Chapter 35 Earned
Colt
I'm in my room at the B&B reading the same paragraph of the same book for the third time when the knock comes.
The book is a paperback Lorna keeps on the writing desk for guests.
A history of Charleston. I've been pretending to read it.
The lamp is on. The window is open. The Charleston night has come on warm over the cool, the marsh letting go of the day.
I've eaten the leftovers from the diner Summer set out for me, washed both plates by hand, turned out the kitchen light, come back upstairs, and sat in this chair. I haven't slept.
She's been in her room across the hall all evening. I've been listening for her without meaning to. The give of the floorboards when she moved across the room. The water running in her bathroom. The small mechanical sounds of a woman alone in a yellow-painted room across a hallway from her husband.
The knock is soft. Three taps.
I set the book down.
"Yeah."
The door opens. She's in flannel pajama pants and my old Charleston Rugby shirt, the one she's worn since high school. Her hair is up in the claw clip. She's barefoot. She closes the door behind her with the same care I've been listening for all evening.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"You weren't asleep."
"Reading."
"You weren't reading."
"I was holding a book."
She crosses the room and sits at the foot of the bed, close, cross-legged.
She looks worn all the way through. Whatever she walked into at that house, she's still carrying it, and every part of me wants to take it off her and I don't know how.
There's nothing I hate worse than that, wanting to fix something for her and not being able to.
"I need to talk."
"Then talk to me. I've been up all night listening for that door."
She presses both hands flat against her knees. Studies them. Her hands always tell me first.
"I called Patrick. I asked him to withdraw the petition."
I'm off the bed and on my knees on the floorboards in front of her, and I have her hands, and I press my forehead down onto them and I don't let go. She puts her hands in my hair.
"I'm not saying we're where we need to be.
I've been so angry at you. I needed to be.
It was the only thing keeping me standing up.
" She looks at the floor. "And today the anger just went, and what's under it is that I still love you.
So much it scares me, Colt. Loving you is what almost killed me and I still can't stop. "
I make myself look up at her.
"I don't want to be somebody who lost you."
I'm crying. My hands are shaking around hers.
"So fight for us. Fight for me." Her voice cracks all the way through. "Please. Just don't ever make me do it alone again."
"Say it again."
"I stopped the divorce."
I put my head back down. "Thank you. You won't regret it. I love you so much, Summer."
"I went to see your mother today."
"How did it go," I say.
"I spent five years letting that woman make me feel like something she scraped off her shoe.
Five years of seating charts and that smile and brave, darling said like a blessing when it was a knife.
And today I sat in her garden and I handed every bit of it back to her. It didn't feel good, but it's done."
"Good." It comes out of me rough and I stand up and put my arms around her.
She folds against me, her forehead under my jaw.
I put my hand on the back of her head and hold her while she shakes.
She stays against my chest until the shaking stops.
Then I sit down on the foot of the bed beside her, and she sits back, dries her face with the heel of her hand, and I watch her put herself back together into someone about to say something bigger.
"I don't want to talk about your mother."
"What do you want to talk about."
She takes a breath. Holds it. Lets it out.
"I want to talk about us. You and me. Whether I take your last name back or keep mine or keep both. What the ordinary version of us looks like. Whether we have a kid someday. Everything that doesn't fit on a lease." She holds my eyes. "You and me. Everything after this."
The room goes very still.
"Okay. Let's talk about us, then. Bennet Ventures is mine. There's no Charleston piece left in it. The whole point of separating it from Bennet Holdings was so that when his burns, I'm not in the building."
"Your father."
"I'm not going to see him."
"Your mother."
"I'm not going to see her."
"Greg and Sarah."
"We'll go down as often as we want. Every holiday, every chance we get.
I'll sit in the diner and let your mama tell me I'm too thin and let your daddy ask whether I'm taking care of you, and I'll mean it every time.
They're my family too, Summer. They have been since I was a kid sliding into that booth and letting Greg decide whether I'd do.
If we have a kid, they're the grandparents. Mine are a name on a court document."
She's quiet for a long time. Her hands rest on the pillow, open and still.
"And Sam."
"Sam."
"He's in my life, Colt. I don't just mean back then. I mean now. Going forward. He's family. I'm not going to pretend he isn't."
"I've been waiting for you to make me say this part out loud. I was hoping you would."
"I need to hear you say what that means to you. Not at the bar where he's pouring you bourbon and being gracious. Here. To me."
I reach over and take her hand again, because I want to be touching her when I say this, and I want her watching my face.
"Sam is non-negotiable," I say. "I know that.
I knew it the night I saw him in your club.
He saved you while I was failing you. I'm going to spend my life understanding that.
I'm not going to ask you to put him in a smaller room.
I'm not going to ask you to apologize for getting close to him.
He's one of the people who kept you alive.
I owe him a debt I can't pay. The least I can do isn't be small about it. "
"Colt."
"I'm not finished. Sam will be at all of our holidays, birthdays and celebrations.
He'll help carve the turkey and decorate for Christmas.
He'll be in the hospital room when we have a kid.
He'll be the person you call when something is wrong and I'm what's wrong.
That's what it means that he's family. I'm going to make my peace with that and I'm going to do it in a way that doesn't require you to manage my feelings about it.
I'll manage my feelings about it. That's my job. "
She looks at me.
"That's the best sentence you've ever said to me."
"I'm working on a portfolio."
"Keep going."
"There's one more."
"Tell me."
"I just want you to know that the version of me that exists from this point forward, that man, is yours. Not because you've earned him by being patient. He's the man you deserved years ago and got late. I'm sorry it took this much wreckage to grow him. He should have been here all along."
"Colt."
"Yeah."
"I love you. I've loved you since I was sixteen and I never stopped. I tried to stop. The night I was tagged in those photos and every night after that, I tried to stop. I couldn't. The love isn't the part that's hard. The love is the easiest sentence in the book."
"What's the hard part."
"Trust. The hard part is trust."
"Then that's the part I'm going to spend the most time on."
"I'm going to give you mine back in pieces. You're going to earn each piece. We're going to fight about pieces I don't give you fast enough and pieces you think you've earned that I'm not ready to hand over. The fight's going to be the work."
"I'm ready to do the work."
"You're going to be ready some days and exhausted some days. Same as me."
"Same as you."
She puts her hands on either side of my face. Like she did when she kissed me on a sidewalk under a Vibes marquee. Her palms are warm.
"I'm going back to my room tonight. Not because I don't want to stay. Because tomorrow I want this to start clean. I want the first night of the rest of it to be its own night, not the back half of a hard conversation. Do you understand what I'm saying."
"You don't want our first real night to be the tail end of coming out of the ashes. You want to walk into it on purpose, choosing it in daylight. I can wait one more night for that. I've waited longer for less."
"Tell me what I'm saying."
"You're saying tomorrow."
"I'm saying tomorrow."
She leans down.
She kisses me.
It isn't the kiss from the night at her apartment in Chicago when she set the pace and dismantled me with anger.
It isn't the kiss from the parking lot when we were kids.
It isn't the comfortable married kiss. It's a kiss that holds our entire future between us.
Her mouth warm. Her thumb against my jaw.
The smell of her, the same shampoo she's always used, the small huff of breath when she leans into it.
I don't move my hands.
I made myself a promise about that when she walked into the room. I'm not going to be the one to reach. I'm going to let her reach. For as long as it takes.
She breaks the kiss. Stays close. Her forehead against mine. Eyes closed.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
She steps back. Crosses to the door. At the door she stops. Doesn't turn around.
"Colt."
"Yeah."
"I'm proud of you."
"For what."
"For not picking up when your father called. For not flinching when Daddy shook your hand. For not following me when I went to your mother's. For not once making today about you."
"I've been practicing."
"I can tell. Don't stop."
"I won't."
She opens the door. The hallway light is the haint-blue buzz. She doesn't look back. The door closes behind her with the same care she opened it with.
I sit on the foot of the bed.
Everything in this room is the same, but I'm not the same man. I've got a long road ahead of me, with Summer, with my parents. But I'm free, and she came to my door.
I lie back on the made bed. I don't undress. I don't turn out the lamp. I look at the ceiling of a yellow-painted room in a Federal house on Queen Street in the city we used to live in and I let the warmth of her mouth stay on mine for as long as my body will hold it.
Tomorrow.
I'm going to be ready for tomorrow.