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“Let’s settle this like we do all serious matters, Petruchio.” I reach behind me for the doorknob, then turn it. “Race ya.”
Christopher swears viciously as I sprint down the stairs and across the yard. I glance over my shoulder just once, shocked to see how fast he’s moving for carrying a sopping wet, heavy bag of laundry on his shoulder.
I leap up the stairs to his back porch two at a time and come to a halt at his door. Above the handle, there’s a code-based lock, a half-moon of numbers.
“Kate!” Christopher yells, making it to the bottom of the steps, scrambling up them.
I don’t know why I do it, if I’m daring fate, if I’m wishing it into existence, but I enter my birthday.
The door unlocks.
I gape and glance over my shoulder.
“Dammit,” he rasps, pushing me inside, slamming the door behind him.
I laugh, equally shocked and thrilled. “Why is my birthday your lock code?”
He drops my laundry off his shoulder with a wetthudand rakes a hand through his hair. He doesn’t answer me.
“Christopher,” I press, my heart pounding with a dawning, earth-tipping hope that’s my most closely guarded, deepest-buried dream. “Why is my birthday your lock code?”
He stares at me, something so fierce and raw in his expression, my breath catches in my lungs.
My throat feels thick as I take a step toward him. “Tell me,” I whisper.
“Tell you what?” he snaps.
Closing the distance between us, he grabs me by the waist and hoists me onto the counter, which hasn’t changed in twenty years, in a kitchen frozen in time. Curious as I am about why his home seems unchanged since I was last here as a little girl, I don’t focus on my surroundings. I focus on Christopher, who’s breathing hard, staring me down.
“What should I tell you, Kate, hmm?” His voice is dark and sharp as he sinks his hands into my hips and pulls me close. “That your birthday is my lock code, that I keep your horribly sewn handkerchief in my journal at work, that I’ve archived every single photograph you’ve ever published, that I lure your cat to my house for cuddles, that I walk into bakeries in the fall just to see the foods you love, that I sit in your mother’s greenhouse and breathe in the scent of your favorite flowers, because anything you’ve touched, anything colored by the memory of you, are relics and I’m a supplicant?
“Should I tell you that since you came home and stayed, I’ve been losing my goddamn mind, because I couldn’t believe the lie I’d told myself for so long, and that’s why I wrote the note in those flowers? Should I tell you that was my confession—that my sad attempt to feel close to you was upheld by the delusion that it was better to have your hate than your apathy? That when I realized how badly I’d fucked up, I hoped it wasn’t too late to have you look at me with anything besides loathing burning in your eyes?
“Should I tell you that I havemissedyou andachedfor you for so long, Katerina Elizabeth Wilmot, that you define those words, and I have done everything I could to break inside me what drew me to you, but I’m not strong enough?”
He steps between my thighs, his hands diving into my hair as he presses the gentlest kiss to my mouth and breathes slowly,shakily. “I can’t do it anymore. Denying myself you has been like battling the tide. If I fight it any longer, I’ll drown. I’m yours,” he says, reverent, quiet, like a prayer whispered in a church. “For as long as you’ll have me.”
Hot, fast tears slip down my cheeks. “Christopher,” I whisper, my voice broken and hoarse.
“I’m so sorry,” he mutters, kissing my cheeks, the tears wetting them. “I’m sorry for every tear I caused, every time I pushed you away rather than pulled you into my arms. I just wanted to protect you.”
“Fromwhat?” I plead, fisting his shirt, dragging him nearer between my thighs, hooking my ankles around the backs of his legs. He’s not going anywhere.
“Me,” he admits. “I’m fucked up, Kate.” He thumbs away a fresh trail of tears. “Look around you. My house is an homage to people who’ve been dead for decades. I haven’t changed anything that hasn’t broken beyond repair. I can barely tolerate it being touched by anyone else, repairmen, painters, landscapers. I’ve never left this city because when I think about how fucking huge and cruel the world is, it makes me spiral into a panic attack so bad, the first time it happened, I thought I was dying. What was I supposed to do? Say,Hey, Kate, the world’s at your feet, but would you mind shrinking it to this sliver of its possibilities for a fuckup like me?”
“Stop it,” I tell him sharply. “You aren’t a fuckup. You lost something I cannot fathom losing, Christopher. You live with the knowledge of life’s fragility that many of us have and choose the privilege of blithely ignoring.” I look around the kitchen, smiling through my tears, memories of this place, full of joyful sounds and smells, returning to me. Gio cooking over the stove as he sang in Italian, loud and off-key. Nora singing along with him, somehowharmonizing to the meandering melody, dancing happily around the table as she set it in the next room.
“You’ve held on to what you have left of the people you loved most andtreasuredit,” I whisper. I draw him closer, cupping his face, holding his eyes. “And with me, you did what you thought was right—” My voice catches, the sadness of what we’ve missed, of what we could have had, mingling with the relief that so many years of misery now make sense, cast in the light of this twisted sacrifice he believed we had to make, for him to live the way he needed, for me to live the way I needed, too. “Even though you were so completely wrong, you were just doing what you believed you should.”
“I was wrong?” he asks quietly, his hands settling on my thighs, sliding up and down them, as if it soothes him, as if it helps him remember I’m still here.
“So wrong,” I tell him through new tears. “Christopher, you grossly underestimated me, what we could have had, if I had known years ago the man I’ve spent the past month learning...” I shake my head, my thumb sweeping across his cheek. “You would have had me from the moment I knew I could be yours.”
Air rushes out of him, pained.
“That day you came home,” I whisper, “when you moved back in, boxes in your arms, and I saw you from the porch, I...” Swallowing nervously, I take his hand and set it over my heart. “A storm was coming as I saw you, and this... electricity crackled right through my skin. I told myself it was something in the air, the promise of what the sky had up its sleeve. But then there you were, serious and strong. You felt so different from when I’d last seen you, and yet so... familiar. After a whole childhood of being the little kid you ignored, it felt different, like we were both... equals, like maybe things could be different. I realized Iwantedit to bedifferent,” I tell him, cupping my hand around his neck, drawing his head down to press a slow, soft kiss to his lips.
“I wanted to curl up to what was familiar,” I whisper against his mouth. “The sound of your voice. Your belly laugh. The way a shirt stretched across your shoulders and that curl at the tips of your hair.” His touch kneads my breast, wraps around my thigh, to my hip, tucking me closer to him, until our bodies meet, our chests heaving for air. “And I wanted to learn everything that was new, every part of you I didn’t yet know.”
