Page 21 of Where Vows Collapse
She stopped a step or two from him.
This close, in the amber light of the living room lamps, she could see what the hallway hadn't shown her. The fatigue under his eyes. The shadow of the day along his jaw. The way his pulse was moving at his throat above the undone collar of his shirt, which was the first time she had ever seen evidence of her husband's pulse.
"Is everything all right?” she asked.
It came out in a voice she didn't recognize. Smaller than she had meant it. More honest.
Elias just stepped closer.
He closed the distance between them to a foot, maybe less, and she did not step back, though some clean sensible part of her that had been trained by her mother was telling her to step back.
She didn't. She could smell the faint remainder of the cold from outside still on the wool of his shirt cuffs, something cleaner underneath, an expensive soap.
"Everything is fine," he said.
His voice was lower than she'd ever heard it. It was the voice she'd been cataloging without meaning to: the private voice, the one he used at a window with her and not at a table for a room. This time it was turned fully on her.
There was a thing happening under her ribs that had been happening in increments for weeks, something that she hadbeen refusing to name, and it was now a thing she could not refuse to name. It moved through her slowly, the way a slow warm water moves through cold pipes: no shudder, no sound, just a gradual equalizing of temperature in a body that had been cold for so long it had forgotten it was cold.
Hope.
It surfaced before she could stop it. She felt it surface. She felt it rise in her throat, and she closed her mouth on it the way she had been trained to close her mouth on everything. But it did not go back down.
He lifted his hand. It was the smallest movement. Almost hesitant. She watched his hand come up between them— slow, improbable, something that wasn't supposed to be happening. His fingers brushed the edge of her jaw. The contact was so light she would have doubted it afterward if she hadn't felt, in the second of it, her whole body answer.
She didn't move.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Then came back to her eyes.
And then he crossed the last of the distance and kissed her.
It was not the kiss she had expected him to be capable of.
She had expected — in whatever shamed private corner of herself had done the expecting — something measured. Something correct. The controlled, slightly detached kiss of a man who did nothing by accident. She got the control, yes, the first half-second was control, but the control broke somewhere in the breath after in a way she felt against her mouth before she knew what she was feeling. The exhale against her upper lip. The involuntary pressure, more than he had meant to give her, before he caught himself and gave her less. Something underneath the control that had not yet been asked for, that had been there the whole time, that had been the thing held back from the start.
Her hand came up and her fingers touched his sleeve, the wool of it was warm under her fingertips from the heat of his body underneath. She leaned in perhaps an inch: she wasn't trying to take more; she couldn't hold herself upright against the weight of him without leaning.
He pulled back.
It was abrupt. There was no grace in it. It was the pulling back of a man who had been touched by a current and needed to be out of it.
The cold came back into the foot of space between them so fast it was almost an audible sound.
Noelle stood there with her hand still half-raised. She hadn't known her hand was still half-raised. She stood there for a second and then a second more, her fingers suspended between them. She watched her husband's face reassemble itself: the control returning in one smooth motion, the unguarded thing she had glimpsed for a moment put away somewhere locked and the key pocketed. She watched him look at her, finally, with the face she knew.
"That was a mistake."
Noelle heard it the way she'd heardit isn't necessaryandthere is no beyond thatandyou're asking for something I didn't offer, which was with the dry clean clarity of a woman who had begun to recognize his closing doors before they were fully closed.
"A mistake," she echoed.
Her voice was steady. She wasn't sure how.
"It shouldn't have happened."
She waited. She waited for the apology, or the explanation, or the gentle circumstance he was going to offer her to take the edge off. She waited for the next sentence, the one that would make this survivable.
There wasn't one.
