I cross back to him. He watches me come, every step. The note is in my hand.
"You wrote me something. I have never opened it without my hands shaking. I want you to read it to me."
I hand him the note.
He takes it.
His hand doesn’t shake. His face does. The small architecture around his eyes does what it does, and his eyes, when they come up from the paper, are the eyes of a man who has just been told a thing he had stopped allowing himself to believe.
"You kept it."
"I kept it. From the night you wrote it. Until now."
He looks down at the paper. He unfolds it slowly and reads it without sound for a moment. He’s not said the words out loud. The words have lived in his head for three years, and he’s been not-saying them, and now he’s going to say them, to me.
"Read it to me."
He reads it. His voice is rough. The voice is two and a half registers below the voice he uses for instructions, and one register below the voice he uses for me.
"You are extraordinary."
My eyes flood. I do not let them spill.
"Now ask me what I would have answered."
He closes his eyes for one full second. He opens them. He says, in the voice that is now the voice that is only mine, "What would you have answered?”
I take a breath. I have been carrying the answer for as long as I have been carrying his daughter.
"Yes. I want this. I want you. I am sober, I am clear, I am choosing this. Take me to bed."
He picks me up.
One arm under my thighs. One arm at my back. My arms around his neck. My legs around his waist. He carries me down the dark hall past the closed door of the room where Nora is asleep, and his mouth is at my temple the whole way.
The door of the master bedroom clicks shut.
He sets me down on the bed and stands in front of me. The light from the hallway is a thin gold line under the door.
"Two things," he says.
"Tell me."
"Before you, I had not been with a woman in eleven years. You were once, three years ago. And since you, there has been no one. I don't know how to do this carefully. I'm going to try. If I move too fast, you say 'slow.' If you change your mind, you say 'no.'"
"I am clean," I say, in the small, clear voice I use for federal courtrooms. "Tested at every annual since Nora was born. The last test was in August."
"I am clean. The Konstantinos family does annual physicals."
"Then come here."
He undresses me without rushing.
The sweater goes over my head. Slow. His hands at my ribs, palms flat, the heat of him through the cotton tank underneath. The tank goes. He kneels at the edge of the bed, and his mouth comes to the place between my breasts and stops there. Forehead against my sternum. Breath warm through my skin.
"Lex…"
"You are so beautiful." His hand comes up and unhooks the clasp at my back with the slow, sure hands of a man who learned this in another life and never forgot. The bra falls away. Then his mouth is on me — open, hot — his tongue dragging across one nipple while his thumb rolls the other, and the "so" he never finished he finishes against my breast, with his teeth.
