Chapter 15 #2
He stopped instantly. He put his forehead against hers and stood there breathing.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm—" She laughed, shakily, with her fist still in his shirt. "I have not done this in three years and I have got a lot of things in my head about it and I'd like about nine seconds."
"Take as long as you want."
"That's the wrong answer."
"It's the true one."
"Blake." She got her forehead against his collarbone. "The last time we did this I was a different shape and I did not have a scar and I was somebody who lived in your house. I need you to know that all of that is coming into this room with me."
Blake put his hand flat on the back of her neck, which he had done ten thousand times over eleven years, and she felt the whole of her spine let go at once.
"Then it comes in," he said.
And that was the last conversation either of them managed for a while.
"Kris—"
"Don't talk."
"I need to say—"
"Blake, I swear to God—"
"I love you," he said, against her mouth, and she made a noise she had not made in three years and got both hands in his hair.
They got as far as the bedroom, barely.
It was a rented room with a bed and a lamp and a stack of unopened boxes against one wall, and afterward she loved that room out of all proportion for the rest of her life.
He got her jacket off and her flannel off and she was working at his belt one-handed, which is a thing she had learned to do that year and had absolutely not learned for this, and then he had her shirt up over her head and she was standing in front of him in the lamplight in nothing but her jeans, and he stopped.
He stopped completely.
And Kristin understood what he was looking at and made herself stand still for it.
The scar. Eight inches on the inside of the left forearm from wrist to elbow, raised and pale now, going white where it had been pink.
She had not let anybody look at it in a room like this.
She had not been in a room like this. And for one appalling second she was thirty-six years old and standing half-naked in front of her own husband wanting to put her arm behind her back.
"Don't you dare be sorry," she said. "Not now. Not in here."
"I'm not sorry."
"You'd better not be—"
"Kristin." He took her left hand in both of his. "I'm not sorry. I'm looking at it."
And he lifted her arm, and turned it over, and put his mouth on the inside of her wrist at the bottom of the scar, and then higher, and then at the crook of her elbow at the top of it, unhurried, three times, with his eyes open.
Kristin stopped being able to stand up very well.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
"I want to say one thing about it and then I'm not going to say anything about it again for the rest of my life."
"Blake—"
"That's on me," he said, against the inside of her elbow. "That is on me. And it's on you the same way your shoulders are on you, and your hands, and the fact that you can put an arm in a cow and tell me what's in there. It's a working body, Kris. It's the best one I've ever seen."
She got her right hand into his hair and pulled his head up.
"Don't be nice to me right now," she said. "I'll come apart. Be something else."
So he was something else.
He got his hands on her hips and turned her and walked her backward three steps into the wall of a rented hallway, and kissed her the way he had not kissed her since about the fourth year — with intent, no apology in it anywhere, one hand going up under her jaw to tip her head where he wanted it.
Her hands went flat against the wall behind her.
Her heart was going like something in a chute.
"Better," she said, into his mouth.
"I know it's better."
"Don't get—" She lost the sentence. His mouth was on her throat. "Don't get pleased with yourself."
"Too late," said Blake.
He was careful with the arm and he was not careful anywhere else, and that turned out to be exactly the arithmetic.
He got her jeans off — badly, with her helping, both of them laughing at one point, which she had not expected and which turned out to be the thing that took the last of the fear out of the room — and got her onto the bed.
Then he took his time, and she had forgotten that about him entirely.
That was the wound in a different form and she felt it go through her while it was happening: he had always been like this.
Unhurried. Attentive to the point of arrogance.
A man who would spend forty minutes on a thing because he had decided to, and who had spent eleven years being exactly this generous with her body and almost nothing else.
She got a fistful of the sheet in her right hand.
"You remember," she said.
"I remember everything."
"That's not fair either."
"No," he agreed, from somewhere below her ribs, and went on.
He put his mouth on her and she put her left forearm across her own eyes, and she was loud, which she had never been, not in eleven years, not once — she had been a woman who was quiet in a big house with staff in it and a mother-in-law four miles off, and she was not in that house anymore.
She was in a rented two-bedroom on a street where anybody could walk up, with the window open, in June.
"Blake—"
He did not stop and did not hurry. He got one arm across her hips to hold her still and she got her heels into the mattress and pushed against it anyway, and somewhere in there she stopped keeping track of what she was saying, which had not happened to her in a decade.
She came against his mouth with her whole body going and a noise coming out of her that she would have been mortified by in any other year of her life.
It went on longer than it had any right to.
And when she came back down she was laughing and crying at the same time, in a way that would have embarrassed her enormously in front of anybody else on earth.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, hell."
"Yeah."
"Shut up." She got the back of her wrist across her eyes. "Come here. Come up here."
He came up over her and she got her hands on him — the good one and the other one, which will not close, which is the shape it is — and she put the left one flat against the side of his face and held it there, palm open, two fingers curled short, exactly what it was.
He turned his head and kissed the middle of that palm.
"Yes," she said. "Now."
He was shaking. She could feel it going through him. Forty-one years old and a man who had never in his life been told no, shaking like a boy, and she got her hand around him and put him where she wanted him and he pushed in and both of them made a sound.
"Oh," Blake said. "Kris."
"I know."
"I'm not going to—"
"I don't care," she said, and got her legs around him. "I don't care, I've got the rest of my life for the good one."
He got his forearms under her shoulders and put his forehead against hers and moved, and it was not smooth and it was not skillful and it was, she thought afterward, the truest twenty minutes of her adult life.