Chapter 16 #3
He took her to bed and took his time about it, which she had complained about exactly once in a year and had never meant.
He started at her mouth and did not get anywhere near where he was going for a long while, and Kristin lay in the dark of her own bedroom on her own ground and let a man who had all night take all night.
He knew this body. That is the thing that only happens with years and there is no way to get it faster: he knew the place under her jaw, and the one at the inside of her knee that she has never told anybody about because there is no way to say it out loud without sounding ridiculous, and the fact that if he puts his hand flat on her stomach and leaves it there she will come off the bed.
"You're doing that on purpose," she said.
"Yes."
"It's my wedding."
"It's my wedding too."
Her hands went into his hair. She was not quiet.
She had spent eleven years being quiet in a house with a woman four miles away who noticed things, and she is not that woman anymore and will not be again — the windows were open on a June night, and it is a county road, and the nearest house is a quarter mile off, and she did not care about a single thing on this earth.
He worked down and took his time about that too, both hands flat on her hips, and she got the pillow over her face at one point out of an old reflex and then took it off again on purpose and threw it on the floor.
"There she is," Blake said, into her thigh.
"Don't be smug."
"I'm going to be a little smug."
She came with her heels in the mattress and both hands in his hair and her voice going up into the rafters of a small brown house, and lay there afterward absolutely wrecked and laughing at the ceiling.
"Come up here," she said. "Right now."
"In a minute."
"Blake."
"In a minute," he said, unhurried, and she said something about him that would have gotten her thrown out of the Minnetonka Club and he laughed against the inside of her leg and did not hurry at all.
When he did come up over her she got her left hand against the side of his face — palm flat, two fingers short, the shape it is — and held it there, and he turned his head and kissed the middle of it the way he always does, every single time, without ever having discussed it once.
"Say it," she said.
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you." He was smiling. He was actually smiling, which he had not been able to do in that particular moment for three years. "Kristin Hovde, I love you, and I'm going to say it out loud tomorrow morning and the morning after that, and you're going to get sick of it."
"I'm not going to get sick of it."
"You might."
"Blake," she said, "I am never going to get sick of it," and pulled him down.
And it was not careful and it was not quiet and neither of them was performing anything for anybody.
He got an arm under her back and she got her legs around him and it was slow at first and then it was not slow at all, and the whole bed complained about it, and somewhere in the middle he stopped and put his forehead against hers and said, "Hey — I'm going to have this for the rest of my life," in a voice like a man who has just worked something out, and Kristin said, "Yes you are," and got her heels into him and told him to move.
She said his name twice. She has never been able to remember what else she said and Blake has always claimed not to remember either, which is a lie, and which she lets him have.
He held on longer than he had any business holding on, and she came a second time with her whole hand flat against the back of his neck, and he went about three strokes after that and said her name — her actual name, both of it, Kristin — and came apart with his face in her hair.
They lay there for a while not saying anything. His weight on her. The window open. Two hearts doing exactly the same thing.
"Okay," Kristin said, eventually, into his shoulder.
"Yeah."
"That's the good one."
"That's the good one," he agreed, and neither of them moved for a long time.
Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and her ruined hand open on his stomach, and the pup came in and got on the bed, which is not allowed and happens every night.
Through the window she could see the yard light and the black shape of the shed with the sign on the road in front of it, and her truck, and the spruce her father would have planted at exactly that distance.
"Five o'clock," she said.
"I know."
"You coming?"
"Yeah," Blake said. "I'll hold the light."
Kristin Hovde lay in her own bed in her own house on her own ground with her husband's heart going under her ear and a bad dog across her feet, and thought about a woman on a slate floor two years ago who had been embarrassed because somebody was going to have to clean it up.
You made it, she told her. You got all the way here. Wait until you see it.
Then she reached over and shut the lamp off, and in the dark Blake said, "I love you," to the ceiling, unprompted, for no reason at all — because that is a thing he does now, four or five times a day, forever — and Kristin laughed out loud in her own bed and said it back.