Page 161 of Never Alone
The ring went on the way I'd known it would. Her hands were the small, steady hands they had been at the gravel lot, at the hospital, at the Greyhound terminal. They had been steady for me again now.
She put her hand on the side of my face, and she kissed me.
I took her upstairs.
The green room was where she stopped. I hadn't asked her where she wanted to go. She'd walked toward it, and I had followed her. She stood in the middle of the floor in the afternoon light and turned around to face me, and the green caught on the wall behind her. The light caught on her hair,and I had been waiting for this in this room for a year without knowing.
I closed the door.
The light through the window was already going copper at the edges. The room held the afternoon the way a room holds an afternoon it has been waiting for. The floor I had sanded. The wall I had painted. The window I had reset in its frame myself after the first contractor had quoted me twice what the job was worth.
I crossed to her.
The space between us closed slowly. She didn't move. She watched me come. The watching had its own weight.
She came up to meet me.
Her face was open the way I had not yet learned a word for. The eyes the green of the room. The flat of her palm on my chest, where my shirt was. The ring cool against the cotton.
Her mouth was warm. Her hands were at the back of my neck. The ring was on her finger, and I felt it cool against my skin where her hand came up to the side of my face, and the metal of it was a thing I had not expected to register and could not stop registering.
She was laughing into my mouth.
I stopped.
"What?"
She had her forehead against my collarbone. She was shaking with laughter in the small, private way she shook when she didn't want a laugh to be a whole thing.
"You. The sling."
"It's off."
I lifted my arm to show her. The shoulder still made the small click it had been making for a week. I didn't let her see it.
"For two weeks."
"I'm being careful."
The careful was not a thing I had thought about putting down. The careful had been the cost of every step I had taken since the gravel lot. The careful was the version of me she had been letting live in the house with her.
"You don't have to be careful."
I looked at her.
I looked at her in the green light in a room I had painted for her without knowing she would ever stand in it.
"Tessa."
Her hand was on my jaw. The thumb at the bone of my cheek.
"Cole."
One syllable. The way it came out of her mouth. The way it had been coming out of her mouth for two months, and not stopping.
"Yeah."
She brought her face up to mine. She put her mouth to my ear.
