45. Lily #3
He went right after me. I felt it happen and I watched his face come open. There was nothing in it he was holding back from me, not one thing. After three years of a man who kept everything behind glass, I want that recorded in permanent ink.
He stayed in me afterward until there was nothing left of either of us, with his mouth against my throat and my hand on the back of his neck, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all.
We lay there wrecked and sticky and enormously pleased with ourselves.
Which is, of course, precisely when the door opened.
It didn't open a little. Tank put his entire head into the gap, established that the situation had resolved, pushed the door the rest of the way with his shoulder, and crossed the room at a leisurely pace.
Then he put his front feet on the end of the bed, hauled the rest of himself up, turned around twice, and dropped a hundred and forty pounds down across our feet with a groan like a man settling into a bath.
Neither of us said anything for about three seconds.
"I told you," Sacha said.
"Do not enjoy this so much."
"He has opened that door since he was a year old."
"I heard you the first time." I put my hand over my eyes. "How long has he been out there?"
"Forty minutes."
"So he waited."
"He is not stupid," Sacha said. "He waited for the noise to stop."
And then the two of us started laughing and couldn't stop.
It was the helpless kind that hurts your ribs and makes no sound.
There was a dog lying across our ankles, entirely unbothered by any of it.
There was Kevin over on the sill with his two remaining good leaves, and the stove ticking down.
Outside, the whole black north woods held not one person who wanted anything from either of us.
That is the household. Three of us and a houseplant, in one room, on a slope, with a door that doesn't latch and a man who is never going to fix it.
He woke me at some point in the small hours, or I woke him, and neither of us has ever been able to establish which.
The lamp had burned itself out. The stove was down to one red line in the grate. There was a dog snoring across the foot of the bed like a piece of furniture nobody had ordered. Sacha was against my back with his mouth on the top of my shoulder and his hand already flat and low on my stomach.
"We have to be quiet," I said.
"You are the one who is loud."
"That is a lie and you know it's a lie."
He got my top knee forward with one hand and found me from behind.
I was already wet from nothing more than sleeping next to him, and he went in the whole way on one long slow push, without either of us having to do a thing about it.
I felt every part of that one too. There is no hiding an arrival at that angle, and neither of us wanted to.
There was no urgency in it anywhere. It was slow and deep and easy and it went on a long time in the dark, and it was the most married ten minutes of my life up to that point.
He kept that hand exactly where it was the entire way.
I put mine over the top of it and held it there and wouldn't let him take it back.
When it finally went through the two of us it was quiet and enormous, and neither of us made much sound at all.
"You were loud," he said afterward, into my hair.
"I was dignified."
"You were not dignified. The dog left."
The dog had, in fact, relocated to the floor.
I was not sick at nine, for the record. I was not sick until a quarter to six in the morning, and he was awake before I was and already halfway across the room with the basin, and he held my hair and said absolutely nothing about the timing.
That is the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me and I intend to hold it against every man who came before him.
I've thought about that laughing a great deal since, because I think it was the moment it actually landed.
It wasn't the ice that did it. It wasn't the heartbeat either.
It wasn't even him asking. It was lying in a bed I'd bled on in the first week, with a dog on my feet and my hand on a chest I once had to work on, laughing so hard I couldn't breathe, at nothing at all.
I got my hand into his and put both of them on my stomach, which is what I do now.
"Say the thing," he said, "so that I can hear you say it."
"I'm staying."
"Again."
"I'm staying, and I'm not doing it because you asked me to. I settled this in a stranger's bathroom in Cutter's Hollow the morning the second line came up, and it took me about nine seconds." I turned my head on the pillow. "You just caught up."
"That is the most humiliating thing you have ever said to me."
"Get used to it. I'm going to be right a lot."
He put his mouth against my hair and didn't answer, which from him is agreement.
For twenty-four years I ran from everything. Wrapped up in his arms in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, pregnant, safe, and loved, I finally understood the truth of it. I was never running toward freedom. I was running from this, from him, from staying. And I was never, ever running again.