30. Lena
LENA
Idon’t decide to follow him.
I just find myself in the back of Lidia’s car with my coat over my knees, saying, “Can you take me somewhere else,” and Lidia, who hasn’t asked me one single question all night, says, “Where,” and I say, “Give me a minute,” and get my phone out.
Which hotel.
The reply comes back so fast he must have had the phone in his hand.
The Bellamy on Ninth. Room 1106. Are you okay?
I sit in the dark of the car with my thumb over the screen and my eyes burning. A man with no house asking if I’m okay from a room he’s paying for himself.
I’m fine. Don’t go to sleep.
Lidia pulls out into the street without a word. At the light she says, “The Bellamy is a perfectly decent hotel.” From Lidia, that’s a blessing said over both our heads. She doesn’t say anything else until she stops at the curb.
“Go on,” she says. “I’m not waiting. If I wait I’ll be tempted to watch.”
He opens the door before I’ve finished knocking.
He’s still in the shirt. Tie gone, collar open, jacket over the back of the desk chair, shoes off, and behind him a perfectly nice hotel room with a bed nobody’s touched and one lamp on and his phone face-down on the nightstand.
He looks at me standing there in the red dress and he doesn’t say anything at all. His throat moves. His hand tightens on the edge of the door.
“Can I come in?”
He stands back.
I go past him into the room and hear the door click shut, and my heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat. When I turn around there’s a bed between us, in a hotel neither of us has any history with. Six years married, and this is the first neutral ground we’ve ever stood on.
“You were there,” he says.
“At the back. By the service doors.”
His hand goes over his mouth.
“The whole time?”
“From the soup.”
“God.” He sits down on the end of the bed like his legs have quit. “I looked once. I made myself stop.”
“I know. I watched you do it.”
I don’t sit next to him. I take the chair by the window and pull it around so I can see his face.
“Is it done?” I ask. “All of it?”
“All of it. You watched them take it.” He rubs his face with both hands, and when they come down there’s a smile trying to happen on it that I don’t like at all.
“I’ve got a salary and a car with some clothes in it, and if you ask me anything else about tonight I’m going to start laughing, and I don’t think either of us will enjoy the sound. ”
“Connor. The money that’s left, if you ever?—”
“It doesn’t buy me you.”
It comes out of him fast and rough, nothing like a speech, and then he looks down at his own hands like they’ve surprised him.
“I didn’t do it so you’d come,” he says, quieter. “I’d have done it if you’d—” His voice quits on him. He shakes his head, starts again, and it comes out plain and wrong-footed and true. “I’d have done it anyway.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
And I stand up out of the chair, because I can’t say the next part sitting down.
“I’m choosing you anyway.”
He goes absolutely still.
“Lena.” He’s up off the bed, and then he doesn’t come any closer, one hand half raised like the floor’s ended in front of him. “You said after. You said I’d have to ask you after, when there was nothing?—”
“It’s after.” My hands are shaking and I don’t hide them. “You walked out of that room with a coat and a phone. There’s nothing left in it for you. So ask me.”
“If this is because of the house, because of what she?—”
“Don’t you dare.” It comes out cracked, and I’m crying, and I keep going anyway.
“I didn’t fall back in love with a man because his mother took his money off him.
I fell—” My throat closes over it. I press the heel of my hand under my breastbone and get a breath and start over, badly.
“You told me first. Every single thing since that step outside Marisol’s, you came and told me first. Before your family.
Before your lawyer. Before it was safe. And there is nothing else on this earth you could have done that would have mattered more. ”
He crosses the room. He doesn’t touch me yet. His hands come up and hover on either side of my face, his eyes wet, and still he doesn’t touch me, like he’s asking.
“And I’m in love with you,” I say, into the little space that’s left. “I never stopped. I just put it somewhere I couldn’t get at it.”
His thumb lands on my cheekbone, right in the wet.
“Say it once more,” he says.
“I’m choosing you.”
And he kisses me.
God, I’ve missed his mouth.
That’s the first thing, stupid and enormous at once, the pure animal relief of a mouth I know.
He kisses me like a man who’s been holding his breath since October, one hand at the back of my head and the other flat on my spine, and I get both fists in his shirt and pull, and the kiss tastes of salt, his tears or mine, no telling.
We knock the desk chair over. Neither of us does anything about it.
“Wait.” He pulls back an inch, breathing hard. “Are you?—”
“If you ask me if I’m sure I’m going to be extremely rude to you.”
“I was going to ask if you were cold.”
“I’m not cold.”
“Okay,” he says, and comes back in.
The dress has a zipper down the whole back and he can’t find the top of it.
His hands are shaking—his hands, the ones that sign things without a wobble—and I have to reach around and start it for him, and we both laugh, and it’s the first time we’ve laughed in the same second in the same room in months.
The relief of that goes warm right down the backs of my legs.
Then the dress is off my shoulders and down, and I step out of it, and he stops.
He actually stops, hands on my waist, and looks at me.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t do the thing where you look at me and don’t say it.”
“No,” he says. “I’m done with that.”
And that’s what he does for the rest of the night. He says it. All of it, out loud, in that room, with the lamp on.
He tells me I’m the best thing he’s ever seen in his life while he’s getting my bra off.
He tells me exactly what he’s going to do before he does it, low and plain against my throat, and every word lands hot and low in my belly.
He says my name so many times it stops being a name and starts being a place to stand.
He lays me back on that bed and takes his time, mouth at my neck, my collarbone, my breasts, and this is the part that undoes me: he still knows all of it.
Which side. Where I’m ticklish. The exact spot under my ear.
Years of learning me, then months of nothing, and now his mouth going back over every inch of it like a man walking the rooms of a house he thought had burned down.
By the time he’s got my underwear off I’m so wet it’s embarrassing, and he says so, out loud, with his mouth an inch from me, and I make a noise I don’t recognize.
“Say that again,” I hear myself say.
“You’re soaked.”
“Yes.”
“You want to hear it.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll hear it all night,” Connor says. “I’m not being quiet about anything ever again.”
And then his mouth is on my pussy and I stop being able to hold a thought at all.
He’s not fast about it. He goes at me slow and completely focused, tongue flat on my clit, one arm hooked over my thigh to hold me where he wants me, and he keeps talking.
Between. Against me. How I taste. How long he’s wanted this.
What he thought about at two in the morning in an empty house.
I’ve got one hand in his hair and the other twisted in the sheet, and when I come it takes the whole top of my head off, and I hear myself, and I don’t care who’s in room 1104.
He crawls up the bed and kisses me with my own taste on his mouth.
“Again,” he says.
“Give me a second.”
“No.”
I get his shirt off him and there’s less of him than there was in October.
He’s lost weight he didn’t have to lose, and there are shadows under his eyes, and I put my hand flat on his chest and feel his heart going like a bird.
Grief sits down on me out of nowhere, right in the middle of wanting him—for the empty house, for every dinner he ate standing up, for the months the two of us spent being wrecked in separate buildings.
“You’re a wreck,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Take your trousers off.”
He does. His cock is hard and hot against my palm the second I get to it, and he makes a sound like he’s been hit, and drops his forehead onto my shoulder.
“Careful,” he says.
“No.”
“Lena, I’m serious, it’s been?—”
“I know exactly how long it’s been. I’ve been there for every night of it.”
And I push him onto his back and get over him, and I take him in my hand and put him where I want him and sink down slow, feeling every inch of the stretch, and the two of us make the same noise at the same time. A low, wounded, grateful sound, out of both of us at once.
Then I don’t move at all.
I sit there with him all the way inside me, my hands flat on his chest, and I look down at my husband. His face is wide open and wet. Neither of us says anything for a long moment, because there isn’t anything.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
And then his hands close on my hips and I start to move, and it goes from tender to wrecked so fast neither of us can steer it.
I ride him with my hair coming down and his hands going everywhere—my hips, my waist, my breasts, up to my face like he has to keep checking it’s really me.
He talks the entire time. Look at you. That’s it.
You feel—God, Lena. Desperate and familiar in the same stroke, my body remembering his in long waves, and when my thighs start to give he rolls us over without coming out of me, gets my leg up over his arm, and starts to really move.
Deep, hard, steady, the bed sounding like a bed, and I don’t care about that either.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you. I’m not going to stop saying it. You’re going to get sick of it.” His voice breaks in the middle. “I love you, and I’m sorry, and I’m not going anywhere, and I’ll say all three every day for the rest of my life if you’ll let me.”
I get a hand down between us and go at my clit, and it doesn’t take long at all. When I come this time it’s the whole body, feet to scalp, clenching hard around him, and I’m saying something into his shoulder that isn’t words.
He follows me over almost at once. He gets his face into my neck and says my name, cracked in half, and comes inside me hard enough that he shakes with it, his whole back heaving under my hands, and I hold him through it the way he just held me.
Then it’s just breathing.
He doesn’t move off me and I don’t ask him to. His weight is the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life. He stays inside me until he can’t, and when he finally rolls he takes me with him, tucks me in against his chest, and puts his mouth in my hair and keeps it there.
“Don’t fall asleep,” I say.
“I’m not.”
“You’re not allowed to be quiet, either.”
“I know.” His arm tightens. “You’re not cold?”
“Connor.”
“I’ve still got my cum inside you and I’m lying here worrying about your circulation,” he says. “It’s a personality. There’s no fixing it.”
I laugh into his sternum until my eyes run.
We talk for hours.
In a hotel bed with the sheet twisted somewhere down by our knees and the lamp still on because neither of us can be bothered.
About Ambrose. About the boiler at Saugatuck.
About what a person does with themselves when the entire architecture of their life gets taken away in one evening in front of an audience.
He asks me about the mixer again, properly this time, and I tell him the rest of it, and he doesn’t do a single useful thing about it. He just listens with his hand moving up and down my back, and that turns out to be the useful thing.
At some point he falls asleep mid-sentence. He’s done that our entire marriage. It used to drive me up the wall.
The light goes gray around the edges of the curtain.
I’m still awake. I’m lying on my side with my head on his arm, looking at him.
He’s asleep with his mouth slightly open and a crease in his cheek from the pillow, and he looks about twelve, and he owns nothing.
There’s been a knot under my ribs since a night in October. I’ve had it through a lawyer’s office and a lockout and a mixer and a corridor in a dress shop, this hard little fist of a thing that wouldn’t come out no matter what I did.
I lie there in a hotel room on Ninth Street at dawn and feel it let go.
He’s got nothing left to his name.
He’s got me.
It turns out that’s enough, and it turns out I’ve known it for weeks, and I put my hand flat on his chest to feel him breathing and let myself fall asleep in a bed with my husband in it.