Page 100 of Night of Shadows
I have heard her. I have heard the word in the careful voice she uses when she’s telling the truth before she’s worked out how to say it, and I have heard the word as the answer to the question I have not asked aloud in either language.
My hand has stopped on her hip.
My face is pressed against her throat.
I am still.
I am still because if I move, I will lose the second one between her ‘yes’ and what comes after, and I am keeping it. Because I know what I have been given. I know that the woman beneath me has just answered a question I have not asked, and the answering is the more sacred thing because she heard the question in the silence I have been carrying it in.
I lift my head. I look at her.
Her eyes are wet. Her hair is on the pillow. Her hand is on my jaw. She’s looking at me the way she looked at me on the dock at the lake house in October, the way she looked at me on the morning she handed me Nora, at Eleni's kitchen door three weeks ago, the way she looked at me from across the federalbuilding lobby on the day we got married. The look is the look of a woman who has decided. The looking is the saying.
I move slowly.
She breathes in. I breathe out. I am inside her, and we are not chasing release. We are answering each other. The peak is not the point. The peak is what the body does because the body has decided. We are both inside the same architecture and we are moving toward the same release with the even patience of two people who have decided the release is the seal on the answer.
She comes first.
Quietly. Without sound. Her hand tightens at my jaw, and her body tightens around me, and she breathes the way she breathes when she’s been keeping a thing in her chest and is finally putting it down. I follow her over. I do not say anything. I press my face against her throat, and I let go. The release is small. The release is not the point. The release is the body completing what the soul has already finished.
I stay inside her.
I do not move off her. I do not roll away.
I stay because she’s just said yes, and the yes is still in the room, and I am not going to put weight or distance between us in the second after the yes.
I do not say ‘eísai diki mou.’
I am keeping the Greek for the special moment I will use it. She hasn’t been told the Greek word for love yet. I am holding it. I am holding it the way I have been holding the ring for forty-two days, the way I have been holding the question for longer.
I say one word.
Her name.
"Maeve."
She breathes against my throat.
She says, "Yes."
Same word. Different register. The first ‘yes’ was the answer. This ‘yes’ is the seal.
I roll us, after a long time, so that her head is on my chest.
My hand is on her back. Her hand is flat on my sternum. Her hair is fanned across my collarbone. The duvet is half on, half off the bed. The candle on the bedside table is still burning. I will not blow it out for another half hour. I want it burning while she’s in this position on me. I want the small steady flame to be a witness to what just happened.
Maeve speaks first.
Quiet. Against my chest. The voice she uses when she’s been thinking and has worked out what to say.
She says, "You said ‘take your time.’ When Eleni was at the door."
"Yes."
"You said yes to her in Greek."
"Yes."
