Chapter 12
Ethan
The bedroom door closes, and the world shrinks to the size of us.
The noise from the reception fades to a distant murmur through the floorboards: Tom’s laughter, the clink of glasses, Maggie urging someone to eat more pie. Meanwhile, my wife stands by the window, moonlight caught in the lace at her wrists. She’s so beautiful that I can’t remember how to breathe.
Mywife. The word is new and enormous and doesn’t fit in my mouth yet, but I’ll spend decades breaking it in.
Jenna turns from the window. Her glasses catch the low light from the bedside lamp, the only one I switched on, because I know she needs soft. She needs time to adjust, to catalogue the room, to run her quiet arithmetic before she lets herself settle. I’ve learned her rhythms the way I’ve learned this land, not by forcing, but by watching long enough to understand what thrives where.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi yourself.”
We stare at each other like two people who’ve just realized that every night we spent apart, longing has narrowed to this room and this bed, and the space between us that I’m about to bridge.
She pauses as her fingers go to the buttons at her throat. “I need to tell you something.” Her voice has that formal edge, the careful vocabulary she reaches for when she’s managing something too big for casual language.
“Okay.”
“I haven’t done this before.” She holds my gaze, chin lifted, braced for whatever comes next.
I know this posture. It’s the one she wears when she's handing someone information that might change how they see her.
“I know,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “You do? But how?”
“Jen. I've spent six months listening to you breathe. I know when you’re nervous, when you’re lying, when you’re about to cry, and when you’re pretending you’re not. I know you’ve never done this.”
I cross the room slowly, giving her time to track my approach, to choose whether she stays or steps back. “I also know you’ve thought about it. With me. Because your breathing changes whenever I’m near, and you think I don’t notice, but I notice everything about you.”
Her throat constricts.
“I haven’t… not in a long time,” I admit gruffly. “Long enough that it might as well be the first time.”
“How long?”
“Years.” I stop in front of her, close enough to touch. “I stopped wanting anyone. Then you happened, and I wanted so much it scared me.”
Her hand lifts to my chest. Fingertips first, then her palm, settling over my heart the way I pressed my hand against my chest after our phone calls. She’s been doing the same thing. We held each other through walls and phone lines and miles of highway, and now there’s nothing between her hand and my heartbeat except a white shirt I’m about to let her take off me.
“I don’t know the steps,” she whispers.
“There aren’t steps. There’s just us.” I trace her jaw with my thumb. “We go as slow as you need. We stop whenever you say. And if at any point you want to lie here and let me hold you, that’s enough. That’s always enough. We have time. We have all night and every night after this for the rest of our lives, and I refuse to rush a single second of it.”
Her eyes are wet. “You can’t say things like that and expect me to remain functional.”
“I’ve never once expected you to be functional, Jen. I just expect you to be honest.”
Her laugh, a wet and startled sound, is genuine. Then her hands find my shirt, meticulously working on the buttons like a data analyst tackling a complex problem.
Her fingers tremble on the third button. I cover her hands with mine, stilling them.
“Slow,” I murmur.
“I’m being slow.”
