"All right," she says.
It is the ‘all right’ she’s been giving me since the door of her apartment three weeks ago. The ‘all right’ that has, in three weeks, become the most generous word any woman has ever given me. She’s accepting the deferral. She’s not pushing. She’s not asking again. She’s decided that the answer will come when the answer comes, and she’s not going to be the woman who demands a man hand her language he’s not yet ready to give.
I tighten my arm around her.
She makes a small sound against my throat. Half pleasure, half the sound a person makes when they have been holding something heavy and have just been told they can put it down.
"Thank you," she says.
"For what?"
"For not lying to me about Theo. For not asking me to forgive you. For not pretending you are different than you are."
"I am not the man who was twenty."
"I know. But you are still the man who did it."
I do not answer that. There is no answer that is not either a lie or a confession, and she’s not asked for either, and I am learning the new register in which we speak, which is the register where what is true between us doesn’t need to be confirmed every time it is said.
"I am not asking you to be different," she says. "I want you to know that."
"I know."
"Then say it back."
"Say what."
"That you know I am not asking. Some men hear ‘I love you the way you are’ and they think it is a thing the woman is saying because she’s not yet seen the worst. I want you to know I have seen the worst. I am still here. I am not asking you to be different."
"I know."
"Say it once more, Lex. So I know you heard me."
"You are not asking me to be different."
"And?"
"And I have heard you."
"All right."
She kisses the side of my throat, slowly. Once. Then again. The second kiss is a kiss with a question in it, and the question is ‘do you understand what you have just been given,’ and the answer my body gives, with my arm tightening around her and my mouth at her hair and my breath going still, is ‘yes.’
She doesn’t ask again. She doesn’t need to.
I do not answer her in language. I answer her by tightening my arm around her again and putting my mouth in her hair and breathing in the smell of her, which is the smell I have been smelling at the side of her neck since she walked into a green-tiled kitchen three years ago, the smell of her shampoo and her skin and the small, unnamed thing underneath that is just her.
She falls asleep against my ribs.
It happens fast. One minute her hand is on my sternum, and the next minute her hand has gone slack, and her breath has lengthened, and I feel the moment her body releases the day, and I lie still under her so as not to wake her.
I do not sleep. I lie awake for forty-seven minutes.
My eyes are open. The ceiling is cedar paneling, I had a man hang it in the first autumn after the house became mine, and I have known every grain of it for four years. I know it now in a way I didn’t know it before.
It is not ‘I love her.’
It is ‘the version of me that walked into this lake house yesterday is not the version of me lying in this bed.’ He’s gone. There is no return.
