Chapter 13 #2
“You taped it to the fridge,” he said.
She turned. He was standing by the refrigerator, reading the Harlan letter.
“Like a kid’s drawing,” she said.
“No.” He touched the edge of it, lightly, with one finger. “Like something you’re proud of.”
She looked at him standing there with his finger on her letter. At the rain in his hair. At the gray at his temples, which was more now than it had been in August. At his face, which she had known so long and couldn’t read tonight.
The coffee maker clicked off.
Neither of them moved toward it.
* * *
She didn’t decide to kiss him. She would think about that later, lying awake. She didn’t decide anything. She just crossed the little kitchen, three steps, and put her hand flat on his chest over the wet wool of his coat, and felt his heart going under it as hard as hers.
He didn’t move. He looked down at her hand. Then at her face.
“Amelia,” he said. Low. A question.
She kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. She didn’t want it to be gentle.
There were five months in it, and all of it came up at once.
The frame and the kitchen table and the cold floor of the Foundation and the green water off Cumberland Island.
She kissed him the way she’d wanted to slap him, hard, with her hand fisted in the front of his coat, and he made a sound against her mouth like something breaking, and then his hands were on her.
One on her waist. One in her hair, pulling the pins out, so it came down.
He knew where. That was the worst of it and the best of it.
Five years. He knew where to put his hands, how she liked to be held, the spot at the back of her neck that made her knees go.
And she knew him. She knew the way he breathed.
She knew the small hitch in his chest when she bit his lower lip, and she did it on purpose, and heard it, and felt a hot mean thrill of power go through her.
She pushed his coat off his shoulders. It fell on the kitchen floor in a wet heap.
She didn’t care. He was pulling her sweater up and she lifted her arms and it was gone, and his mouth was on her neck, her collarbone, the top of her breast above her bra, and she had her hands in his hair and was holding him there.
“Bed,” she said. “Now.”
* * *
They didn’t make it gracefully. They knocked into the card table on the way and a mug went over and neither of them looked. At the bedroom doorway he stopped her, with his hands on her face, and looked at her. Just looked. His eyes were wet.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Don’t ask me again.”
He didn’t.
He laid her down on the plain bed on top of her quilt, and she pulled him down with her, and the old springs creaked under both of them.
She got his sweater off him. His shirt under it.
He was thinner than he’d been in the summer.
She could feel his ribs under her hands.
She could feel the heat coming off his skin, and his heart, and his breath shaking as she ran her palms down his chest to his belt.
His hands were shaking too. She felt them at her back, fumbling with the hook of her bra, as they had not fumbled since the first time.
It took him two tries. She laughed, breathless, into his shoulder, and he laughed too, low and cracked, and then the bra was gone and his mouth was on her breast and she stopped laughing.
She arched up off the bed. She heard herself make a sound she hadn’t made in five months.
He took his time. That was the thing she’d forgotten, or made herself forget.
He always took his time. He kissed his way down her body in the dark, slow, as he used to on Sunday mornings, and she lay with her hands in his hair and her eyes closed and let him.
He pulled her jeans off. He pressed his mouth to the inside of her knee, and then her thigh, and she felt his breath on her through the cotton of her underwear, and her whole body pulled tight like a wire.
“Lucas,” she said.
He looked up at her. In the light from the kitchen she could see his face, and it was the face from the twenty-eighth floor. Open. Nothing hidden. Nothing arranged.
He took her underwear off and put his mouth on her.
She came apart faster than she wanted to.
She’d meant to hold out. She’d meant to stay in control of this, to keep some part of herself back where he couldn’t reach it.
She couldn’t. He knew her too well. He knew how slow to go and when to stop going slow, and she had her hand pressed over her own mouth and her other hand fisted in the quilt, and when it hit her it was like a wave hitting the back of her knees, all at once, and she cried out into her palm and shook with it.
He stayed with her through it. He didn’t stop until she pushed at his head.
Then he came back up her body, slowly, and lay over her, braced on his arms. He was looking at her face. His own face was wet. She reached up and touched it and her fingers came away damp.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t cry. Not now.”
“I’m not,” he said, and he was.
She pulled him down and kissed him, and tasted herself, and tasted salt. She reached between them and undid his belt, and he helped her, and then there was nothing between them at all.
She knew his body. She knew it better than her own.
The weight of him. The shape of his shoulders under her hands.
The long muscle down his back that tightened when he moved.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in, and he pushed into her slowly, and they both stopped breathing at the same time.
He held still. He put his forehead down against hers.
“Amelia,” he said. Just her name. Like it was the only word he knew.
She had waited five months to hear him say her name like that. She hadn’t known she was waiting.
Then he moved, and she stopped thinking.
At first he moved slowly. Long, deep, careful strokes, the way you’d walk into cold water, one step at a time.
He kept his forehead against hers. His breath was on her mouth, ragged and hot.
She could feel every inch of him, and every inch of him felt like coming home to a house she’d sworn she’d never set foot in again.
She put her hands on his face. She held it. She made him look at her.
“You don’t get to be careful,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Not tonight. You were careful for five years. You were careful with everything. You were so careful you never told me one true thing.”
He went still inside her. His eyes were dark.
“I’m not careful,” he said. “I’m scared.”
She pulled his face down closer. “Be scared, then. Just don’t be careful.”
He made a low sound in his throat. He slid one arm under her back and lifted her against him, so there was no space at all between them, her breasts crushed to his chest, his heart slamming against hers.
He buried his face in her hair. He said something she couldn’t hear.
He said it again, and she heard it that time, her name, and something after it that was just please, please, and she didn’t know what he was asking for and she didn’t think he did either.
She rolled her hips up to meet him. He gasped against her ear.
It wasn’t slow for long. She didn’t let it be.
She dug her heels into the backs of his thighs and her nails into his shoulders and pulled him harder, faster, and he went with her.
It was fierce. It was almost angry. It had everything in it, all of it, the bet and the frame and the eight weeks in the car and the cold floor in January.
She bit his shoulder. He said something into her neck that she didn’t catch.
The old bed hit the wall, again, again, and she didn’t care if the landlady heard, she didn’t care about anything except the weight of him and the heat and the terrible familiar rightness of it.
She knew his rhythm and he knew hers, and it was like the selection weekend, it was like carrying boxes in the dark, their bodies knew how to do this without asking.
Every place he touched her, she’d been touched there by him a thousand times before.
That was what made it so much worse. Nobody else would ever know her like this. Nobody else ever had.
She felt it building again, deep and slow this time, not like before.
She held on to him. She said his name. She said it again.
He lifted his head and looked at her, right at her, his eyes wide and dark in the dim light, and she held his look and didn’t close her eyes, and she came like that, looking at him, with his name in her mouth.
He followed her a few seconds later. She felt him go rigid and then shudder, and he made a sound like he was in pain, and pressed his face into her neck, and held on to her like he was drowning.
For a long time neither of them moved.
He stayed inside her, heavy and damp and shaking, with his face in her neck.
She lay under him with her arms around his back and her legs still wrapped around him and felt his heart slow down against her chest, one beat at a time.
His breath was hot on her skin. Her own breath was coming in pieces.
Somewhere in the apartment a pipe knocked. The rain went on.
She ran her hand up his spine, slowly, all the way to his hair. She felt him shiver under it.