Chapter 25
NOELLE
They went to Astor Street.
They didn't go to the penthouse — she hadn't said not the penthouse and he hadn't suggested it. The penthouse was behind a wall. Astor Street was hers.
She let them in with her key. The entryway of the Mathieus' apartment was narrow, and in the light of the single lamp his face was the face from the bookshop floor: open, without the composure he'd worn like a second skin for the whole of their marriage.
It was the face of a man who'd arrived at a door and was waiting to be told whether to walk through it.
Noelle took his hand. She led him down the hall to the bedroom she'd been sleeping in since the winter.
She put her hands on the front of his shirt, flat, over his chest. She could hear his heart under her palms: fast, faster than she'd expected, the heart of a man whose composure had, as she'd noted in the bookshop, simply ceased to exist.
Elias let out a low growl and kissed her.
She kissed him with her hands on his chest, then on his shoulders, then at the back of his neck.
His hands came up to her waist. His fingers found the hem of her blouse and moved underneath it, the touch of his hands on the bare skin of her back was the first time his hands had been on her body since the marriage, and the contact went through her like current.
The slow spreading warmth of a circuit being completed after a long time open.
She pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were burning, shot through with desire.
Noelle unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, and she looked at the body she'd been married to and never seen: the lean lines of him, the shoulders she'd watched from across a hundred rooms without ever having touched them.
He reached for her blouse and undid the buttons. The blouse opened, he drew it off her shoulders and it fell somewhere behind her. His eyes moved over her, raw with hunger.
"Noelle." His voice was low. Lower than she'd heard it. "You're beautiful. "
They fell onto the bed together. His mouth found the curve of her neck, her back arched off the mattress, her hands pulled at his belt.
His hands pulled at her waistband and the gravity dissolved into something messier and more honest, which was two people who'd been starving for each other for a very long time and had, finally, stopped pretending they weren't hungry.
His mouth moved down her throat to her collarbone, across the line of her shoulder.
He moved down her body with the attention of a man who was learning her, discovering a woman's body with his mouth, finding out what made her breath catch and what made her hips shift and what made her fingers tighten in his hair.
He kissed the inside of her wrist. He kissed the line of her hip. He kissed the soft skin of her inner thigh, and when his mouth found her center she closed her eyes, her head went back and the sound she made was a sound she'd never made in her life, a half-moan and groan.
Elias stayed there until her climax tore through her body. When he came back up to her and settled his weight against her she opened her eyes and looked at him. His face above hers was filled with emotion.
He entered her slowly. She could hear him breathing against her neck, could hear the control he was exerting to keep the slowness slow, and the exertion was its own intimacy, because a man who was exerting control in bed for the purpose of her pleasure rather than his own composure was a man who'd crossed a line she hadn't known he was capable of crossing.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper.
She heard him make a sound against her throat — low, involuntary— and she held onto him and let him lose it.
She let him move, let him find the rhythm she wanted and adjust to it without being told.
The adjusting-without-being-told was the thing about him that had, across the whole length of the evening, been breaking her open: the evidence that he was, at last, paying the kind of attention that didn't require a dossier or a strategic analysis.
Just his body against hers, reading hers, responding.
Noelle came again, with her face against his neck, her fingers in his hair and his name in her mouth.
It moved through her from a depth she hadn't known she had, and she let it, let the whole of it happen.
When it was done she was shaking, his arms were around her, he was still inside her and still moving, slower now, until his own climax roiled through him.
They lay in the dark afterward. The duvet had been pushed to the floor.
The sheets were tangled. His arm was across her waist, his face was in her hair and she could hear his breathing slowing in the way a body's breathing slowed after the body had been taken apart and was putting itself back together.
She lay very still.
She was thinking.
The thinking had started before the breathing had slowed — had started, if she was honest, before the last of the shaking had stopped. Her mind had caught up to the giving and begun to assess what the giving was going to cost.
Noelle still loved him. She loved him in a way she hadn't known she was capable of, in a way that was deeper and more dangerous than anything she'd acknowledged before.
She loved him the way a woman loved a man whose face she was going to see every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life.
She loved him with the complete, terrified clarity of a woman who'd just discovered the size of the thing she stood to lose.
If he hurt her again, it would destroy her.
She knew it in her body. If Elias Strathmore broke her trust again — if the composure came back, if the door closed behind his eyes, if the cold returned and the managing resumed — she wouldn't survive it the way she'd survived the gala.
She wouldn't walk out. She wouldn't file papers.
She wouldn't build a bookshop. She would simply, at some level that had nothing to do with composure or training or her mother's lessons, come apart.
She sat up.
"Noelle?" His voice was soft. His hand moved on her back.
"I need to go."
"What?"
"I need — I need to think, Elias. I need to think about this."
She could hear him behind her in the dark, processing. She waited for the thing his body was going to do: whether he was going to reach for her, whether he was going to produce words, whether he was going to do the thing he'd always done, which was to manage the moment.
He didn't reach for her. He didn't produce a sentence.
"All right," he said.
She got up and dressed. She dressed in the dark without looking at him, because looking at him was going to undo the decision she was making.
Noelle didn’t turn until she got to the door.
He was sitting up in the bed. The sheet was at his waist. The light from the window was on his face, and his face was stricken. There was no other word for it.
"This may have been a mistake," she said.
She watched the word land. Mistake. She'd heard the word in his mouth on the night of their kiss, in the living room, a lifetime ago. She was now the one saying it.”
“I don't think it was," he said. His voice was very quiet.
"I need time."
She looked at him for one more second. “Please let yourself out.”
Noelle left, stood in the hallway of the Mathieus' building and breathed. And then, without thinking, she dialed a number.
Her mother answered on the second ring.
"Noelle?"
"Can I come over?"
“Of course.”
When she arrived, her mother was in the kitchen.
Her mother was in a robe and slippers and had, Noelle could see, been reading at the kitchen table.
A book and a glass of wine, the lamp on, the house quiet around her.
Her mother looked up when Noelle came in and didn't ask any of the questions her face was asking.
"Sit down," her mother said.
Noelle sat. Her mother poured a second glass from the bottle on the table, set it in front of her and waited.
"I slept with him," Noelle said.
Her mother didn't react. Her mother took a sip of wine.
"And?"
"And I told him it may have been a mistake, and I left."
"Was it?"
"I don't know."
"Do you love him?"
"Yes."
"Does he know?"
“I think so.”
"Does he love you?"
"He says he does."
"Is he lying?"
"No," Noelle said. "He isn't lying. That's the part that scares me."
Her mother nodded. "I spent my marriage being afraid of your father," her mother said, after a pause.
"Not afraid the way women are afraid of men who hit them — nothing like that.
Afraid of the distance. Afraid that if I ever stopped performing the version of myself he'd married, he'd notice I wasn't who he'd thought I was, and the noticing would be the end of it.
So I performed. And the performing became the marriage, and the marriage became my life, and by the time I realized I'd spent thirty years being afraid of a thing that had already happened — he'd already stopped looking at me. He’d stopped looking at me years before I stopped performing.
By that time there was nothing left to be afraid of.
The fear had eaten the thing it was afraid of losing. "
Her mother looked at her.
"You're afraid that if you go back to him and he hurts you again, it'll destroy you."
"Yes."
"It might. I'm not going to lie to you. Going back to a man who's hurt you is a risk.
Pretending the risk isn't real is the thing I did for thirty years and I'm not going to sit in this kitchen and tell my daughter to do it too.
" She paused. "But I'm also not going to sit in this kitchen and watch my daughter turn into me. "
Noelle didn't speak.
"I spent my life protecting myself from a man I'd already lost. You're sitting in my kitchen protecting yourself from a man who loves you. Those aren't the same thing."
Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Noelle’s. The hand of a woman who'd trained her daughter to hold everything and was now, in a kitchen at night, telling her daughter to consider letting something go.
"You built a bookshop," her mother said.
"You didn't ask anyone's permission. The woman who built that bookshop is not the woman I trained.
The woman who built that bookshop is someone I didn't know how to raise, and she raised herself, and she is — " Her mother's voice thinned at the edges. “I don’t think she’s going to be destroyed by a man.
Not even a man she loves. Not even if it goes wrong. "
"You don't know that."
"No. I don't. But I know her better than I knew myself at her age, and I know that the worst thing she could do — the thing that would actually destroy her — isn't going back. It's spending the rest of her life being safe."