Chapter 20 #4
I had done it a hundred times. I did it now slow, the way he had done it slow with me.
The buttons of the white shirt one at a time, my fingers careful, my mouth on the skin of his chest as it came open under my hands.
The undershirt over his head. The belt. The trousers.
He stepped out of them. He stood in front of me in the soft light of the lamp in his shorts and the small gold cross at his throat, and I put my palm flat on his chest over his heart, and the heart under my palm beat the way it had beat in the field above Monreale and in the kitchen on the morning of the anklet and in the entry hall of my father’s house, and I left my palm there for a long second, and then I drew him to the bed.
He laid me down.
The linen on the bed was white. He had changed it that morning.
He drew the slip up over my head and laid it on the chair.
He drew the underwear down my legs and laid it on top of the slip.
He undid the clasp of my bra and drew the straps down my arms and laid that on top too. The gold chain stayed. The ring stayed.
He came over me.
His weight on his forearms on either side of my head the way he always took it, the small unbroken habit of a careful man, and his mouth on my mouth and then on my throat and then on the gold medal at the hollow of my throat and then on my collarbone, and his hand moving down my body slow, palm flat, the long slow inventory he took every time we made love, the way he reminded himself that I was a real thing and not something he had imagined.
His mouth on my breast.
He stayed there. He took his time. His tongue moved over me in the slow patient way it always did, and the small dark current that lived under my skin came up to meet him, and my hand went into his hair and held, and he hummed, low, against me, and the hum traveled down through my breast and into the center of my chest and settled.
His hand between my thighs.
He did not press. He stroked. The pad of his middle finger moved on me in the slow circles he had learned in the first week of us, the rhythm calibrated to my breathing, the rhythm I no longer had to teach because he had learned it the way he learned everything, once, correctly.
I was wet under his hand before he had moved twice.
He slid two fingers into me.
Slow. The slow that did not perform slow. The slow that was the slow because the slow was the right speed. He worked them in to the second knuckle and then to the third, and he held them there for one second while my body adjusted, and then he moved.
I made a sound.
It was not loud. The walls of this house were thick but the window was open and the music was below, and the sound that came out of me was the small sound of a woman in the early part of a long thing, and his mouth found my mouth and he caught it.
“Sera.”
“Marco.”
“My wife, I want to be inside you.”
“Yes.”
He drew his fingers out. He shifted up. He took himself in his hand and he laid himself against me, and he looked at my face one more time—the husband look, the new one—and he pushed in.
The slow.
The same slow as the first time, and the slow as the field above Monreale, and the slow as every time he had ever entered me, but the slow now had a year’s worth of body memory under it, and my body opened to him in the way it had been opening to him for a year, and he seated fully and he stopped and he held.
He breathed against my temple.
“Mia moglie.”
My wife.
“Mio marito.”
My husband.
He moved.
The long strokes. The unhurried rhythm. The build that did not push and did not race.
His weight on me. His mouth at my temple, at my ear, at my jaw, at the corner of my mouth, kissing without interruption and without intention except to be kissing me.
My hands on his back. My hands in his hair.
My hands at his hips drawing him in. The bed quiet under us.
The music below us. The ring on my finger pressed against the back of his neck where my hand cradled his head.
I came first.
I came in the long unspooling way I had come in the field above Monreale, and the wave went up through me from my hips into my chest and out my throat as a small word that was his name and not quite his name, and his rhythm broke on the second stroke after mine, and he pushed in deep and stayed, and the warm pulse of him inside me was the small fact I had been waiting for.
He lowered his weight onto me.
He stayed there for a long time. His forehead against mine. His breath slowing. My hand in his hair. The music below. The window open. The warm spring night moving through the room.
After a long time he rolled to the side.
He took me with him. He drew the linen sheet up over both of us, around our hips, and I lay against his chest with the gold chain between us and his hand at the small of my back and his other hand under my cheek, and we did not speak for ten minutes, maybe more.
Then I told him.
“Marco.”
“Mm.”
“I’m pregnant.”
His hand at my back went still.
“I‘ve known three weeks. I wanted to tell you tonight. I wanted to tell you in this bed.”
He did not speak.
He did not speak for what felt like a long time and was probably ten seconds. His hand at the small of my back stayed still. His breath at the top of my head went slow. I lifted my head to look at his face, and his face had done the thing.
He moved.
He drew me down onto my back gently. He pulled the sheet down off my hips. He bent his head and he kissed my stomach, low, just above the pelvic bone, the small flat warm place where nothing yet showed and where, in a few months, the small change would begin.
He kissed it again.
He moved up. He kissed the soft skin under my ribs. He kissed my sternum where the gold chain lay. He kissed my throat at the hollow where the medal sat. He kissed the underside of my jaw. He kissed my mouth.
He did not say anything.
There was nothing to say.
The music drifted up through the open window. Somewhere down in the courtyard Rosa was telling someone, in Sicilian, to bring her another bottle from the cellar. A car door closed at the end of the drive. The fairy lights in the olive trees moved in the warm breeze.
He drew me into his chest and he held me, and I closed my eyes against the small warm hollow of his throat where I had pressed my mouth in the field above Monreale and on a hundred mornings since, and the room went quiet around us, and we slept the sleep of happy people.