Page 23 of Reluctant Bride

My grip finds the edge of the counter. Knuckles white. The whole kitchen lists sideways.

Somewhere under the want there’s a second thing, quieter, uglier, sitting in my gut. She’s wearing lace upstairs in her bedroom and I’m standing in the kitchen instead of her doorway. The only reason is a contract she wrote because I taught her, a long time ago, that trusting me with her heart was a mistake. I don’t get to resent the distance. I built the road that led her to it.

Your turn to be incapacitated, she writes underneath it. Welcome to the club.

I’ve been a member since the tack room.

Liar. You’ve been composed since the tack room. Infuriatingly.

I’m not composed right now.

Prove it.

I don’t answer with words. I answer with the truth of my own hand, unsteady enough in the photo that she’ll see it if she looks close, and I know she’ll look close, because she’s spent her whole life reading rooms for exactly this kind of tell.

There you are, she writes back, and my own line handed back to me, softer, almost fond, ties a knot in my throat tight enough to strangle me, worse than anything explicit could manage.

We go quiet for a while after that. Not finished. Recalibrating. I take the stairs two at a time, phone still in my hand, and it’s not until I’m sitting on the edge of my own bed that the whole day finally catches up with me at once, the wedding, the gate, the boot prints, the six hours since I stood in a courthouse and made this woman my wife in the eyes of a county that’s spent two years betting on which of us draws blood first. I can hear her, faint, across the hall, the exact creak of her mattress when she shifts her weight, and I sit there with my phone in my hand like it’s a live wire, counting the minutes until she sends the next one.

When it comes, it isn’t teasing anymore.

She’s cropped it careful, controlled, the same precision she brings to a contract or a hearing, showing me exactly as much as she’s decided to show me and not one inch more. Dark ink at her hip, a road running into the base of a mountain, something I’ve never seen on her in my life. Lower, past that, a glint of metal I wasn’t expecting and can’t stop looking at, small and entirely, devastatingly new information about a woman who used to be mine. Every curve, every scar, and every sound she made when we made love, I thought I still knew by heart.

Eight years is a long time, she writes. You don’t know this body anymore, Sullivan. Not even close.

I read that four times before I can make my hands work well enough to type back.

When did you get that?

Twenty-three. A very ill-advised weekend in Nashville. Ask me about it sometime.

I’m asking now.

Not over text. Some stories you have to earn.

I intend to.

Bold claim from a man who’s still fully clothed.

She’s right. I’ve been sending her pieces of restraint dressed up as pictures, disciplined, measured, the same control I bring to everything, and she’s been handing me actual truth, open, new, nothing I could have built from memory no matter how many nights I spent trying.

I could have had this. All of it. Not a photograph through a wall, but her, tonight, in a bed that’s supposed to be ours instead of two separate rooms with a hallway keeping score between them. I don’t let myself finish that thought all the way to the end, because the ending is always the same, that I’m the reason there’s a hallway at all, the reason she wrote a contract instead of just walking through my door and trusting I’d still be the man who deserved her there. Wanting her this much and still not reaching for the door is the closest thing to penance I know how to pay her.

I stand up. I strip down to nothing, and I take the photo, no posing, no careful crop like hers, just the plain fact of a man who’s spent years telling himself one version of her was enough to live on and just found out how wrong he was.

I send it before I can talk myself into a safer version.

The reply takes over a minute. Long enough that my pulse starts running a rhythm I don’t love the feel of, half want, half the old fear that I’ve finally handed her more than she wanted.

Well, she writes finally. That escalated. And also. Wow.

Is that a yes or a no?

That’s a give me a second, Dawson, I need to remember how words work.

I laugh again, quieter this time, alone in a dark room, cracked wide open by a woman who belongs to me now on paper and hasn’t let me anywhere near her since the judge said so, and who I’ve spent every second since pretending doesn’t matter.

I want to hear your voice, she writes, after the second has stretched into several. Not tonight. I don’t trust what I’d say tonight.