
We hadn't used condoms since we'd started trying, and neither of us reached for one. Graham nudged my knees wider and pushed inside me in one long, careful stroke.
I felt every inch of him. My body stretched, then welcomed the weight and fullness I knew so well. He held still until I pulled him down for a kiss.
“Move.”
He withdrew and thrust back into me, deeper.
The bed gave a soft knock against the wall.
He changed the angle, one arm beneath my shoulders, and I wrapped my legs around him.
There was no clock in my hand, no calculation running beneath the pleasure.
Only Graham's mouth at my neck and the rough sound of my name when I tightened around him.
His pace lost its polish. I loved that part—the moment my composed husband stopped managing anything. I dragged my nails down his back, and his hips drove harder between my thighs.
“Come with me,” he said.
I touched myself where our bodies met. He watched, jaw slack, and the sight of his face pushed me over. My second climax rolled through me as he thrust deep and came inside me, his body shuddering over mine.
For a while, neither of us spoke. His weight was heavy in the best way, his cheek against my hair. When he finally shifted, I made a small sound of protest and he smiled, kissing my shoulder before settling beside me.
He pulled the covers up and tucked me against his chest. I traced the faint red mark my nails had left below his collarbone.
“I meant what I said downstairs,” he murmured. “I want us back.”
I rested my palm over his heart. It was slowing beneath my hand.
“Sometimes I think your family already has the version of you they want,” I said. “You, Audrey, and Theo. Every dinner, every holiday. They arrange the three of you before anyone remembers where I sit.”
His body went still behind me.
“Audrey is my brother's widow.”
“I know who she is.”
“And Theo is a kid who lost his dad. I've never looked at Audrey that way. I don't even think of her as a woman.”
I turned onto my back. “I didn't say you were sleeping with her.”
“Then what are you saying?” The edge in his voice landed harder because of how tenderly he'd touched me minutes before. “That I should step away from them? Make Audrey feel guilty every time Theo needs something?”
“I'm saying there's always a place set for you there.”
He stared at the ceiling. “She is family, Claire.”
“So am I.”
His eyes closed. The silence stretched just long enough for me to wish I'd waited until morning.
Then he rolled toward me and slid his hand over my hip. “You're my wife.”
“That wasn't the question.”
His hand stopped. “It feels like you're asking me to choose.”
“I'm asking you to notice how often everyone else chooses for you.”
“Theo is six.”
“I know.” The words came out sharper than I meant. “You keep answering with Theo when I'm talking about where your mother puts the adults.”
He looked away. Irritation stayed in his face beside the tiredness. For once, he did not replace either one with an apology.
I lay beside him and felt the space Audrey could occupy without ever entering our bed.
“Say something at the christening,” I said.
“I will.”
“Even if your mother makes it difficult.”
“Even then.”
He kissed me once, but the argument remained between our bodies when he turned off the lamp.
His breathing evened out before mine did. One arm stayed heavy across my waist, his hand open against my stomach. In eleven days, in front of everyone, he would only have to speak once.