Chapter 15 #3
It undid her. Right there, in front of everybody, at the front of the riser, twenty-four inches away, and she sang the whole last line straight through it without dropping one word, because she was a professional and because she was not going to give up the last line of her own song for anything on this earth.
The lights went out.
Somewhere out in the dark, a fourteen-hundred-seat room stood up at the same time.
They did not stay for the party. There was a party. There is always a party.
Deacon shook about forty hands in nine minutes with his hat in his left hand, and Savannah stood at the mouth of the hallway and told Trish Gormley that the consent expired at midnight and that she meant it, and then she got her guitar out of a storage closet with a mirror screwed to the wall and turned the light off in it herself.
They drove out to the Harpeth House in his truck at half past eleven with the windows down and did not say one word the entire way, and it was not a difficult silence, and about four miles from the house he put his hand on her knee and she put hers on top of it.
The kitchen light was on. It was always on.
She let herself in the side door with her own key.
He set his hat on the counter and she set the guitar down inside the door and they stood in the kitchen looking at each other for about two seconds.
Then Savannah took two steps and got a handful of his shirt and pulled.
He came down to her. He came down fast, one hand behind her head and one at her waist, and his mouth was hot and he tasted like the inside of a hall, and she got both arms up around his neck and made a sound against his mouth that she had not made in five months.
"Off," she said, and got her hands under the shirt, and he pulled it over his head one-handed and dropped it on the floor of his own kitchen.
She put her palms flat on him. His chest, his ribs, the flat of his stomach, the scar on his shoulder from a stage in Little Rock.
She knew all of it. That was the trouble with it.
Her hands knew where they were going, they had known for nine years, and for one bad second in the middle of it she was standing in a hallway in March in front of a closed door with a man's name on a brass card, and her hands stopped.
Deacon felt it. Of course he did.
He went still under her hands and did not push and did not say anything and did not move one inch, and he waited, and he would have waited all night.
Savannah made the decision the same way she had made every other decision since March, which was out loud.
"I'm not stopping," she said. "I went somewhere for a second. I'm back."
"Take as long as you want."
"I don't want long," she said, and reached down and got his belt.
He got her shirt off at the counter and her jeans somewhere between the counter and the stairs, and she got one boot off and left the other one halfway up and did not care.
He picked her up on the landing. He had done that a hundred times, drunk and sober, and she had always laughed at it, and she laughed at it now, into his neck, with her legs around him.
The bedroom was exactly the same. That should have hurt more than it did. Her side of the closet with six inches of air between her shirts and his, and every one of her shirts still hanging in it, because he had not moved a thing.
He put her down on the bed and stood there looking at her.
"Say something," she said.
"I can't."
"Deacon."
"I'm looking," he said, and his voice was gone, "and I get to look, and I have not been able to look at you since March."
"Then get down here and look at me."
He got down there.
He took his time. She was going to be angry about that later and she was not angry about it then.
His mouth on her throat, on her collarbone, on the underside of her breast, and one hand spread wide across her stomach holding her flat against the bed.
He knew where to go. He had always known where to go, and the knowing had been the sharpest thing in her mouth for five months, and now it was underneath her, and she was going to have to make her peace with the fact that a thing could be both.
He went lower. He put her thighs over his shoulders the way he had a thousand times and looked up the length of her once — she felt it, she did not see it — and then his mouth was on her and she got a fistful of his hair and lost the thread of every sentence she had built that spring.
He was slow about it. He was maddeningly, deliberately slow about it, two fingers and his tongue and no hurry anywhere in him, and she said his name twice and then quit saying anything, and when it came it came all the way up from her heels and she made a noise into her own forearm and her whole back came off the bed.
"No," she said, before it had even finished, hauling at his shoulders. "Come here. Come up here."
He came up.
She got her hand around him. He was hard and he was hot and his breath went out of him against her ear, and she pushed him over onto his back and got up over him and held him there with one hand flat in the middle of his chest.
"Look at me."
He looked at her.
She took him in slow, all the way down, and watched his face come apart on the way, and neither one of them made a sound for a second.
"There," she said.
"Savannah—"
"Don't talk yet."
She moved. She set the pace and she kept it, slow at first and then not slow, with her hands on his chest and her hair down and her ring cold against his skin. He got his hands on her hips and she took one of them off and put it up on her waist where she wanted it, and he went where she put him.
That was the whole of it. She thought about it later, in the dark.
She had spent nine years being good at fitting into what a room needed, and she had spent five months learning to say a sentence out loud, and it turned out the last of it was this: she moved his hand and he let it be moved, and there was not one second of that where either of them thought it was a small thing.
Her eyes were running by then. They had been for a while. She did not wipe at them and she did not apologize for them and she did not slow down.
"Say it," she said.
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you. I have loved you the whole time. I did every rotten thing I did with that in me, which is worse, and I love you." His hands closed on her waist. "You're my wife. Savannah. You're my wife."
She came down over him and put her forehead against his and stayed there, moving, and it stopped being a thing she was doing to him and started being the other thing.
He got his arms all the way around her back and held on.
She could feel him going, the whole length of his body drawing up under her, and she got her mouth against his ear.
"I know," she said. "Go on."
He said her name into her shoulder and came apart, and she went right after him with his arms locked around her ribs, and for a while after that neither one of them was any use to anybody.
Some time later they were lying crossways on the bed with all the lights off and one window open, and his hand was moving slow up and down her back, and she had her palm flat on his chest with the ring on it.
He found it with his thumb. He went still for a second when he did.
He did not say anything about it. He turned it once around her finger with his thumb and forefinger, the way she did when she was anxious, and then he left his hand there.
"You put it on before the show," he said.
"In the closet."
"Before we walked out."
"Before you missed the top of the third line in 'Ash Creek,'" Savannah said, "in front of the entire music business."
"I'd like it noted that I found it again."
"You came in four cents under."
"I found it again," Deacon said, with a lot of dignity for a naked man, and she laughed into his shoulder for about a minute and a half and could not get herself stopped.
Later still, almost asleep, she opened her eyes in the dark.
"I'm taking the money," she said.
"Take it."
"All of it. Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars, and the interest Odette's going to get on top of it, and I'm not putting one dollar of it into this house."
"All right."
"You don't want to know what I'm doing with it?"
"You'll tell me when you want to," Deacon said.
"I'll tell you in the fall."
"Then I'll find out in the fall."
Savannah lay there in her own bed in her own house with her hand on her husband.
"Two more things," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
"I'm not doing thirty more cities. I'll do the ones I want and you'll eat the guarantees on the rest, and I'll tell you which ones on Monday."
"Monday," he said. "What's the other one."
"Take the sign down Sunday," Savannah said. "I'll say when it goes back up."