Page 92 of Second Alarm
"If I had, I'd have lost you too, because you'd have — you'd have — "
"Hanna."
"You'd have left the station. You'd have — "
"Hanna."
"You'd have gone away from me because I'd have been his sister and you'd have been the reason and I — "
He turns the water off. He wraps me in a towel without stepping out of the tub — both hands, around me — and then he takes my face in his hands and says, with the specific flatness I've spent weeks being undone by:
"I wouldn't have left. I'd have been with you tomorrow. With you the day after. In that kitchen with your mother, the way I've been in that kitchen since I was a kid, watching her through the worst thing that's ever happened to her for the second time. I wouldn't have gone anywhere. Because she's my second mother and you're — "
"Don't."
"You're — "
"Ty."
"You're my person, Hanna."
The towel is holding me up. His hands on my face are holding me up.
I cry harder than I've cried in front of another human being in the years since my father died — like a woman who's been saving it the way my mother saved her speech — and he catches all of it. He doesn't say another reasonable thing. He doesn't tell me it's going to be all right or tell me to breathe, and when I can breathe, I reach up, put my wet hands on his jaw, and pull his mouth to mine.
"Come to bed with me."
"Okay."
The bed is a bed.
The lamp, this time, I turn off — I'm not putting on a front for anyone, and I don't need light to witness any of it — but I leave the hall light on so the edge of his face is still there, the specific silver line along his jaw.
This isn't a fight.
This isn't a decision.
This isn't gravity.
This is a very slow, very deliberate conversation between two bodies that have been holding their breath.
He unwraps the towel the way you'd unwrap a gift you didn't intend to rush. He lays me down, then himself, and he doesn't hurry — specifically doesn't hurry. He lets me be the thing that dictates the speed, and the speed I dictate is the speed of a woman who's spent an hour in a hospital hallway, who's spent hours before that running a call at highway speed with her brain half-watching her brother bleed, and who needs not the gravity version of this but the tenderness.
He gives me the tenderness.
He gives me the tenderness the way he pours coffee: thoroughly, without comment, as many times as I need.
Between things he says my name.
Not like a line. Like an acknowledgment.
Hanna,when I look away from his face.Hanna,when my breath catches in the bad way.Hanna,when it catches in the good way. The name is the anchor. It pulls me back into the room every time my head tries to go back to the gravel. He's never said my name this many times in one night in years of knowing me. I'm counting them by accident. By the time everything is — I've lost count, which is the whole point, which is what he's doing, and which is working.
Afterward, he lies on his back next to me, his hand flat on my sternum.
"Your hand."
"Yeah."
