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“Do you really?”
His hand was still on her ass, and as he hauled her up his thigh, the squeeze moved deep into not-public-appropriate territory. “Yeah,” he said. Looking right into her eyes. “Both haircuts.”
She swatted his arm, and he grinned, and after he kissed her and kissed her some more, they started to walk again, wandering at first. Meandering. Laughing.
They kissed again, and Tony got pretty handsy, and then they turned around and walked in a straight line back toward the room. Back toward the resort.
Back toward the plane that would take them home.
CHAPTER NINE
It was dark when they landed in Columbus, and cold enough in the parking garage to see her breath. They piled into Tony’s truck and started home, stopping in Johnstown for gas and something to drink.
Amber sipped peppermint tea and looked out the windshield, wondering why Ohio didn’t feel like it belonged to her anymore.
It wasn’t as though she’d left her heart in Jamaica. She’d found it.
Before she left, she’d been longing for a break in the weather. She’d felt as if her life were on pause, and she’d needed proof that she wasn’t locked in ice, trapped in snow forever.
Now everything she saw out the window looked as though it was part of a transition, the forward movement of time creating the snowbanks, erasing them, replacing them with crocuses soon enough.
It would be spring, then summer.
Her children would grow up. They would leave.
Sooner or later, she would find herself alone with Tony, the rest of their lives still ahead of them.
Amber inhaled the smell of peppermint, and she let herself accept, for the first time, that what she’d been afraid of was just this. This movement forward into the future. How to navigate it. What to do next.
All three of her children were out of the house all day long. Her father was recovering. Tony was absorbed in work. She had empty space around her where before there had been only pressing demands, and it was in that space that her fear had grown too large and her secrets too big.
She looked at Tony’s hands on the steering wheel. Those beat-up, capable hands one of the first things she’d noticed about him back when she worked at the community center and he’d been in charge of putting the addition onto the building.
In the beautiful early days of their relationship, th
ey’d pursued every possible intimacy—stripped off their clothes, bared their souls to each other, because they’d both needed that, then. Needed to be seen and understood by another person who could tell them, You’re fine. You’re more than fine. You’re wonderful.
He’d given her the gift of her body and his regard. He’d seen her—really seen her—in a way that no one else ever had, and partly that was because she’d allowed him to.
In return, she’d given him permission to stop being afraid of the dark. To look forward instead of back, because there was too much good in him to give up. Too much wonderful potential.
She thought, in a marriage, that no one could ever sustain that kind of intimacy indefinitely. At some point, months or years into it, you had to start building up some boundaries again, to wall off yours from mine from ours, because life happened, and it wasn’t practical to think it could keep happening to both of you, communally, forever.
Everyone needed secrets. It wasn’t possible to raise three children with another person and keep telling him every single thought that went through your head, every fear you had, everything he did that annoyed you. You had to make selections. Edit yourself. Edit the narrative of your day.
Every marriage needed roles. One person made dinner most of the time, another took out the trash. One put the kids to bed, another dressed their wounds. It didn’t mean you couldn’t shake things up. It only meant that you had to divide up the day, divide up the jobs, the same way you divided up what you gave each other access to.
But sometimes the divisions you made stopped making sense after a while. You resented taking the trash out because it had to go out during the only time on Wednesday morning when you could shower, and when you finally complained about it, your husband said, I can take the trash out.
Oh. Right. Duh.
You had to make choices, and they got set in stone, which only meant that sometimes you had to take a hard look at all the walls your choices had put up, grab a mallet, and knock a few down.
She’d made the right choice in the beginning when she chose Tony. Whatever his faults—the overwork, the constant worry, all the parts of parenting that he left to her so he could pursue his single-minded notion of male responsibility—his profile was the one she wanted to look at, driving down the road. His hands on the wheel.
Tony’s smile was the one she wanted to see in the dark. Tony’s hammer knocking down her walls.
This is love, then.
