Chapter 13 #3
He lifted his head at last. He looked down at her. His face was wet and flushed and completely undone, and he didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t smooth it over. He just let her see it.
She had never seen him like that. Not once, not in five years. Not at the wedding, not on the parking-deck roof, not in the green water off Cumberland Island. He had always kept one piece of his face back. She’d thought it was just how he was made.
It wasn’t. She could see that now. It had been the bet. Six years of keeping one piece back so she’d never see what was behind it.
There was nothing back now. There was nothing held.
He opened his mouth to say something.
She put her fingers over his lips.
“Not tonight,” she said. “Whatever it is. Save it.”
He looked at her over her fingers. Then he nodded, once, and kissed her fingertips, and rolled carefully to the side and gathered her against him.
* * *
Afterward, they lay tangled on top of the quilt in the dark. Neither of them said anything. The rain had picked up again outside. She could hear it on the tin roof of the landlady’s porch below, and the fig tree scraping the kitchen window, and his breathing slowing down beside her.
His arm was under her neck. His other hand was on her stomach, his thumb moving back and forth, slightly, over her skin. Like he was making sure she was real.
At some point he found her left hand in the dark. He lifted it to his mouth. He kissed the base of her thumb, the thin white scar, as he had every morning of their marriage.
She let him.
She lay there and let him and felt her eyes burn, and she didn’t say anything, and after a while his breathing went slow and even, and she knew he was asleep.
* * *
She didn’t sleep.
She lay beside him in the dark and looked at the ceiling, and sometime around three in the morning, with the rain still going and his arm heavy under her neck, she counted it.
A mistake.
Not because she didn’t want it. She had wanted it.
God, she had wanted it. Her whole body still hummed with how much she’d wanted it.
Her lips were sore. There was a mark coming up on his shoulder where she’d bitten him, and she could see it in the faint light from the kitchen, and she was not sorry.
It was a mistake because of the timing.
That evening she had stood in the conference room and told him the price of her listening.
Two things. She’d told him they weren’t the price of her.
That she wasn’t selling anything. That she didn’t know what would happen, even if he did both.
She had said all of that with her chin up and her voice steady and meant every word.
And then she’d brought him home and taken him to bed.
He hadn’t done anything yet. Not one thing.
He’d said yes. Yes was easy. Yes was the thing he’d always been good at.
The program was still inside the Fletcher Foundation.
The dinner in April was still two months off.
He hadn’t stood up in front of anybody. He hadn’t moved one dollar or said one true word out loud where it counted.
And she’d already given him this.
She’d given him the one thing she had been holding back.
Five months of holding it back. Five months of the wall, brick by brick.
And she’d handed it over before he’d done a single thing he promised, because her car wouldn’t start and it was raining and he’d touched the edge of her Harlan letter like he was proud of her.
She turned her head and looked at him sleeping.
His face was younger asleep. It always had been. The lines around his eyes went smooth. His mouth went soft. He looked like the man on the break-room floor at four in the morning, six years ago, with his tie off, telling her about a book he’d read.
She wanted to put her hand on his face. She kept it still.
She was so angry. Not at him. At herself.
At her own body, which had known what it wanted and had not waited for permission.
At her own timing, which had always been terrible, which had been terrible when she said yes to a man on a parking-deck roof with the city lit up behind him and a bet still open on a wall across town.
And she had said yes that night for a reason she had never told anyone.
Not Roxanne. Not him. She had been twenty-seven, and she had been tired.
Thirteen years of nights tired. Tired in her hands and her back and her teeth.
And a life where she got to stop being tired had been standing on a parking deck holding out a ring.
It wasn’t why. It wasn’t most of it. She had loved him; she knew that as surely as her own name.
But it had been in there, under the love, small and hard, and she had never owned it.
She could not put it next to a dollar on a wall and pretend it weighed nothing.
Her side of the marriage had not been perfectly clean either. Nobody’s was.
She lay there awake beside him until the window went gray, furious and warm and sore and absolutely certain that she had done the wrong thing at the wrong time.
And not one part of her, not one, wished he wasn’t there.