Chapter 16 #3
She walked across the office, across the wet carpet, and she stopped in front of him. She took his face in her hands. He closed his eyes. And she kissed her husband in the winter sun, slowly, with nobody watching, for as long as she wanted.
* * *
They went home to the townhouse.
He drove. She held his hand on the gearshift the whole way.
It was four o’clock, and the light over Rittenhouse Square was going gold and long, and the bare trees in the square threw long blue shadows on the snow.
He unlocked the front door and held it for her, and she went in, and the house was warm and quiet, and the grandfather clock was ticking in the living room.
They did not rush.
That was the thing she would remember later.
On Christmas Eve, under the tree, there had been a whole year in it, and all of it had been fighting to get out at once.
This was different. This was the two of them climbing the stairs of their house in the late afternoon light, holding hands, stopping on the landing to kiss, and then stopping again at the top of the stairs, as though there were all the time in the world.
In the bedroom, the curtains were open. The last of the sun came across the floor.
Connor stood in front of her and put his hands on the top button of her cardigan. Then he stopped and looked at her.
“Can I?” he said.
She smiled. “You don’t have to ask me every time.”
“I know,” he said. “I want to.”
“Yes.”
He undid the buttons one at a time. He did it slowly, and he watched her face while he did it, not his hands.
When the cardigan came off her shoulders, he kissed her shoulder.
When she lifted her arms, he pulled the thin sweater underneath over her head and dropped it on the chair, and he kissed the inside of her wrist, and then her elbow, and then her collarbone.
She undid his shirt. Her hands were steady this time. She took her time with every button. When she pushed it off his shoulders, she saw the marks on his shoulder, faint now, from her teeth on Christmas Eve. She touched them with her fingertips.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said, and she laughed against his chest.
They undressed each other the rest of the way in the gold light, piece by piece, with a lot of stopping.
She kissed the scar on his knee from a forklift accident when he was twenty-three.
He kissed the freckle on her hip that he had once, early on, told her was his favorite place in Philadelphia.
He laughed when she got his belt caught.
She laughed when he fell over trying to get his foot out of his jeans and landed on the bed.
It was nothing like Christmas Eve. It was nothing like the careful Saturday nights of the last years, either, in the dark, with their eyes closed.
Their eyes were open. The whole time.
He pulled her down onto the bed with him, and she lay on top of him, skin to skin, and for a while they just kissed like that, slowly, deeply, with the clock ticking downstairs and the light moving across the ceiling.
He was hard against her stomach, and her own body was going warm and heavy and slow, like honey in the sun.
“I love you,” he said against her mouth.
It was the first time he had said it since the lighting. He had not said it on Christmas Eve. He had not said it at the train.
She lifted her head and looked down at him.
“I know,” she said. “I love you too. I never stopped. That was the whole problem.”
He laughed, and then he wasn’t laughing. He rolled her over, gently, onto her back, and looked down at her.
He moved down her body with his mouth. Slowly.
Her throat. The soft skin between her breasts.
Each nipple in turn, taking his time, until her back came up off the bed and her hands were in his hair.
Her stomach. Her hip, the freckle. The inside of her thigh.
He opened her with his hands and put his mouth on her, and she let out a long breath that turned into his name.
It wasn’t fierce this time. He was patient.
He was so patient that it undid her in a completely different way.
He did it slow and soft and steady, and he paid attention, and every time she moved, he followed.
When she started shaking, he didn’t hurry.
He held her hips and kept going exactly the same, until the pleasure built so slow and so high that she couldn’t breathe.
When she came, it rolled through her in long waves, and she held on to the sheets and cried out, and he stayed with her through every one of them.
When she could see again, he was lying beside her with his head propped on his hand, watching her face.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said, breathless, and pulled him on top of her.
He settled between her thighs. She felt him, hard, right there, and she reached down between them and guided him to her, and he pushed inside her, slowly, with his eyes on hers.
They both made a sound.
For a long moment he didn’t move. He held himself up on his arms over her and looked down at her in the last of the gold light, and she wrapped her legs around his back and looked back at him.
She felt full, and held, and — for the first time in more than a year — like there was nobody else in the room with them.
No crowd. No woman under a light. No study door.
Just her husband, inside her, looking at her like she was the only thing he had ever wanted to see.
Then he moved.
It was slow and deep and unhurried. It was the way you make love to someone you plan to spend fifty more years with.
He kissed her while he moved. He said her name.
She met him, slow, every time, and ran her hands down the long muscles of his back, and held on.
The light went from gold to pink to blue on the ceiling.
The clock chimed five downstairs, and they both heard it, and they both laughed, and he kissed the laugh right off her mouth.
It built slowly. It built for a long time.
When it came, it did not break over them like a storm.
It rose like a tide. She felt it gather in him, and in her, and she held his face in both hands and said look at me, the way he had said it to her under the tree, and he looked at her.
They went over together, with their eyes open, with his forehead against hers and her name in his mouth and his in hers.
* * *
Afterward, they lay tangled in the sheets in the blue dark with the streetlights coming on outside.
Neither of them said anything for a long time. They didn’t need to. She lay with her head on his chest and listened to his heart slow down, and he ran his fingers through her hair, over and over, gently, the way he used to do on Sunday mornings when they were first married.
“We’re still selling the house,” he said into the dark.
Caroline laughed so hard she had to put her face in his chest.
“We’ll talk about it,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it,” he agreed, and she could hear him smiling.
Downstairs, the grandfather clock ticked on in the empty living room.
Outside, a car went past on the square with its radio playing, and then it was quiet.
Caroline lay in the dark in her husband’s arms, in a house she was going to lose an argument about, and she felt her heart beating against his ribs.
She wasn’t afraid of it anymore.