28. Epilogue, I Can Float #2
“I ran it on you too. Every night, for eleven weeks, in a truck. And every single night the answer came back the same and I refused to believe it, because the answer was that you weren't a risk. You were the only safe thing in the world.”
My voice goes, and I let it go. “I'm done running the numbers. I choose you in the open, with everybody watching, and I'm going to keep choosing you every ordinary morning for the rest of my life.”
Charles says the words, and Nolan doesn't wait for permission. He has my face in his hands before the sentence is finished and he kisses me standing in the Pacific with twenty-two people cheering in the shallows, and I hear Kane whistle, and somebody, I am fairly sure it's Harlan, actually hollers.
And I'm laughing into my own husband's mouth, which is nothing like how I pictured any of it, and is better.
Then he doesn't let go of me.
“Mira.” His mouth is still against mine, and the cove is still making noise behind him. "You went and told me once that the water was the very thing that could go and take you under,"
“I did.”
"And then you went and told me the truer thing,” One arm goes behind my knees and the sand goes out from under my feet and I am up against his chest in eight hundred dollars of ivory. “You done said that water was me, yeah."
He walks me straight out into the Pacific.
In a suit. In October. Past his knees and past his waist, with twenty-two people howling on the sand behind us and all of Point Bluff screaming at the top of their voices, and my father, I learn afterward, laughing so hard he has to sit down on a rock.
The cold hits and I do not care about the cold.
The dress goes heavy and dark and ruined and I do not care about the dress.
He gets us out to where the swell comes through and the sand quits being underneath, and he stops, and he holds me there, and the water takes the whole weight of me out of his arms and into itself.
“Go on,” he says. His voice has gone all the way down. "Go on and let go, yeah. I've got you."
So I do.
I lie back in my wedding dress in the cold Pacific with my hair coming undone and a stranger's careful work running off my face, my husband's hand flat between my shoulder blades, and the swell comes up under me and lifts, and I do not sink.
Eleven years I held a thing above the waterline so it would not get wet. Three years I swam so I would not go under. And the man who was the water is standing chest-deep in it with one hand under my back, and he is not the thing that takes me down. He never was once. He is the thing I rest on.
“I've got you,” he says again.
“I know,” I tell the sky. “I know you do.”
Voss, The Laughing
We come out of the surf ruined and streaming and laughing, and my mother is standing at the tide line with a hotel blanket she has been holding for twenty minutes.
That is how I learn she knew the whole time. “It's a good fabric,” she says into my wet hair, furious and delighted at once. “I told you it would come back.”
It's Harlan who tells me, an hour later, holding a beer and watching my husband wring out a suit jacket.
Six weeks Nolan read a tide table the way he reads ground.
And he settled on four o'clock in October because four is the hour the tide is going out and the wash runs shallow and warm over hard sand.
He built the whole afternoon around being able to carry me into it. He never said one word about it to me. He said four o'clock, and I said fine, because I trusted him, which is the whole story of us.
Spencer stands up past the wrack line near the path, close to an exit out of old habit, and lifts his glass when I catch his eye. A few operators I know only by first names and careful eyes lift theirs too, men who will never appear in a photograph anywhere and toast me all the same.
My dad sits on his rock with his shoes in his hand and does not say another word all afternoon, and does not leave either. Sometime in the evening I look over and my mother is sitting on the rock beside him, the two of them not talking at all, close enough that their shoulders touch.
Later still, with my hair drying stiff with salt and my mother's blanket around my shoulders, they come to us, Beau and Loretta, to do the thing people do, and Nolan looks at the pair of them a beat too long, the way he looks at everything, reading them.
"What?" Loretta says.
Nolan doesn't answer her. He looks at Harlan instead, the big man stuffed into a suit and standing next to a woman he can't stop orbiting, and something almost like a smile touches the corner of his mouth. "You look like you was born right to this kind of water, yeah," he says to him. Just that.
The man who I've watched walk calm through things that would empty most men out goes beet red to the ears.
And Loretta can't help it. She giggles, one bright helpless sound, and claps a hand over her own mouth, and looks up at the blushing mountain beside her like she's just seen the whole rest of her life and wouldn't mind it one bit.
And then I can't help it either. I feel it climb up out of me and I press my lips together and try to hold it down, the way you hold down a laugh in a quiet room. Loretta sees me trying, and that finishes both of us.
We lose it together, the two of us, laughing until she has to grip my arm and I have to grip hers, two women cracking up at a wedding while a giant blushes beside us. And Nolan watches me come apart with laughter and looks like he'd trade every calm year he has left to keep me doing exactly this.
That's theirs, the thing between Beau and Loretta, and it hasn't started yet, and it isn't this one. But the laughing is mine. I let it have me all the way, here, in the open, standing in wet sand in a ruined dress, and I don't look away from a single second of it.
Voss, What She Sees
That night, in the room that is only ours, with the wedding gone quiet behind us and the whole long war of it finally, finally over, I get to do the thing I have wanted to do since a dim safe house a lifetime ago. I get to look at him.
For eleven weeks I only ever glimpsed him, pieces stolen in low light with the dark pressing at the edges, a scar half-seen, a line of muscle caught and lost. Tonight there is no dark pressing.
There is only lamplight and time and my husband taking off a dark suit jacket in a quiet room. For the first time in the whole of us I let myself simply watch, the analyst turned all the way toward the one subject she has never gotten to study in full.
He is unhurried under my eyes, and he lets me look, which is its own gift from a man who spent two decades making himself hard to see. I take in the whole of him. The shoulders that stood between me and a rifle round.
The chest I only ever glimpsed in stolen dark, and the faint scars scattered across it that I finally get to read, each one a place the world tried to take him before it could give him to me.
The storm-gray eyes gone soft and steady on mine.
The drawl in the low register he keeps only for me when he says my name, Mira, like it is the one word he was saving.
I step forward and run my hands over his chest, tracing every scar with my fingertips. He stands still for me, letting me explore his enormous body, with my hands and with my eyes. I think he is enjoying being adored like this, as he makes muscles. Huge muscles, in Mr. Universe poses, for me.
The feel of his warm skin and the steady beat of his heart under my palm send heat curling through me. I lean in and press kisses along the marks I have wondered about for so long, tasting salt and the faint trace of gun oil and clean sweat that is so uniquely him.
Finally, Travis pulls me close, his large hands gentle as they slide down my back and unfasten my dress.
The fabric pools at my feet and then it is my turn to be seen in the full light.
His gaze moves over me with open hunger and deep love.
We come together on the bed, skin to skin, rings glinting on both our hands.
We try different positions I have heard about, each one letting me feel him in new and deeper ways.
Every position is unhurried, thorough, and lit by the warm lamplight.
I watch the play of muscle across his shoulders and chest as he moves, memorizing the way his storm-gray eyes hold mine even in the height of passion.
Then I go for him and take him in my mouth as far as I can with his girth, as he explores my core, enjoying each other in what seems to be forever. When the heat becomes unbearable, I find his mouth and he tastes himself in my mouth as I do mine in his.
I watch his hardness sink into me, as his huge black bush mingle with mine, bringing fresh waves of heat cresting several times as he pushes into me.
The heat between us rising higher with each change, until we both crest together in a powerful, shared release that leaves us trembling with my legs wrapped tightly around him as he makes one final thrust emptying himself inside me.