The music reaches us here, faint and warm through the walls, the band playing something with strings in it. She turns in the candlelight, taking in every flame, and her eyes are shining when they come back to me.
"Dance with me," I say.
She goes very still.
"Rowe. That means?—"
"I know what it means."
I hold out my arms. Both of them. An open circle, an invitation into the one place no one has ever stood, and I watch her understand it, watch the tears arrive and spill without a sound, and then she steps in.
Her body settles against mine.
All of her. Her chest to my ribs, her arms sliding around my waist, her cheek finding the hollow below my collarbone, the whole soft warm weight of the woman I love pressed along the front of me, and I close my arms around her and hold on.
We dance—a slow turning in place, my hand spread over the small of her back, her heartbeat against my sternum, the music drifting in from a wedding still going on without us. Her tears soak through my shirt, and she's smiling. I can feel the shape of it against my collarbone, crying and smiling at once, and I press my cheek to the top of her head and breathe her in.
"You're holding me," she whispers.
"I'm holding you."
"Don't stop."
"Never," I vow.
We turn through one song, then another. Her handsmove over my back, slow, learning it, and my skin lets her, and sometime during the third song, she tips her head back and looks up at me, lashes wet, candle flames doubled in her eyes.
And I do the thing I've wanted to do since a woman with a field kit crouched in the dirt of my tent and talked softly to a frightened monkey.
I cup her face in both hands, lean down, and kiss her.
Her lips are soft and taste of salt, and the sound she makes against my mouth is small and broken and joyful, and I swallow it whole. It starts carefully—two people who've never done this with each other, one who's never done it at all—and then her mouth opens under mine, and I stop being careful. I kiss her deep, tangling my tongue with hers, thirty-five years ofneverpouring into it, and she rises up on her toes and gives it all back, her fingers curling into my shirt. We stand in the candlelight kissing until neither of us can breathe.
I pull back an inch. Her mouth follows mine, chasing, and I laugh against her lips.
"Hi," I whisper.
"Hi," she sobs, laughing, tears sliding freely now, and I kiss them off her cheeks, one side and then the other.
I walk her backward to the bed. Slow. Her hands stay flat against my chest, and I find the zipper at the back of the green dress and draw it down, inch by inch, listening to her breathing speed up.
The dress slides off her shoulders, and I kiss the skin it uncovers. Her shoulder, the wing of her collarbone, the curve where her neck meets it. My mouth is on her body for the first time above the waist, not frantic in the dark, but deliberate and unhurried, and she shakes under every kiss,crying without sound, her hand cradling the back of my head so lightly it weighs nothing.
The dress falls. I kiss her sternum. The soft upper swell of each breast as I unclasp her bra and let it drop. Her nipples, one and then the other, drawing each into my mouth until she gasps, her fingers tightening in my hair. I go to my knees and kiss her belly, long, worshipping presses of my lips while her tears fall onto my shoulders like rain. Her hips as I slide her underwear down. The tops of her thighs. The inside of one knee.
"Rowe," she chokes.
"I know."
"You're touching me. You're just—touching me."
"I'm never going to stop."
I stand and strip for her. Shirt over my head, belt, jeans, everything, until I'm as bare as she is, candlelight moving over both our bodies. Then I lay her down in the middle of the bed I built for exactly this night, and I follow her down, and for the first time in my life, my skin meets another person's from mouth to ankle.
Warmth. That's all it is. That's everything it is. Her warmth all along me, her thigh sliding over mine, her breasts against my chest, her hands moving up my spine tracing scars I no longer count, and my body—my broken, screaming body—melts into her like it's been waiting for her the whole time.
"Look at me," she whispers.
