Chapter 5 #2
She thought about all the reasons not to.
She had a list. She had been keeping it for three weeks and she could have recited it from the top — Toni's voice, and Whit's voice, and the flat gray letters under seven phone calls, and a woman in a car in Casper hearing the sentence Tess had waited a decade for.
The list was good. Every item on it was true.
And standing there in her wet socks with her hands still cold from the water line, she looked at her husband sitting on a floor doing nothing, and the list did not weigh anything at all.
Then she crossed the floor and knelt down in front of him and kissed him.
He made a sound against her mouth like something coming apart.
His hands came up and stopped, hovering, not touching her, and she had to reach and take his wrist and put his hand on her waist herself, and even then he held her like she was borrowed.
"Porter."
"I'm trying not to—"
"I know what you're trying to do. Stop it."
"If you change your—"
"Then I'll say so," she said. "I've never had a problem telling you things."
That was funny and it was also the least true thing in the room, and they both went still for a second, and then he laughed, and she laughed, and something let go in the both of them at once.
After that it was not careful.
Twelve years is a long time. It's long enough that a body becomes a road you know in the dark — she knew the exact place at the base of his throat, she knew what happened when she put her teeth there, she knew the sound he made and she had not heard it in — she genuinely did not know.
A year? More? At some point they had stopped and neither of them had noticed the day it happened.
He got her sweater off and then the shirt under it, and then he stopped.
The scar ran from just under her sternum down past her navel, ten weeks old, still pink, still raised, with the small dotted line of the drain site off to one side. In the firelight it was the brightest thing on her.
The flinch started in her own shoulders — the instinct to cover it, to turn, to make a joke.
He put his hand flat over it.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're looking at it."
"Yes," Porter said.
And he didn't stop. He sat back on his heels and looked at it, at her, in the firelight, with his hand spread out over the whole ugly length of it, and his face did something that broke her heart, and then he leaned down and put his mouth on it.
She made a noise she didn't recognize.
"Okay," she said. "Okay—"
He worked up from there. Slow, and thorough, and with a kind of attention that was not about technique at all, and she got her hands into his hair and held on.
He put his mouth on the hollow under her ribs and then on the underside of her breast and then on her nipple, and she felt the whole line of herself go tight and hot from the sternum down.
She had forgotten this. That was the thing that kept arriving, over and over, like bad news.
Not that it was good — she remembered that it was good.
She had forgotten how it worked, the specific mechanics of being wanted by this particular man, the way he went quiet and heavy and single-minded and stopped being anybody's chairman of anything.
"Say something," she said.
"What."
"Anything. I want to hear you."
He lifted his head. His mouth was wet and his eyes had gone black in the firelight.
"I have thought about this every day for six weeks," he said, "and I did not once let myself finish the thought, because I didn't have the right to it."
"Finish it now."
"No."
"Porter."
"Not out loud," he said, and put his mouth back on her, lower this time, and whatever she'd been going to say came apart in the middle.
"The shoulder," she said. "Don't put weight on the—"
"I know."
"Okay."
He knew. That was the thing that undid her more than anything else that night. He rolled them so that she was over him and he took her weight off the arm without being asked, and he kept it that way for the rest of it, every position, every time, and never once said a word about it.
She got his shirt off and got her hands on him and he was thinner than he should be, ribs closer to the surface than she'd ever known them, and she stopped for a second with her palm on his side.
"You've lost—"
"Yeah."
"Porter."
"It's been a bad two months," he said. "Come here."
She came there.
The rug burned her knees and she didn't care. The fire got too hot on one side of her and she didn't care about that either.
When he finally got her jeans off it was with an impatience she remembered from years ago, the both of them getting in each other's way, and she laughed against his mouth and he said "shut up" into hers and she felt him smile.
Then his hand was between her legs and she stopped laughing.
He had always been good at this and he had always known it, which used to annoy her, and did not annoy her now.
He took his time. He watched her face the entire time, which he had not done in years — at some point in the middle of their marriage he had started closing his eyes, and she had never said anything about that either, and here he was, watching her like he was reading something.
"Look at me," he said, when she turned her head.
"I am."
"You're not."
She looked at him. He slid two fingers into her and held her gaze while he did it and she made a sound and her whole body arched up off the floor.
"There," he said.
"Don't be smug."
"I'm not being smug. I'm being—" He stopped, because she'd gotten her hand on him through his jeans, and whatever he'd been about to say did not survive.
It went fast after that. She got him out of the rest of it. She pushed him back against the couch and got over him and he had his hands on her hips, not guiding, just holding on, and when she sank down onto him they both made a sound at exactly the same time and then went completely still.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah."
"Don't move for a second."
"I couldn't if you paid me," Porter said, with his eyes shut and his forehead against her collarbone, and his voice had gone to pieces entirely, and she felt the whole twelve years and the whole seventy days sitting there in her chest at once.
Then she moved.
Slow, at first, because that was all either of them could stand.
He had both hands on her hips and his head back against the couch cushion and his throat exposed, and she watched him take it — watched the muscle jump in his jaw, watched him lose the thread entirely — and something in her that had been clenched shut since a Tuesday in December came unlocked with a violence that frightened her.
"Look at me," she said.
He opened his eyes.
"You don't get to close them," she said. "Not anymore. Not ever again."
"Okay."
"Say it."
"I won't close them," he said, and he didn't, not once, not for the rest of it, and it turned out that being looked at like that was almost more than she could take.
She set a rhythm and he let her have it. He was shaking under her hands. She got a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back and put her mouth on his throat, on the exact spot, and heard him say her name into the ceiling.
"Tess—"
"Not yet."
"I'm not going to—"
"Yes you are," she said. "Don't you dare be polite about it."
It was not smooth. She had a shoulder that didn't work and he had two months of not sleeping in him and neither of them had done this in longer than either would say out loud, and there was a moment about halfway through where her arm gave out and she came down on him hard and they both said ow and then laughed so hard they had to stop entirely.
"This is undignified," she said, into his neck.
"It's great."
"It's undignified."
"Tess." He got a hand up into her hair and turned her face and looked at her from three inches away, and he was not laughing anymore. "It's the best thing that's happened to me in my life."
She kissed him so she wouldn't have to answer that.
When she came it went through her like something breaking loose off a slope, and she had her face in the side of his neck and heard herself saying his name over and over in a voice she hadn't used in years, and he held her right through it with one hand spread wide across her back and the other on the back of her head, and he was saying something too, low, into her hair — her name, and please, and something that might have been thank you — and then his whole body went rigid under her and he said her name once, out loud, like it hurt.
After, they lay on the floor because neither of them could be bothered to move.
He got a blanket off the couch at some point and put it over her and not over himself, and she pulled half of it back onto him, and they argued about it for a minute without any words in the argument.
The fire went down to coals. The window behind the couch had frosted from the inside.
They stayed there a long time. Long enough that the coals shifted and settled twice. Long enough that her hip went to sleep and she moved it and did not get up.
He traced something on her back with one finger, over and over, and it took her a while to work out that it was nothing, that his hand was just moving, that there was no pattern in it at all.
"Your knees are going to be a disaster tomorrow," he said.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry about the rug."
"You are not."
"I am not," he agreed.
She lay with her head on his chest and listened to his heart come down out of it and thought, with total clarity: I am happy.
It was such an unfamiliar sentence that she turned it over to look at the back of it.
"What," he said.
"Nothing."
"You just did the thing where you go quiet in a different way."
"I have two kinds of quiet?"
"You have about nine," Porter said.
She smiled into his chest.
They went up at some point after midnight, carrying their clothes, laughing at the cold in the hallway like a couple of teenagers.