"That was the idea."
A beat.
"I'm not going to thank you."
"Don't."
She got up from her chair, came around the table, and sat down in my lap.
She was warmer than the room. She had wine on her mouth. Her hand came up to the back of my neck, and her other one went flat against my chest, where her hand went every night she slept in my bed. The difference this time was that she wasn't keeping it there to keep it there. The difference this time was that her thumb was moving.
I'd been waiting on this kiss for four weeks. I'd been waiting on it since the water tower, if I was honest about it, and I was done not being honest about it.
She broke first. She pulled back an inch. She looked at me. Her eyes had something in them that wasn't a question.
"I'm staying tonight," she said.
She got off my lap and took my hand.
I let her lead me out of the kitchen. The cast iron was off the heat. The light was on. I left both where they were.
I took her hand back at the bedroom door. I caught her at the doorframe, turned her, put my hand on the side of her face, and kissed her again.
It was a different kiss.
This one had nowhere to go but where it was going.
Her sweater came off over her head. I didn't remember pulling it off. She had a thin tank under it, and her bare shoulders had the freckles I'd been watching since a Tuesday morning ten weeks ago, the ones that had been wet under a bath towel and that I wasn't allowed to look at then. I was allowed now. I looked, and she let me, and neither of us said anything about it.
I unbuttoned my own shirt and dropped it on the floor.
She put her hand flat on my chest and moved it once over the cat-scratch scar at my collarbone. The scar had healed. She'd done good work. I told her I thought about it. She asked what part. I saidher hip, and she laughed against my mouth.
A scratch at the bedroom door.
We both stopped.
Moose. On the other side.
"You have got to be kidding me," I said.
She started laughing—the one that came up out of her in a place she didn't try to manage. Her forehead landed against my collarbone, and her shoulders were going.
"Are you serious?" she said.
I told her not to go anywhere, got up and crossed the room, and opened the door six inches. Moose was on the other side, his tail at half-mast, wearing the deeply offended expression of a dog who had been excluded from a room with Astrid in it for the first time in three months.
I told him we were going to have a long conversation about boundaries. His tail thumped once.
I closed the door.
She was on the bed by the time I turned around. Up on one elbow. Hair around her shoulders. Looking at me with the green-eyed steadiness she'd had at the council vote, only warmer.
"You're a man who has closed a door on a dog tonight."
"Welcome to my new life."
I went back to her.
