Page 55 of Take the Fall
“No,” I said, and went after him.
He’d got the shirt off by the bathroom door. I saw his back before he turned the light on, and it stopped the breath in me. A bruise the size of a dinner plate coming up dark over his ribs on the left. A scrape down one shoulder blade, road rash, cleaned but raw. The whole long muscled length of him marked like he’d been dragged, which, I understood with a lurch, he probably had.
“Luke.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks like three men tried to take you apart. Why?”
He didn’t answer. He reached into the shower and turned it on and stood waiting for it to run warm, his back to me, and I stood in the doorway of that cramped off-white room with its hospital-green tiles and I felt the whole night come up my spine at once.
“You don’t get to do this,” I said. “You don’t get to come home looking like that and sayit happensand walk into the shower like I’m not standing here.”
He tested the water with his good hand and stepped into the shower. Pulled the curtain half across. The water changed sound as it hit him. Nothing. Just water.
The water ran. The steam climbed. My heart was going like I’d run the eight blocks again.
“I care what happens to you. Do you understand that?” My voice cracked and I let it crack. “I’ve been out of my mind, Luke. I sat in that kitchen and I couldn’t get a full breath, because nobody would tell me anything and I didn’t know if you were okay. That’s not nothing. That’s not a colleague.” I was nearly shouting now and I couldn’t get under it. “I worry about you all the time. I can’t shut it off. I worry about you because I love you.”
The word was out before I’d cleared it for takeoff.
It just left me so suddenly, I almost didn’t realize it.
The water shut off.
Time did a strange thing. It stopped, and went very loud in the stopping, the drip off the showerhead suddenly the largest sound in the world.
The curtain pulled back.
Luke turned around. Water running off him, off the dark bruise and the raw shoulder and all of it, his hair flat to his head, and on his face an expression I had never seen there in all the months of reading him. Stunned. Wide open.
I stood there with my hand still half raised from the shouting and felt the blood go out of my face.
“I” was as far as I got.
He moved fast for a man who’d told me he was stiff. His hand came out of the shower and closed in the front of my shirt, and he pulled, and I went, no resistance in me at all, over the lip of the tub and into the water and into him, shoes and clothes and all, and his mouth came down on mine before I’d got my feet under me.
It wasn’t the careful kiss of a careful man. It was the other thing. The thing all the carefulness had been holding back. His hand slid up into my hair and held my head where he wanted it and he kissed me like he’d been keeping it in a locked drawer for months and the lock had finally given, and the water came downover both of us, and I made a sound into his mouth I didn’t know I had in me.
“Say it again,” he said, against my lips. Rough. Wrecked. “The end part. Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you. I’m in love with you. I have been for longer than I let myself know it.” I had his face in both my hands now, the wet of him, careful of the cut over his eyebrow without deciding to be. “I’m sorry I did it in a shout.”
“Don’t be sorry.” His forehead came down against mine. His eyes had gone wet, and not from the shower. “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’ve been standing at the edge of saying that to you since a kitchen floor weeks ago and I couldn’t. I didn’t think I was allowed the word.” His thumb moved along my jaw. “Say it a third time. I’m greedy.”
“I love you,” I said, a third time, quiet now, the shout all gone out of it, just the true flat fact of it left. “There. It’s yours.”
He kissed me again, slower, and the slow was worse than the fast, the slow undid me completely.
I was soaked through and I didn’t care. He reached past me and turned the water back to warm, and his hands went to my shirt, the buttons, working them loose with fingers that weren’t quite steady. I stood there and let him, which after the whole speech about letting him in, I understood I was finally doing.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
