33. Gavin
GAVIN
Henry turns six months old by explaining a problem to the ceiling before the sun’s up.
It starts as one unhappy sound and becomes a full complaint by the time I get to the crib. Allison shifts under the blanket beside me.
“I’ve got him,” I say.
“The bottle’s?—“
“Second shelf, already measured.”
One of her eyes opens. “Show-off.”
“Go back to sleep.”
She does, instantly, the way only people who’ve been up with a baby for months can. I carry Henry into the kitchen and warm the bottle, and he tells me about his problem the whole time in a tone that suggests I caused it.
I’ve lived here since the Saturday I carried one suitcase up the stairs.
It’s still the only one. My suits have the top drawer and half the closet, my shoes live under the bed, and my shaving kit found a home on a shelf in the bathroom after losing a brief territorial war with the sink.
I still keep an office at Callahan, even though I don’t run the place anymore, and I leave it when I say I will.
I take the early bottle whether Henry slept all night or spent it convinced that sleep is a lie grown-ups tell babies.
My work phone lights up on the counter while he eats.
There’s bad weather over Westchester, and the office is sending a flight to a different airport.
It’s the kind of thing that used to have me on a call in my boxers before the second ring.
My thumb twitches toward it anyway. I read it, turn the phone face down and give Henry the rest of his bottle.
When I check again, it’s been handled, and nobody needed me to handle it.
It feels like setting down a bag I’ve carried for years.
Henry falls asleep against my shoulder before he finishes. Then the first delivery truck backs into the yard below us, beeping with enormous commitment, and he doesn’t even stir.
I used up my one lifetime complaint about the trucks the first week I lived here. I regret it every single morning.
At breakfast, Allison eats toast standing over the sink and reads her email.
“Callahan Air wants to know if Barrett will bid on the plants for the Teterboro terminal,” she says. “The same order Rebecca canceled in September.”
I’m snapping Henry into a clean sleeper on the changing pad. “They’re asking a few nurseries. You’re one of them.”
“Did you tell them to ask me?”
“I told them to stop pretending you don’t exist because of who you’re married to. Then I left the room.”
“Very restrained of you.”
“You get the same letter as everybody else. No special pricing, no promises.” I work on the last few snaps. “Freezing you out because you’re my wife would be stupid. Handing you the order would turn your people into my staff, and you told me that’s not allowed. So you get what everybody else gets.”
She puts the toast down. “I might not bid.”
“That’s up to you.”
“I’m going to bid,” she says. “And I’m going to charge them a fortune for the ferns.”
Her face softens, and warmth goes all the way down my arms. She comes over to the changing pad and looks down at our son.
“You did it crooked,” she says.
I look. One leg of the sleeper is fine. The other has wandered off and become its own garment.
“I was distracted by ethics.”
“That’s dangerous before coffee,” she says, and fixes it in no time while I watch and learn nothing.
Henry goes to Janet’s for the night with more bottles and diapers than a two-week cruise would need. I checked the bag twice. Allison checked it after me, because she loves me but not that much.
When she comes back up the stairs, I’m waiting by the door in my suit.
“Why are you dressed like that?”
“I came from work.”
“You changed your tie.”
I did. The first one looked like I was about to fire somebody. So does the second one, just less aggressively.
“Come downstairs with me,” I say.
She glances at the empty crib through the nursery door, and she keeps looking at it a second longer than she needs to. I understand. It isn’t his first night at Janet’s, and she still does it every time.
“My phones are on the kitchen counter,” I tell her. “Both of them. They’re staying there.”
“That’s a strange way to ask a woman on a date.”
“I’m nervous.” My palms are damp, and I keep wiping them on my trousers.
“Well, that’s more interesting,” she says, and follows me down.
The retail house is dark. Propagation three isn’t. I’ve switched on only the work lights over the center bench, and the spring starts we kept alive through the freeze run in long green rows toward the glass, and it’s warm and it smells like wet dirt and tomato leaves.
The pot’s sitting in the middle of the bench. It’s plain terracotta with a lopsided rim and a white mineral stain running down one side, and she has a whole shelf of them upstairs that she refuses to throw away.
Allison stops walking. “You stole one of my ugly pots.”
“Borrowed it.”
“That’s a difference rich men really enjoy.”
“I’ll give it back.”
“Depends what you did to it.”
I lift the pot. The ring is sitting underneath on a clean square of burlap.
She looks at it, and then she looks at me, and my ears start roaring. I’ve talked my way through rooms full of angry clients and a government minister and one airport authority in the middle of a fuel strike. I’ve never in my life forgotten every word I meant to say as completely as I do now.
“Gavin.”
I get down on one knee. The concrete is wet, and it soaks straight through my trousers, and the second tie turns out to have been pointless.
“We’re already married,” I say.
“I noticed.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend the first time didn’t happen.
I’m asking if you’ll keep building the next part with me.
” Her eyes are filling, and I keep going before I lose my nerve.
“I can’t promise I’ll never work late or have to travel.
You wouldn’t believe me, and you’d be right not to.
What I can promise is that my job doesn’t get to win just by being my job.
We decide together what’s worth pulling either one of us away from home.
We decide before the plane’s waiting on the runway. ”
She puts her hand to the chain at her throat.
“I love you,” I say. “You were never part of the company. You’re the life I want to come home to when the company’s done with me for the day. Will you choose me again?”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. Get off the wet floor.”
I stand up with a dark wet patch on one knee. She pulls the chain over her head, and her old wedding ring slides into her palm, and she puts it back on her finger herself. Then she holds out her hand to me.
“The new one goes next to it.”
My hands aren’t steady. I get it on anyway.
“It fits,” I say, like an idiot.
“My mother gave you the size,” she says. “Don’t even try to pretend she didn’t.”
“She made me promise things in exchange that I’m not allowed to tell you.”
Allison laughs and kisses me, hard, before I can finish.
We make it back upstairs with my tie in her fist and dirt on my knee. Her invoices are spread across the kitchen table. She shoves them into a pile with one hand and hops up onto the edge of it and pulls me in between her knees by the tie.
“This table was bought for invoices,” she says.
“It has range.”
She laughs against my mouth, because she remembers too: her desk in April, the storm on the glass, and my phone lighting up right after I came inside her. I reached for it before I even knew I’d moved. I still feel sick about it.
“Do you want this?” I ask her, once, because I want to hear her say it.
“I’m sitting on my invoices, Gavin. Yes.”
I get her sweater off and her bra after it, and I kiss her breasts slowly, the way she likes, until her fingers go into my hair and pull. She gets my shirt open and her hand down the front of my trousers and wraps it around my cock, and I groan into her neck.
“You’re overdressed,” she says.
“I proposed in this.”
“You proposed on your knees in dirt. The suit’s already dead. Take it off.”
I pull her jeans and underwear down her legs and kneel on her kitchen floor this time, where at least it’s dry, and put my mouth on her.
She tastes like I remember and I take my time about it.
I lick her slowly and then less slowly, and I suck her clit until her heels are digging into my back and she’s saying my name to the ceiling, loud enough that I’m glad Henry’s two towns away.
She comes with her hand tangled in my hair, and I keep going until she laughs and pushes at my head.
“Get up here.”
“Bossy.”
“Please,” she says, and she’s smiling, because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
I stand up between her knees and she pushes my trousers down and guides me into her.
There’s nothing between us. She’s hot and wet and tight around me, and she wraps her legs around my hips and holds on.
The table bangs the wall. A pile of invoices slides off onto the floor, and she doesn’t even look.
“Thin walls,” she whispers.
“There’s nobody downstairs.”
“The trucks come before it’s light.”
“We’ve got hours.”
She bites my shoulder for that. I get my thumb on her clit and fuck her slow and steady, and she comes again, and then again when I don’t stop, until I’ve lost track and so has she and it doesn’t matter.
I watch her face the whole time. I’m not halfway anywhere else.
When I come, it tears straight up my spine, and I come deep inside her with her legs locked around me and her mouth against my ear saying my name, and afterward I don’t move. Neither does she.
Later we shower in a stall built for one ordinary person and not two grown adults making bad decisions about elbows, and we get back into bed damp and laughing. Her hand settles flat over my heart, and we fall asleep with her foot tucked under my leg and the fitted sheet coming loose at one corner.
I wake up first. The room’s gray and quiet, and the trucks haven’t started yet. Allison is breathing slow and even beside me with the new ring and the old one on the hand she’s got tucked under her cheek.
I’m happy, plainly and completely, and it scares me a little how much.
I stay where I am.