Chapter 17 #2
“I turned it down on Wednesday and I did not think about you once while I was doing it. Not once. I sat at that table and I looked at the whole thing and I turned it down because I have a horse in Pennsylvania and a friend with a barn full of horses and a hill I can ride to, and because I’ve spent my entire adult life in rooms other people chose, and the one I want to work in is a barn office with a bad computer in it. ”
“Okay.”
“So I am not here because I ran out of options.” Her voice was going and she let it.
“I want that established in this kitchen tonight and I want it to stay established for the next forty years, because I know exactly what you’re going to do with it otherwise.
I had somewhere else to go. It was a good somewhere.
I said no to it three days before I got in the truck, and then I got in the truck anyway. ”
* * *
“The second thing,” she said.
“Mila—”
“I’m not finished and if you talk now I’ll cry and I’d rather do that in a minute.”
He shut his mouth.
“I’m not coming home to be forgiven and I’m not coming home to be careful,” Mila said.
“I’m coming home because I have spent eight months finding out exactly who I am with nobody’s hand on me, and it turns out that the woman I am wants to live in this house with you, and she’d like it on the record that she is not settling for anything.
“And here are the terms, and they are not a probation and they are not conditions and you can argue with any of them, tonight, in this kitchen, out loud.
“You do not decide what I get told. Ever. Not about money, not about your father, not about the company, not about me. If it’s bad news you bring it to me the same day and we stand in it together and it is allowed to be awful.
“I get the barn office and the work and the three days every other week in Washington and you do not once, in your life, look at the calendar with that face.
“And you talk to me.” She was crying now and she did not stop.
“That’s the real one. That’s the only one that actually matters.
Two years of long week nearly killed this marriage before a horse ever did, and I am not doing another two years of it, not for anything.
If there’s a thing in your chest at two in the morning you wake me up.
You wake me up, Jason, and you tell me, and I will be so glad. ”
* * *
He came around the counter.
He stopped about a foot away — of course he did, he had been stopping short since February and it had become the shape of him — and he said, “Can I say mine?”
“Say yours.”
“Yes to all of it. Obviously. Every word.” His voice was wrecked. “And here’s mine, and it’s short.
“I am not going to spend the rest of my life being grateful at you. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve decided it’s the one thing that would actually ruin this.
So I’m not going to. I’m going to be your husband and I’m going to want things and I’m going to be wrong about things and I’m going to argue with you about the money and where we go in August.”
“Good.”
“And I want a second thing, which I’ve had since about March and haven’t been able to ask for.” He took a breath. “I want you to stop being careful with me about that horse.”
Mila laughed. It came out as a sob and she did not care.
“What?”
“You’ve been going up there on your own since April and telling nobody.” He was almost smiling and his eyes were streaming. “I want to come. I’ve paid for that animal for nine months and I’ve never seen her and I’d quite like to, and I’ve been too embarrassed to ask, and I’m asking.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Saturday,” said Mila. “Bring boots. She’ll bite you.”
* * *
And then it was just the two of them in a kitchen.
He put his hand on the side of her face, the way he had ten thousand times, and she turned into it, and it was not like March — nothing about it was like March. March had been furious and fast and full of arithmetic. This was slow.
“Say it,” she said, against his palm.
“Say what?”
“The thing you almost said in March. You stopped yourself. I put my hand over your mouth and you let me.”
Jason Shepard looked at his wife for a long moment.
“I love you,” he said. “I have loved you every single day since the second week I knew you, including the ones where I was too much of a coward to be any use to you, including every day of those six weeks, and the thing I said on the ninth of November was the biggest lie I have ever told in my life.”
“Again.”
“I love you.”
“Once more,” said Mila, “and then take me upstairs.”
* * *
They did not make it past the landing at first.
He had her against the wall at the top of the stairs with her hands in his shirt, and he was saying her name into her mouth, and she got the buttons wrong and laughed and he laughed and then neither of them was laughing.
“Bed,” she said. “I want the bed. I want our actual bed, I’ve thought about it for eight months—”
“Yes.”
“—and if you carry me I will end you.”
“I’m not going to carry you,” Jason said. “I’ve learned a great deal.”
The room was exactly the same. That went through her as she came into it — the same bed, the same lamp, the same window, and everything she had been for eight months sitting in her like a stone — and he felt her stop and did not ask, and simply stood behind her with his hands on her arms and waited until she was ready.