Chapter 17 #3
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
Then his mouth was on the back of her neck and it was very much not okay in the best possible way.
* * *
He undressed her slowly, which she had not expected and had no defense against, and he looked at all of it: the scar on the thigh, the pins, the shoulder that would never be square again, the whole inventory of a year.
“Don’t,” she said, out of pure reflex.
“I’m looking at you,” he said. “That’s all it is. I’m allowed to look at you.”
And she stood in her own bedroom in July and let her husband look at her, which turned out to be about a hundred times harder than taking her clothes off and a hundred times better.
Then she got her hands in his hair and pulled him down onto the bed.
It was slow and it was not careful. Those are different things and she had eight months to think about the difference.
He took his time — he took a great deal of time, and she let him, and somewhere in the middle of it she stopped keeping any kind of score at all, which had not happened to her since before the accident and possibly since before the marriage.
He went slowly enough that she got annoyed about it, twice, and told him so, and he said, “I know,” and did not speed up.
That was its own kind of answer. In ten years he had never once made her wait for anything; he was a man who arrived, competently, and got things done.
And here he was taking her apart by inches in their own bed with the window open and the whole of a July evening coming in, and she understood somewhere around the fourth time she said his name that he was not doing it to be generous.
He was doing it because he had eight months of not touching her to spend and he was going to spend all of it.
“Jason.”
“Mm.”
“I am going to lose my mind.”
“Yeah,” he said, into her stomach. “That was rather the plan.”
She got a fistful of the sheet and laughed and then stopped laughing entirely.
When he finally came back up her body she got her hands either side of his face and held him there, and neither of them said anything for a second, and the whole marriage was in that second: two people who had been extremely careful with each other for eight months, out of breath, an inch apart, with absolutely nothing left to be careful about.
“Now,” she said.
And he did, and she made a sound she had never made in that room in eight years of marriage, and he stopped, and she said, “Don’t you dare stop,” and he did not stop again.
It was not quiet. That was the other difference.
March had been silent and fast in a dark kitchen with a door open forty feet from his father; this was their own room with the door shut and no one in the world to perform for, and she said what she wanted and he answered her, out loud, in words, which was a thing they had never properly done and which she would think about with some astonishment for a considerable time afterward.
At one point she got him over and stayed there, which hurt her hip and which she did anyway, and he put both hands on her thighs — on the scar, on the pins, on all of it — and looked up at her like a man at a window.
“There you are,” he said.
She had to stop for a moment. He waited.
Her hands shook. They always shook when she was tired and she was extremely tired and she did not mind.
“Look at me,” she said, at the end, and he did.
He did not look away once. Neither did she.
That was the whole difference between July and March, and she thought about it afterward for years: that in a kitchen in the spring she had pulled his mouth down onto hers to stop him looking at her, and in a bed in July she kept her eyes open and let him.
She said his name when she went. He said hers, and then he said the other thing, right into her hair, and this time nobody put a hand over anybody’s mouth.
* * *
Afterward she lay with her head on her husband’s chest in her own bed and listened to the house.
The clock in the hall. The pump in the back room, sighing and cycling. A window open somewhere and the swallows done for the night and the enormous green silence of a Maryland July.
“I can hear everything,” she said.
“I know you can.”
“No — listen.” She put her hand flat on his chest. “That’s the intercom. And that’s the clock, and somebody’s got a tractor out on the valley road, and there’s a faucet dripping in the blue room and there has been since 2019.”
“I’ll fix the faucet.”
“Don’t you dare fix the faucet.” She was almost asleep. “I’ve spent eight months learning what this house sounds like from a mile away.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Mila,” he said. “Are you home?”
“Yes,” she said.
And then, into his chest, with her eyes shut:
“I’m home, and I chose it, and I’m not going anywhere. Say it back.”
“You’re home,” Jason said. “You chose it. You’re not going anywhere.”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m not going anywhere either,” he said. “Ever. That’s mine, and you’re getting it whether you asked for it or not.”
She fell asleep smiling, which she would remember, because she had not done that in a long time.