Chapter 17 #2
"So that's the term. Not that you never do it again — you'll do it again, everybody does, and I'm not going to spend the rest of my life auditing you.
" She looked at him. "The term is that when you catch yourself doing it, you tell me you did.
Out loud. That's it. You come home and you say I wanted to ring somebody today and it wasn't you. "
Gordon Sutton sat in a folding chair in a rented kitchen and put his hand over his mouth.
"And fourth," Nicole said, "and this is the one I've been most frightened of, so I'm going to say it badly.
You have to be the man from the print shop room in front of me.
All the time. Not the one who's good at rooms." She swallowed.
"Because you were right in August, and I've thought about nothing else since.
You didn't laugh because you're cruel. You laughed because I'm a witness.
And if this works, then you're going to be looked at by somebody who knows exactly what you were and exactly what you've lost, every single day, for another twenty-four years. That's what you'd be signing up for."
The apartment was very quiet. Down in the street somebody's car alarm went off and stopped.
"Is that all of it?" Gordon said.
"That's all of it."
He stood up.
"Then I want to say two things back," he said, "and then I'm going to be quiet, because you've done all the work in this room for eight months and I'm not going to make a speech at you."
"Go on."
"The first is yes. To every clause, without negotiating one word of it, and I want you to notice that I'm not negotiating, because I've negotiated for a living for twenty years and I know exactly what it looks like when I do.
" He was very steady. "The reporting line stays.
The public thing is permanent. I'll tell you when I catch myself.
And I'll be the man from the room, because Nic — that's not a cost. You've offered me the only thing I actually want and you've put it to me like a bill. "
Nicole's eyes went hot.
"And the second thing," Gordon said, "is that I'm not going to say I've changed.
Everybody says that and it's worth nothing, and you told me in August that agreeing is worth nothing, and you were right.
" He took a breath. "So instead I'll say: I've got about twenty-five years left, and I intend to spend them being a man you'd have said yes to in that room in 2006, and you're going to be able to check, every day, because you'll be there.
That's the offer. It's not a promise. It's a thing you can audit. "
Nicole stood with her back against the counter.
"Come here," she said.
He crossed twelve feet of rented kitchen and stopped in front of her, close, not touching.
"I'm going to be a nightmare," she said.
"I know."
"I'm going to be difficult about things for years, Gordon. Not on purpose. I'll be fine for six weeks and then somebody will say something at a table and I'll be twenty-four years old in a—"
"Nicole."
"What."
"I have got nowhere else to be," Gordon said, "for the rest of my life."
And she took a fistful of his shirt and pulled him down and kissed him.
It was not gentle. She had thought — in the four seconds she'd had to think about it — that it would be careful, two people finding their way back, and it was nothing like that at all.
It was eight months of held breath going out at once.
His hands came up to her face and then down to her waist and he made a sound against her mouth that she had not heard in years, and she pulled him in by the shirt until there was no space at all between them and the counter edge was digging into her back and she did not care.
"Nic—" he got out.
"Don't."
"I'm not — " he kissed her jaw, her throat, the place under her ear that he had known for twenty-four years and had not forgotten — "I'm not asking, I'm not — do you want—"
"Gordon." She got both hands in his hair and made him look at her. "I have wanted to for eight months and been so angry about it I could have set fire to this building. Yes."
Her coat was on the floor. She had no memory of that happening.
He kissed her like a man who had been given something back he'd priced as gone. Her hands remembered him — the buttons, the belt, the exact width of his shoulders, twenty-four years of muscle memory arriving all at once and none of it needing to be thought about.
And then, halfway across the room, it stopped being frantic.
It happened all at once and neither of them decided it. He got her against the wall by the bedroom door and stopped, and stood there with his forehead against hers, both of them breathing hard, and neither of them moved for a long moment.
"What," she said.
"Nothing. I want to look at you."
"You've looked at me for twenty-four years."
"Not for about ten of them," Gordon said. "Not properly. That's the whole thing, isn't it."
And he did. He stood in a rented hallway with his hands on her waist and looked at her — at her face, unhurried, in a way that made her want to turn her head away and made her, deliberately, not — and something went through her that was worse and better than any of the last five minutes.
"Say it," she said.
"You are the most formidable person I have ever met," Gordon said. "I've known that since I was twenty-seven and I have never once said it in a room with other people in it, and that's the thing I'll be paying for until I die."
She pulled him into the bedroom by the front of his shirt.
The bed was too small and the sheets were the landlord's and there was orange light coming in off the parking garage, and none of it mattered.
He undressed her slowly, which she had not expected and could not have borne any other way, and he did it looking at her the whole time.
When his hand found the scar at the base of her thumb he stopped and turned her hand over and pressed his mouth to it, and Nicole said, "Don't," in a voice that came out wrecked, and he said, "Sorry," and did it again.
She was forty-six years old. She had been afraid of this specific thing since December in a way she had never admitted to Bridget or to Regina or to herself — that eight months was long enough for a body to go strange to itself, that fourteen years of being unseen do not undo themselves in one night, and that a woman who has been called decorative in front of three hundred people does not necessarily believe, in the dark, that she is anything else.
He gave her no room for it at all.
He took his time over her the way he had not taken time over anything in a decade.
His mouth at her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, lower — unhurried, and paying attention, and stopping when her breath changed to find out what had done it and do it again.
She got a hand in his hair and pulled, and he made a low sound against her stomach and did not speed up.
"You're taking a long time," she managed.
"Yes."
"Gordon—"
"I've got nowhere to be," he said, and went lower, and Nicole's head went back against the landlord's pillow and she stopped having opinions about the timetable.
She lost track of it after that. There was the orange light on the ceiling and the particular rasp of his jaw against the inside of her thigh, and his hands — big, careful, one flat on her hip holding her exactly where he wanted her — and the terrible unbearable patience of a man who kept stopping to look up at her, so that twice she said don't stop and once she said something much worse, and he laughed against her and it went through her whole body.
When it broke she said his name. Not a word — his name, twice, and her hand fisted in the sheet, and her back off the bed.
He came up her body slowly afterward and she was still shaking and he kissed her through it, and she could taste herself on him, and that undid something in her that eight months of dignity had held shut.
"Come here," she said. "Now."
"Bossy."
"Gordon Sutton, so help me—"
And then he was over her and in her and both of them stopped talking.
"Look at me," he said, and she did, and he said her name — her actual name, the whole of it, the way he had in a room over a print shop when they were broke — and something in her chest let go entirely.
They were not careful with each other and they were not clumsy either, which was its own kind of grief and its own kind of relief: twenty-four years does not go anywhere.
He knew where to put his hands. She knew the exact place at the base of his spine that made his breath break, and used it, and heard him laugh into her shoulder, wrecked.
But it was not the old thing. That was what she would keep afterward.