Chapter 24
NOELLE
Noelle almost didn't go.
She'd gotten dressed twice. Once in the soft grey sweater she wore at the shop, which was wrong because it was too much like the woman he'd been watching through the window, and once in a navy dress she hadn't worn since before the divorce, which was wrong because it was too much like the woman she'd been when she was still his wife.
She'd stood in front of the mirror in the Mathieus' bedroom in the navy dress and looked at herself, taken the dress off and put on a cream blouse she'd bought on Division the week the shop opened, a blouse that didn't belong to any version of herself he'd ever seen. New. Hers.
The walk to the Music Box took twenty minutes. She could've taken a cab. She walked because the walking was the last space in which the decision was still hers to reverse.
The Music Box was on Southport. The marquee was lit, even in the afternoon, and the lobby smelled the way it had smelled when she was a girl: old carpet, popcorn butter.
Elias was standing near the ticket window.
He'd come in the overcoat. He hadn't unbuttoned it.
His hands were in his pockets and he was looking at the vintage movie posters on the lobby wall.
She stood in the doorway for a second before he turned and saw her.
The sight of him made her heart flutter; he was even more devastatingly handsome in person, the way she remembered. Relief was all across his face.
"You came," he said.
"I came."
They sat in the dark.
The film was Italian. A restored print of something from the early seventies, set along the Amalfi coast, all sunlight, stone and long shots of a woman walking through a village alone.
She didn't recognize it and he probably didn't either, though she suspected he'd chosen it because an Italian film at a matinee on a Saturday was the kind of thing a woman who read Morisot biographies and books about the gardens of the ?le-de-France might agree to sit through.
He'd been paying attention. The attention no longer surprised her; it had always been the thing he was best at. What surprised her was that the attention was, for the first time, pointed at what she wanted rather than at what he was trying to determine about her.
They didn't speak during the film. His hand was on the armrest, her hand was in her lap. The distance between the two hands was perhaps six inches, and neither of them closed it.
When the film ended and the lights came up, they sat for a moment in the emptying theater.
"I wanted to say something," she said. “I saw the Corton gala. Someone filmed it. My mother sent me the video."
He didn't answer immediately. She could see him deciding how to hold the information.
"I didn't do it for — "
"I know you didn't." She looked at him. "Today is a film.
Today is not a reconciliation, or a conversation about reconciliation, or the first step toward anything.
Today is two people who used to be married to each other sitting in a movie theater on a Saturday afternoon and finding out whether they can be in a room together without one of them getting hurt. "
"All right."
"I need you to hear that."
"I hear it."
She looked at him for another moment. His eyes were the hazel she'd learned to read at close range.
"Can I call you?" he asked.
The question landed in her the way I miss you had landed on the curb on Clark Street. In a place she hadn't reinforced. She'd reinforced against apologies. She hadn't reinforced against can I call you.
"Yes," she said, the words out before she could stop them. "You can call me."
He called the following evening. They talked about the film: she'd liked it more than she'd expected.
He'd listened the way he listened now, which was differently from the way he'd listened during the marriage.
During the marriage, his listening had been the listening of a man cataloguing.
This listening was the listening of a man who wanted to know what she thought and had no second purpose for the knowing.
He called again two days later. That conversation lasted longer.
The courtship — because that was what it was, and she wasn't going to pretend it wasn't — began the way courtships began between two people who'd already been married to each other and divorced and were now, against every reasonable expectation, trying to find out whether there was a version of their lives in which the marriage hadn't been the whole story.
He sent books. He kept sending books, but now the books came with flowers.
Flowers a man had chosen himself. Ranunculus from the florist on Clark.
A bunch of dahlias wrapped in newspaper.
Once, a single peony — white, open, ridiculous — tucked into the front cover of a volume on Japanese garden design with a note that said only this reminded me of your mother's wedding photograph. E.
She'd held the peony, stood behind the counter of the bookshop and let herself feel giddy.
More films followed. A Sunday matinee at the Music Box, a documentary about a woman in the Scottish Highlands who'd spent twenty years restoring a crumbling walled garden on her family's estate, which she suspected he'd found by searching some combination of woman rebuilds garden documentary because the film was obscure and he wasn't a man who watched documentaries.
A Wednesday evening showing of something she'd mentioned wanting to see in one of their phone calls and which he'd, without comment, bought tickets for.
An afternoon at a revival house in Wicker Park where they'd watched a black-and-white film about a bookshop in New York.
She'd turned to him in the dark and whispered you chose this on purpose and he'd whispered back I chose everything on purpose, Noelle.
She'd let the sentence sit in the dark between them without answering it.
Lunches. He came to her neighborhood. He didn't ask her to come to his. He sat across from her at tables that seated two and asked her about the shop, the books she was reading, about the customers who came in and what they bought. He listened, and the listening was still the new listening.
She showed him the bookshop on a Saturday morning before opening.
She'd been thinking about it for a week.
She'd been thinking about it because the bookshop was the thing she'd built in his absence, and showing it to him was going to be — she was honest with herself about this, sitting in the bathtub on Astor Street the night before — the most vulnerable thing she'd done since the gala.
The shop was hers in a way nothing in her life had ever been hers, and inviting him into it was inviting him into the one room she'd built without his shadow in it.
He came at nine. She let him in through the front door, and he stood in the middle of the honey floor, looked at the room the way she'd wanted, without knowing she'd wanted it, for someone to look at it.
"You did this," he said.
"I did."
"The floors."
"I chose the stain. The color is honey."
"It's — " He stopped. Pride shone in his voice. "Noelle."
"Yes?”
"It's beautiful."
Beaming, she showed him the sections: the gardens, the art, the biographies, the travel, the fiction shelf she was still building.
She showed him the back room with the ivory walls, the utility sink, and the chair where she sat at the end of the day.
She didn't show him the shelf where his books were. He didn't ask.
Elias set up the picnic on a Tuesday evening.
She'd given him a key. She'd given him a key to the shop the week before, because he'd been coming in the mornings before opening to bring her coffee from the place on Dickens she liked.
This had required her to come downstairs to let him in, and the coming-downstairs had become a thing she didn't want to do in her bathrobe. The hungry way his gaze raked over her made heat fill her, and she wasn’t ready for that.
Not yet. The key had been easier than the bathrobe.
She hadn't examined the giving of the key too closely.
She arrived at the shop after a Tuesday appointment on Clark Street and found the front door locked, the pendant lights on and, in the middle of the honey floor, a blanket.
He'd spread it between the garden section and the biographies.
There were candles — real ones, in low glass holders, the kind that wouldn't set a bookshop on fire.
There was food from the Italian place on Armitage she'd taken him to the week before, laid out on the blanket in the containers the restaurant used for takeaway.
There was wine, two glasses. Beside the glasses, a single white peony in a jar.
Elias was sitting on the blanket with his back against the garden shelves.
He'd taken off his jacket. His sleeves were rolled. He looked, sitting on the floor of her bookshop in the candlelight, like a man she'd never met: a man who didn't run rooms or produce instruments or manage outcomes.
"Elias."
"Noelle."
"You broke into my bookshop."
"You gave me a key."
"I gave you a key for coffee."
"I've expanded the scope."
She didn't fight the thing that was happening in her chest, because fighting it would've been the old her.
The old her was the woman who'd held everything and shown nothing, and she wasn't that woman anymore.
She'd been that woman for a long time, but she'd built a bookshop and told a man on a sidewalk that he didn't get to touch her.
All of it had been necessary, and the woman who'd done all of it was standing in the doorway now looking at a blanket on a floor and knowing that the season had changed.
She sat down on the blanket across from him.
They ate. They talked. They talked the way they'd been talking on the phone and at the lunches and at the matinees — about the shop, about a book she'd found at an estate sale in Lake Forest. The candles burned down in their glass holders, and at some point the talking stopped.
"Noelle."
"Yes?”
"I need to tell you something."
He looked at her. The candlelight was in his eyes — the hazel had gone to amber, the way it went in low light. She could see, in the amber, the thing he was about to say before he said it.
"I love you," he said. “I didn't know how to when we were married, and the not-knowing cost me the marriage, and I've spent every week since then trying to learn, and the learning has been — " He stopped. He started again. "I love you because you’re you, Noelle. You protected me when you didn’t have to, because that’s the type of person you are.
I've loved you since the beginning, and I was too afraid to hold it, and the fear was the thing that cost us everything. "
The man sitting across from her had dismantled everything he'd been and found, in the wreckage, the version of himself that had been, all along, the one worth keeping.
She reached across the blanket and put her hand on his jaw. His eyes closed, his breath caught. She held him there and let herself look at his face the way she hadn't let herself look at it in months: the line of his mouth, the dark lashes against his cheek. He was so achingly handsome.
"Elias," she said.
"Yes."
"Open your eyes."
He did. She looked into them and she saw the full weight of what he'd just said to her. No one had ever, in her life, looked at her with that combination of terror and surrender.
He was giving her everything he had. She could see it.
Noelle leaned in and kissed him.
The kiss started soft. Her mouth against his, lightly, a question rather than an answer.
And then she deepened the kiss, opening her mouth against his and letting her hand slide from his jaw into his hair and pulling him closer.
His hands come up to her waist — tentative at first, as though the waist might be a boundary he hadn't been invited past, and then, when she pressed closer, with the full warm certainty of a man who'd been given permission and was not going to waste it.
His hands were warm through the fabric of her blouse.
His mouth tasted like the wine they'd been drinking and like something underneath the wine that was just him.
The taste of him was the thing she hadn't let herself think about in the months of the divorce, because thinking about the taste of your ex-husband’s mouth while you were rebuilding your life was thinking that pulled the nails out of the rebuilding.
Noelle was thinking about it now. She was drowning in it now. His mouth on hers, his hands on her waist and the warm weight of him as she leaned into him and felt the bookshelf behind his back give slightly, a creak of wood, and neither of them noticed, and neither of them cared.
The kissed until the kissing had become its own language, until the softness had burned off and what was left was hunger, real hunger, the hunger a woman carried in her body for months without naming it because naming it would've been a concession she wasn't ready to make.
She was making it now. She was making it with her hands in his hair, her body pressed against his and her breathing ragged against his mouth.
She pulled back. Her forehead against his.
Her eyes still closed. His breath on her mouth.
Her hands still in his hair, his hands still at her waist, and between them the charged dark warmth of two people who'd just discovered that the thing between them hadn't gone away during the months they'd been apart.
It had been waiting. It had been sitting in a back room on a shelf beside the books he'd sent her, and it had been growing in the dark the way things grew in the dark: quietly, without anyone's permission, until the growing was the loudest thing in the room.
She opened her eyes. His were already open.
The hazel was close enough to fill her whole field of vision.
What she saw was the man from the blanket, the man from the candles, the man who'd said I love you without asking for anything in return and was now looking at her with his hair wrecked by her hands and his mouth swollen from her mouth and his breathing still uneven.
The shop around them was dark and warm and theirs.
Noelle was, at last, ready to find out what happened next.
"Elias."
"Yes?”
"Take me home."