Chapter Three: What We Build
The gate swings inward without a sound. He has oiled the hinges.
That is the absurd, tender thought that goes through my head as I step into his garden: he oiled the hinges. And then there is no room for thought at all, because he is right there, close enough that I can feel the heat of him through his shirt, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to see his face.
"Elena," he says, and it sounds like a question and a prayer.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes."
He cups my face in both hands. His palms are rough, and so careful, as if I am something that might break. For one long heartbeat he simply looks at me, his thumbs stroking along my cheekbones, and I see the war in his eyes, the restraint wound as tight as a spring.
Then his mouth comes down on mine.
Oh, my.
It is not tentative. It is not the polite, practised kiss of a marriage. It is deliberate and deep, the kiss of a man who has thought about this for weeks and has no intention of wasting any of it. His lips are soft, his tongue sweeps slowly into my mouth, and I make a sound I have never made in my life, a low, helpless whimper that seems to come from somewhere beneath my ribs. My hands fist in his shirt. His arm bands around my waist and hauls me against him, and I feel, unmistakably, the hard length of him pressing into my belly.
I gasp against his lips.
"Tell me to stop," he breathes, and his forehead drops against mine. "If you want to. Now. Please."
"Don't you dare."
A shaky laugh escapes him. "Thank God."
He lifts me. Just like that, his hands under my thighs, my legs wrapping around his hips as if my body has done this a thousand times in some other life, and he carries me across the dark lawn and up the steps and through the kitchen door, which he kicks shut behind us. We do not make it to the stairs. He pins me against the wall in the hallway, one hand braced beside my head, and kisses my throat, my jaw, the hollow beneath my ear, while I tug at the buttons of his shirt with fingers that will not obey me.
"I want to see you," he murmurs against my skin.
"Then look."
My dress is a thin cotton thing, a summer thing, and it goes over my head in one smooth motion. I am standing in his hallway in a plain white bra and knickers I did not choose for this and have never felt more beautiful, because of the way he looks at me. His chest rises and falls. His eyes travel down, slow and reverent, and I watch his throat work as he swallows.
"You're stunning," he says hoarsely.
"You haven't seen anything yet."
"I intend to see every inch."
Who is this woman? I think wildly. She is not me. She has never said anything like that in her life.
But she is me. She has been here all along, waiting, patient as a seed.
He unhooks my bra with a single flick of his fingers and draws it away, and his mouth closes over my breast. I cry out. My head falls back against the plaster. The sensation is almost too much, the wet heat of his mouth, the delicate scrape of his teeth, his tongue circling and flicking until my nipple is aching and tight and a bolt of pure need shoots straight down between my legs.
"Noah," I gasp. "Please."
"Please what?" He lifts his head. His eyes are black now, the grey swallowed whole. "Tell me what you need."
Need. The word hangs between us. I know what it costs him. I know he has spent four years learning to say it.
"You," I whisper. "I need you."
Something in his face breaks open.
He carries me upstairs. It is a Victorian house, narrow and steep, the ceiling in his bedroom sloped like the roof of a ship, and he lays me down on a wide bed that smells of cedar and clean linen and him. He strips his shirt off over his head. I have seen his chest before, in the sunlight, from a distance, and none of it prepared me for what it is like to have it above me, broad and warm and lightly dusted with dark hair, the muscles shifting as he braces himself on his forearms.
"You can still change your mind," he says.
"I've never been less likely to."
He smiles, slow and wicked, and slides down my body.
His hands part my thighs. His breath is hot against the thin cotton between them, and I arch off the mattress before he has even touched me. He peels my knickers down my legs with agonising patience and drops them over the side of the bed. Then he looks at me, really looks, and I should be embarrassed, I think, but all I feel is a burning, shaking want.
"Beautiful," he says. And then his mouth is on me.
My fingers tangle in his hair. His tongue strokes me, long and slow and thorough, and I hear myself babbling, a string of broken syllables, oh and God and his name. He holds my hips down when I buck. He hums low in his throat, a sound I feel everywhere, and when he slides two fingers inside me, curling them, finding the place I did not know existed, the world narrows to a single bright wire.
"Noah," I cry. "Noah, I'm going to..."
"Let go," he says against me. "I've got you."
I shatter. There is no other word for it. My whole body goes rigid, then liquid, wave after wave rolling through me as I clutch the sheets and scream his name into the sloping ceiling. He does not stop until I am shuddering and sobbing and weak, until I am pushing at his shoulders because it is too much, it is too good.
He rises over me, his mouth glistening, and I catch his face and kiss him, tasting myself on his tongue.
"Condom," he rasps. "Drawer. I haven't, not for years. I hoped. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be quick."
He fumbles in the bedside drawer. I watch him roll it on, watch the flex of his thighs as he settles between mine, and the sight of him, thick and hard and almost shy in the lamplight, makes me wet all over again. He lines himself up and goes still.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
He pushes into me, slowly, inch by inch, his eyes fixed on mine, and I feel myself stretch to take him. It is heat and fullness and a pleasure so intense it borders on pain. My nails dig into his shoulders. He groans, a raw, broken sound, and drops his forehead to my collarbone.
"God, Elena. You feel..."
"Don't stop."
"I won't." He begins to move, a deep, unhurried roll of his hips that sets every nerve ablaze. "I'm not going anywhere."
We find a rhythm as if we have always known it. He is careful, and then he is not careful, and I wrap my legs around his waist and urge him deeper, harder, and the bed creaks under us and the lamplight shivers and I hear myself saying yes, yes, there, please in a voice I do not own. He slides a hand between us and his thumb finds the swollen bud of me, circling with that infuriating precision, and I come apart a second time with a cry that tears out of my throat. He follows with a shout, his body locked rigid, my name falling from his lips like a vow.
Afterwards he doesn't move for a long time. He lies on top of me, heavy and damp and warm, his face in my neck. I stroke his back. We breathe.
Well, I think dazedly. That was the moment after.
* * *
For ten days, we have what two people have when they know it is borrowed.
I want to be clear with myself about this, in the cool, honest part of my mind that keeps insisting on a reckoning. I am not an innocent. I walked through that gate with my eyes open. I understood that it had a shape, that Michael would come home, that the gate was not a solution. The gate was the thing itself.
We do not speak about it in those terms. We do not speak about it at all. We simply fill the nights with each other. I cross the lawn after dark, barefoot, wearing nothing but a coat on the third night, and he opens the kitchen door and swallows his own laugh and says, "Mrs Rhodes, you'll catch your death," and I let the coat drop to the floor.
He learns my body like a drawing. He is endlessly, devastatingly attentive. He finds the ticklish place behind my knee, the spot at the base of my spine that makes me shudder, the way my breath hitches when he drags his teeth along my shoulder. He makes me come against the kitchen counter, in the shower with the water drumming on the tiles, and on the sofa with my hands bound loosely above my head with his belt, because I asked him to and he looked at me for a long moment and said, in a voice like gravel, "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Say it if it's too much."
"I will."
It is never too much. It is only ever more.
On the fourth night we lie in his bed with the window open and the suburb dark around us, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing lazy circles on my hip. The sloped ceiling is a pale blur above us.
"The book," he says. "Is she still at the moment before?"
"No."
"What happened to her?"
"She went through the gate."
His chest rumbles with a quiet laugh. "You're writing tonight."
"I'm writing the truth. It's the only way I know how." I tilt my head to look at him. "If I write from outside myself, the pages go dead."
"And this?"
"Alive." I press my palm flat against his heart. "Whatever else it is."
His arm tightens around me. For a while he says nothing at all. Then, very quietly: "Michael comes home on Saturday."
"I know."
"And this..."
"Ends."
"Does it?"
I lift myself on one elbow. The moonlight picks out the line of his jaw, the stubble I have been feeling against my thighs. "What else would it do?"
"I don't know." He swallows. "I've been trying not to think about it."
"So have I."
He draws a breath. "I should tell you something. I don't do this. In four years I haven't been with anyone, and the reason is that being with someone like this means needing them. And I've been very good at not needing."
"And now?"
"Now I need you." He says it plainly, without defence. "It isn't frightening the way it was before. Because you named it. The moment before. You said, this is what this is, and I didn't have to work out what to do with something that had no name."
"Named feelings are still complicated."
"They're visible." A faint smile. "That helps."
I lie back against him. My fingers trace the long muscle of his arm. "Michael isn't unkind," I say after a time. "I want you to know that."
"I never thought he was."
"He loves me. In the way he's able. It's real." I stare at the ceiling. "It's just that in all the years we've been together, he has never once asked me what I was thinking the way you did that July morning."
"That isn't a small thing."
"No."
"What do you want, Elena?"
"I want to finish the book."
"That's not an answer."
"It's an honest first one." I try to laugh, and it does not quite work. "I've spent four years not knowing. Now I do, and everything changes. The book changes. I change."
"And after Saturday?"
He doesn't say the gate, but I hear it. I turn my face into his chest and breathe him in.
"I don't know," I whisper. "I'm still at the moment after the moment before. It's new territory. I'm trying to see its shape."
He kisses the top of my head, and holds me, and does not tell me what to want.
That, I think, is the most dangerous thing about him.
* * *
Saturday comes anyway.
Michael's car crunches into the drive at half past five. I am in the kitchen, in a clean dress, with my hair brushed and my skin scrubbed, and my pulse is going like a trapped bird. I hear the boot slam. I hear the briefcase hit the hall table, the old familiar sounds of a house being re-occupied.
"How was London?" I ask, when he walks in.
"Exhausting." He kisses my cheek. He smells of airplane and aftershave. "The team's excellent. The client is a nightmare."
"Have you eaten?"
"On the plane. I'm fine." He pours himself a glass of wine and drops onto the sofa, loosening his tie, and closes his eyes.
He does not ask about my ten days.
It is not cruelty. I want to be precise about that, because I owe him precision. It is the incuriosity of a man who has been inside his own story for ten days and has not yet climbed out. He will ask in an hour, or over dinner, when London has settled. And I will say, fine, and the book, and Noah's been fixing the last bits of fence, and every word will be true, the way a very small truth can sit on top of a very large one and hide it entirely.
I stand at the counter with the kettle in my hand, my skin still humming with another man's fingerprints, and I think: So this is what deferring looks like from the inside.
You make the tea. You answer the question. You wait.
And the feeling goes wherever feelings go when you have spent eleven years training them not to speak.
"The fence looks good," Michael says, squinting through the window.
"Noah did a lovely job."
"Solid chap. We should have him over, you know. Neighbourly."
"He lives alone."
"All the more reason." He swirls the wine, yawning. "Decent thing to do."
"Yes," I say, in a voice I barely recognise. "Yes. It is."
I carry the tea to the table. I sit. I look at the south fence through the glass, at the narrow plain gate, closed now, its latch pale in the evening light, and I think about a man in a dark house next door who said the gate is still there.
Saturday, I think. Michael is home.
And the gate is still there.
What does a woman do with the moment after the moment before?
I do not know.
But I am, God help me, already writing it.
* * *