Chapter 15 #3
Lucas was on his feet by his table. He was just standing there. His face was wet. His hands were shaking at his sides. He looked at her coming toward him like he didn’t believe it.
She stopped in front of him. She took his shaking hand in her scarred one.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Before dessert.”
* * *
They didn’t talk in the car.
He drove. She sat in the passenger seat of the plain blue sedan with her hand on his leg, and his hand over hers, and every red light, he turned his head and looked at her, and every red light, she looked back.
Neither of them said a word the whole way from Buckhead to Cabbagetown.
There wasn’t anything to say that they hadn’t said in front of four hundred people.
At the yellow house, he parked. She got out. He came around the car, and she took his hand again, and they went up the outside stairs together in the dark.
At the top, she stopped with her key in the lock.
“You said Kirkwood,” she said. “The table. The two chairs.”
“Yes.”
“I found those chairs on the curb. On Hosea Williams. I painted them blue.”
“One of them wobbled,” he said.
She laughed. It came out broken and wet. She turned the key and opened the door and pulled him inside by the front of his jacket.
* * *
It wasn’t like February.
In February it had been fierce and angry and full of everything neither of them could say. It had been a mistake of timing, and she’d known it while it was happening, and part of her had been fighting him the whole time.
She wasn’t fighting now.
She stood with him in the dark front room of her apartment, just inside the door, with the streetlight coming in pale through the window.
She put her hands on his face. It was still wet.
She kissed him, slowly, the way you’d kiss someone at the very start, when you don’t know anything yet and want to know everything.
He kissed her back the same way. Like he had all the time in the world. Like he wasn’t going anywhere.
She took his jacket off his shoulders and let it fall. She undid his tie. She did it slowly, as she’d done it every morning of their marriage, when he bent his head so she could. He bent his head now. She slid the tie out from under his collar and dropped it on the floor.
“You never needed me to tie it,” she said.
“No.”
“Why did you let me?”
“Because you liked doing it,” he said against her mouth. “And I liked watching you do it. Every morning. It was the best part of my day.”
She kissed him hard for that.
He found the zipper at the back of her black dress.
He drew it down slowly, all the way, and cool air touched her spine, and then his warm hand, flat against her bare back.
The dress slid off her shoulders. She stepped out of it.
She stood in front of him in the pale light in nothing but her slip and her grandmother’s pearls, and he looked at her like he’d never seen her before.
“Amelia,” he said.
“I’m here.”
He took the pins out of her hair, one by one. He was careful with them. He put each one in his pocket. When the last one was out her hair came down around her shoulders, and he put both hands in it, and held her face, and just looked at her.
“I’m not going to be careful,” he said. “You told me not to.”
“Good.”
“But I’m going to take my time.”
“I know,” she said, and pulled him toward the bedroom.
* * *
He took his time.
He laid her down on her plain bed in the dark and he learned her all over again.
Like he’d never been there before. Like he was starting from the first page.
He kissed the scar on her thumb, and then the inside of her wrist, and then the soft skin inside her elbow, all the way up her arm to her shoulder.
He slid the slip down and kissed her collarbone where the pearls lay.
He kissed her breasts, slow, until she was arching up off the quilt with her hands in his hair and her breath coming short.
She pulled at his shirt. He sat up and let her unbutton it. Her hands weren’t steady. She didn’t care. She pushed it off his shoulders and put her mouth on his chest, over his heart, and it slammed under her lips.
She found the mark on his shoulder. The one from February. It had faded to almost nothing, a faint shadow on his skin. She touched it with her fingertips.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said. “I looked at it every morning for two weeks.”
She laughed into his neck. He rolled her under him, and the laugh turned into something else.
They got the rest of their clothes off somehow.
She didn’t remember how, afterward. She remembered his hands.
She remembered the weight of him coming down over her, warm and heavy and exactly right, and the way he braced himself on his forearms and looked down at her before he did anything else.
Just looked. For a long time. With the streetlight on the side of his face and his eyes wide open.
“Say it again,” she said.
He knew what she meant.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you. I’ve loved you since two chairs in Kirkwood. I love you.”
She pulled him down into her.
It was slow. It was so slow she thought she might die of it.
He moved in her like they had all night, like they had the rest of their lives, which she understood, suddenly, lying there under him with her hands on his back, that they did.
There was no bet. There was no clock. There was nothing on a wall anywhere, waiting.
There was nothing hidden in him now, nothing held back, nothing he was keeping from her face.
It was just the two of them, in a small dark room, in a bed she’d bought with her own money.
She wrapped her legs around him and held him and moved with him. She didn’t close her eyes. Neither did he. She watched his face the whole time, and everything was in it. Everything. The fear and the love and the six years and the eight months. He let her see all of it.
That was what undid her, in the end. Not his hands or his mouth or the slow deep rhythm of him. His face. Open. Hers.
She came with his name in her mouth and his forehead pressed to hers, shaking, holding on to him, and he followed her a moment later. He shuddered and went still and said her name into her hair, again and again, like a prayer he’d finally been allowed to say out loud.
* * *
Afterward, they lay tangled in her quilt with the window open a crack. It was a warm April night. She could smell the fig tree, which had come back in leaf. Somewhere down the street a dog barked, and a train went by far off with its long low horn.
His arm was under her neck. Her head was on his chest. His heart went slow and even under her ear.
“The Adler letter,” he said after a long time. “In your bag.”
“Mm.”
“If you want it. Washington. You should take it. I mean that. I’d come with you, if you wanted me to. Or I’d fly up on weekends. Or anything. It’s yours.”
She lifted her head and looked at him.
“It’s mine,” she said. “I know it’s mine. That’s why I get to say no.”
She’d call Nora on Monday. She’d thank her. She’d tell her the truth, that she had a fund above a hardware store in Atlanta with forty kids starting in August, and a crooked name on the door, and that she wasn’t done with it yet.
She put her head back down on his chest.
“Lucas.”
“Mm.”
“I love you too,” she said. “I never stopped. Not once. Not even in Zane’s study. That was the worst part.”
His arm tightened around her. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
She lay there and listened to his heart, and the train, and the fig tree moving in the warm dark, and she thought about the dollar folded up in her bag on the kitchen floor, next to a letter she wasn’t going to send.
It weighed nothing at all.