Epilogue #2
I didn't argue. I nodded and stood and slipped my hand into his and we walked through the quiet house to our wing without speaking, past the photograph room and the library where I had said yes in the lamplight what felt like a lifetime ago, past all the rooms that were ours now in ways they hadn't been eight months ago.
"Did your mom go to bed?" I asked as I sat on the edge of our bed and let him kneel and remove my shoes with the unhurried tenderness of someone who had been looking for an opportunity to take care of me all day.
"About an hour ago. She's wanting us to move to the main wing." His hands moved up my legs and found the stockings at my thighs.
"We aren't moving." I shook my head and closed my eyes as he worked them free, his hands warm and careful. "I'm not making her pack up her home. There’ll be time for that, but it's not now."
"I know," he said. "I told her the same thing."
"I feel like I haven't seen you in a month," I sighed.
"I know." He stood and reached behind me, his fingers finding the zipper and drawing it down slowly.
"I feel the same." He pushed the dress from my shoulders and ran his hands up my neck and I felt the week begin to fall away from me, the grief and the responsibility and the particular exhaustion of being present for everything. "I need you, CeCe."
"Then get at it, mister. I'm about to fall asleep." I smiled up at him and he laughed, low and warm, and began taking the pins from my hair one by one until it tumbled down my back and I felt the last of the day come loose with it.
"Lay down and lift your hips," he whispered in my ear.
I did as I was told, which was something I did considerably more often than I would ever admit to anyone, and he drew my dress and panties off and settled beside me and ran his hand between my thighs with the particular knowing of eight months of marriage, finding exactly where I ached for his touch.
"What do you want tonight, amore?"
"Make love to me, Con. Please." I looked up at him in the low light of our room.
"Tonight I need tender." There was plenty of time to be ravaged and we both knew it and used it and I had no complaints.
But tonight I needed to feel him, feel us, and just be held inside something that was ours. "Just be with me."
He moved his hand up my stomach and cupped my breast and ran his thumb over my nipple and I inhaled slowly and let myself feel it without managing it.
"Do you have any idea how beautiful you are swelling with my child?
" He moved his other hand to the side of my abdomen, warm and large and certain, and looked at me in the low light with an expression that had no performance in it at all.
He pressed his mouth to mine and slipped his tongue over my lips, and I opened for him, and we explored one another with the particular quality of people who knew each other well and were still finding new things, slow and sensual in the quiet of our room with the rain still falling softly outside the windows.
He rolled onto his back and drew me with him and I reached down and grabbed his shaft and shifted onto my knees and lined him up and sank down slowly until there was no space between us and I rested my palms on his warm chest and felt his heartbeat under my hands.
I rode him slowly, feeling everything, watching his face in the low light.
His hands on my stomach felt like something I couldn't find words for, the specific warmth of it, the particular intimacy of this man holding the evidence of what we had made together while I moved above him.
I committed it to memory the way I had been committing things to memory since the first morning in the kitchen, storing up what mattered against whatever came next.
I leaned down and claimed his mouth and he took over, his hips moving beneath me with a rhythm that built steadily, and I gave myself over to it entirely, reaching up to touch myself while he watched with dark eyes, and the room was quiet around us except for our breathing and the rain and the sound of each other.
"Yes, amore, let me watch you," he said, his voice low and rough, and I felt the heat of his gaze as much as his touch.
He moved his hand between my legs and found my clit and I stopped being able to think about anything at all, which was exactly what I needed, the complete and total occupation of every sense by this man and this moment and nothing else.
My legs shook and I couldn't stop the flowing fire that moved through me and I cried out in the quiet room without caring.
"Con, please, oh god." I met each movement, panting, and the world went entirely quiet and small and contained nothing except him, and I surrendered to it completely, spasming around him, and felt him stiffen and release into me with my name rough in his mouth.
I collapsed against him and rolled onto my side and listened to his heart slow from its working pace back to the steady rhythm I had fallen asleep to more nights than I could count now.
Eight months ago I had run away from a life I had known I never wanted, had crossed an ocean alone with a bag and a passport and four months of carefully skimmed household money, had walked into Jacob's coffee shop and thought that anonymity was the same thing as safety.
I had been wrong about that. Safety wasn't anonymity.
Safety was this, this man and this house and this family that had made room for me before they had any particular reason to, that had called me daughter and given me a kitchen and a library and a rose at my throat and a ring on my finger and a reason to come back from whatever came next.
The man I’d married did bad things sometimes. He was also a good man and a fair man and the kind of man who sat on floors with grieving women and left lights on and pressed his hand to his wife's stomach in the back of a car at a cemetery in the rain and couldn't find words for what he felt.
He was the love of my life. Nothing in this world was going to change that.
"I love you," I whispered, as my eyes grew heavy and the rain fell soft outside our windows and the house settled around us into its nighttime quiet.
His arms tightened around me.
"I love you," he said, into my hair, already half asleep himself. "Always."
I closed my eyes and let myself be held, and thought that I’d run from one life and found another, and that the finding had been worth every mile.