25. Allison
ALLISON
My son is spending the night at my mother’s house, with a freezer bag full of milk and a page of instructions I wrote in capital letters. Janet read the whole page, said, “Allison, I kept you alive,” and stuck it on her fridge under a magnet shaped like a pineapple.
He’s fine. He’s rolling onto his side now and looking extremely smug about it, and he laughs at the ceiling fan like it told him a joke. I’ve mostly stopped standing over his crib at night to make sure he’s still breathing. Mostly.
So now I’m in the hallway outside Gavin’s apartment, the smaller place he took in the city after Henry was born, with my wedding ring on its chain under my sweater, trying to remember how normal people breathe.
Gavin signed his response to my divorce papers and sent it to my lawyer.
Then he texted me that there were two things in it he wanted to be sure he understood, and I could come by or not.
I drove all the way down here in the dark to have a conversation that could have happened on the phone. I’ve decided not to think about why.
He opens the door before I knock. He’s in gray pants and a white shirt with the cuffs pushed back, his hair still wet from the shower, and my whole body goes warm and stupid before I’ve said hello.
“You don’t have to come in,” he says. “It’s all been sent already.”
“I drove an hour, Gavin.”
“That doesn’t mean you owe me the next one.”
He steps back, and I go in.
I’ve never been here, but some of it’s familiar, and that’s worse.
It’s a lot smaller than the penthouse, with plain white walls and windows that look at the building across the street instead of the whole sky.
But the table by the door is the same one, where he used to drop his keys and I used to drop the mail he never opened.
There are no flowers and no dinner pretending this is a date. He just brings me a glass of water.
Then I see the bookcase by the living room. The scan I gave him is sitting on the middle shelf in a plain black frame, Henry’s one small foot and bent knee, right where Gavin would see it every time he walked to the kitchen. The backs of my eyes burn, and I have to look away first.
The divorce papers are on the dining table, with my name typed under his.
“You signed it already?” I ask.
“Yesterday.”
“Before you knew I’d come?”
“Yes.”
I sit and open it. It doesn’t fight the divorce.
I keep the greenhouses, the apartment, and everything I built.
He gives up any claim on what Barrett grew into while we were married.
There’s nothing saying I have to keep quiet, no demand that I move back to the city, and not one word about Henry’s name.
His signature’s on the last page with yesterday’s date. It’s everything I asked for.
I hate it so much my hands shake on the pages.
“You made this easy,” I say.
He stays on the other side of the table. “I tried to make it safe for you.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t.”
The calm way he says it makes me want to throw the glass. “I asked you to stay, and you got on a plane. Now I ask you for a divorce, and you hand it to me already signed.”
“What should I have fought?”
“Me.”
It’s out before my pride can grab it. Gavin doesn’t even blink.
I put the pages down too hard. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I think it is.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean.”
“Then tell me.”
I get up and go to the window, because I can’t look at him and say it.
Down on the street a man is walking a dog in a little yellow raincoat, and the dog has stopped dead to sniff a hydrant like it’s reading the news.
In April I lived at the top of a glass tower and thought the view put us above every ordinary problem a marriage could have.
“You can make it easy for me to leave,” I say, “and still not want me to stay.”
“I want you to stay.”
It hits me in the backs of my knees, and I put a hand on the cold glass.
“I want you to stop the divorce,” he says behind me, quiet and plain. “I want you and Henry. If this apartment isn’t home, and it isn’t, I want to come home to the greenhouse. I want all of it, Allison.”
I turn around. He’s still on the far side of the table.
“Then why sign?”
“Because I could make this slow and ugly and expensive,” he says. “I could drag it out until staying with me looked easier than getting away from me. You’d call that fighting for you. I’d call it keeping you in a room with the door locked.”
“You figured that out fast.”
“No. I figured it out after I showed up at your door with two security guards and my mother’s nurse, three days after you gave birth. That wasn’t fast at all.”
I want to stay angry, because angry is useful. It keeps me on my side of the table when what I want is to end up in his bed.
Then he looks at my mouth and looks away, and that’s worse.
“Do you still want me?” I ask.
“Every day.”
“Even if I sign this?”
“Yes.”
I should pick up the papers and go home. Instead I cross the room, grab two fistfuls of that crisp white shirt, and kiss him.
He doesn’t touch me at first. His mouth answers mine, hard and hungry, and then he pulls back just far enough to see my face.
“Are you sure you want this?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “I drove an hour.”
He laughs against my mouth, surprised into it, and then his hands come to my waist and stay there, waiting on me. So I take one of them and put it under my sweater, flat against my stomach, and that’s the last question he asks.
We don’t make it to the bedroom right away.
He kisses me against the wall by the windows, slow and deep, like he’s got all night and intends to use it.
When his hand finds the clasp of my bra, I tell him to go easy, because I pumped before I left Janet’s and they’re already tender again.
He cups me so gently through the cotton that I should cool off.
I don’t. I push his shirt off his shoulders, and my hands remember everything: the warm skin, the little scar by his ribs from a stupid college sailing trip, the way his stomach jumps when I drag my nails down it.
“Bedroom,” I say.
There are new sheets on the bed, and one side looks like nobody’s slept on it.
The dress from our third date is hanging on the closet door, pressed and clean.
The last time I saw it, it was lying in a heap on the penthouse floor, and he brought it here with him.
I don’t ask. I pull my sweater over my head, and Gavin looks at me exactly the way he did in my bedroom doorway, hungry, with no pity in it anywhere.
He kneels to unzip my boots and peel my jeans down. Then he puts his mouth on the soft skin under my navel, on the dark line that’s fading and the pale lines that aren’t. He kisses them like they’re his, and he doesn’t make a speech about it.
“Lie down,” he says, looking up at me from the floor.
I lie back. He spreads my thighs and puts his mouth on me, and the first slow stroke of his tongue lifts my hips off the bed.
He takes his time. He licks circles around my clit until my legs shake, then slides one finger into me, then two.
I tell him harder, and he listens. I tell him faster, and he does that too.
I come with one hand in his hair and the other twisted in his new sheets.
He stays right there and keeps going until I come again and have to shove at his head.
“Up here,” I say. “Now.”
He crawls up the bed. I reach down and wrap my hand around his cock, and he groans into my neck like I’ve hurt him.
I roll us so I’m on top of him, and his hands settle on my hips and stay there, because this part’s mine.
I sink down on him slowly. It stretches, and I have to stop halfway and breathe.
He goes absolutely still under me, the cords standing out in his neck, his eyes on my face.
Then my body remembers him, and I take the rest of him in one long slide, and his head drops back on the pillow.
“Allison,” he says, like my name is the only word he’s got left.
Good.
I ride him slow until the tenderness turns into heat, and then not slow at all.
He gets his thumb on my clit, and I tell him where, and he keeps it exactly there.
It doesn’t fix London, or give him back the birth, or make those papers on his dining table disappear.
It’s just my husband underneath me, staying where I put him, and for tonight I let that be enough.
I come with his name in my mouth, and he holds me through it, and then he rolls us over with his hands tight on my hips.
He moves over me slow at first, then harder when I pull him down, and I hook my heels behind his thighs and hold him there.
“Come in me,” I say. “I want it.”
“God, Allison.” He drops his forehead to mine. “You feel so good. You always feel so fucking good.”
He doesn’t close his eyes when he comes. He watches me the whole time, says my name into my mouth, and comes deep inside me, the way he did on my desk the night before everything went wrong. I hold on to him until he stops shaking.
Afterward he gets a warm cloth and a glass of water, and he doesn’t ask me what any of it means. He starts to get up.
“Where are you going?”
“The couch,” he says. “Unless you want me here.”
“Stay.”
He gets back under the sheet and waits without pulling me in, so I move over there myself. When my cheek lands on his chest, every muscle I have goes loose and heavy for the first time since before London.
In the middle of the night, my breasts wake me up before anything romantic can happen.
I dig the pump out of my bag, and Gavin sits on the bathroom floor with me while I use it, because I don’t want to be alone and my dignity’s already had a very long year.
When I’m done, he labels each bottle with the date in his neat block capitals, then washes every piece of the pump without being asked and sets it on a towel to dry.
Then he comes back to bed, and he stays there until morning.
Coffee’s waiting when I walk into the kitchen in his shirt and yesterday’s underwear. It’s not glamorous. It’s extremely married.
The divorce papers are sitting next to my mug. He’s squared the stack and turned it so my name faces me.
“Your lawyer has the electronic copy,” he says. “That one’s yours.”
I flip to the last page anyway. Same signature, same date. Nothing in it changed because I slept with him. Relief and disappointment hit together, prickling hot in my face, and I can’t tell which one’s bigger. I put the papers in my bag next to the clean pump parts and the milk he labeled.
I get my coat on and my keys in my hand, and then I stay right where I am, in my husband’s kitchen, watching him drink his coffee.