She went still.
"I told you it was a mistake."
"Yes."
"It wasn't."
She closed her eyes. He waited. He did not know what he was waiting for. He understood that he had just given her, with a handful of unrehearsed sentences, more of himself than he’d given her in all the months of their marriage. But he didn’t regret it.
That, too, was new.
"Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.
"I don't know."
"Elias."
"I don't know. I came home early. I meant to say something else. I'm telling you the truth because — " He stopped. "Because you asked me a question on a curb and I lied. I haven't been able to stop thinking about the way you looked when I did."
She opened her eyes and looked at him. It was not a soft look. It was not the look she had given him at the altar, or in the study doorway, or in the moment before the kiss. It was a harder look, the look of a woman weighing him. He did not make a case. He’d given her what he had to give; he could not now argue her into accepting it.
Noelle stood. She crossed the small distance between the dining table and the chair he was in, and she looked down at him.
"Stand up."
He stood up. This close, he could see the tired set of her mouth, the line of her throat where her hair had fallen away from her nape, the faint color that had come into her cheeks in the last minute that hadn’t been there before. He could see, also, that she wasn’t certain.
“Tell me one more true thing,” she said.
A beat. He looked at her.
"I think about you at hours of the day when I have no business thinking about you."
He could see his words land. The small flicker of pleasure in her eyes.
"Since when?”
"Since longer than I've let myself account for."
She studied him.
For a second he thought she was going to step back. He thought she was going to sayall right, then,and return to her chair. He understood, watching her face, that she was considering doing exactly that.
She did not do it. She lifted her hand, instead, and laid it lightly along the line of his jaw.
It was the touch she had placed on his forearm at the Union League, returned to her now in private, under entirely differentrules. He closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of her palm against his skin.
"Noelle,” he breathed.
"Yes?”
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"Neither do I."
He kissed her, slowly. He kissed her with her hand still along his jaw. Her mouth on his was warmer than he’d let himself remember, and the sound she made in the back of her throat when he brought his hands up to the sides of her waist was the sound he had been thinking about at his desk in the middle of the afternoon without knowing he’d been thinking about it.
Elias kissed her the way he’d sworn he wouldn’t kiss her again. He kissed her with the attention of a man who had been rationing himself for months and had finally, for reasons he could not justify, opened the tap. He kissed the corner of her mouth. He kissed her jaw. Her fingers found the back of his neck. His forehead came to rest against hers, he heard her breathing, he heard his own, and he understood that whatever certainty he had been carrying into the living room had been, in the space of perhaps ninety seconds, dismantled.
