Page 98 of Night of Shadows
" Eat, Maeve."
I eat.
The lamb is the best thing he’s made. I tell him. He nods once. He doesn’t deflect the compliment. He doesn’t pretend he’s still learning. He’s reached the point in his cooking that he can hear ‘this is the best thing you have made’ and accept it with a single nod.
We talk about almost nothing.
I have been rehearsing testimony for the third week running, and I am sick of my own voice. Lex tells me he heard me practicing the same paragraph through the door this morning,fourteen times, and I tell him it is going to be twenty by the end of the week.
We talk about Cormac's coat at last Sunday's family dinner, which was a green tweed thing that Eleni accidentally complimented and which Cormac has now decided to wear to every Sunday dinner forever as Eleni's punishment.
We talk about the cloud Nora pointed at on the way home from daycare on Wednesday. Nora informed me it was, ‘a cloud that is trying.’ I had no idea what the cloud was trying. Nora doesn’t know what the cloud was trying. The cloud, presumably, knows.
Lex laughs at the cloud.
It is a real laugh. A small one. A laugh from the back of his chest. The laugh I have heard maybe nine times in the fifty-five days I have lived with him, the laugh that is not for me and not for himself but for our daughter, because our daughter has observed a cloud and decided it was making an effort. And that observation is the kind of thing that loosens the architecture in Lex Konstantinos's chest in a way I doubt nothing in the previous years of his life has.
I watch him laugh.
I think: ‘this is the man I am going to spend the rest of my life with.’
I think: ‘I have known this since the lake house, but I have not let myself say the sentence in this exact form before, and the sentence has been waiting forty-nine days to be said.’
I think: ‘he’s going to ask me. He’s not going to ask me tonight in words. He’s going to ask me tonight in another language.’
I think: ‘I am ready to answer.’
? ? ?
I clear the table.
I take his plate and my plate, and I walk them to the sink, and as I pass his chair, his hand catches my wrist.
Light. Not stopping me. Just registering.
I stop anyway. He stands up.
The plates are still in my hands. He takes them and sets them on the table. He turns me toward him with both hands at my hips, the bandaged arm now healed but still moving with the small care of a man who has learned to do certain motions slowly.
He looks at me. The candle is between us on the table, a small steady flame at hip height, and the kitchen behind him is still warm from the cooking. The brownstone is still, and the city outside the window is doing what the city does on a Saturday night in January in Boston.
Lex doesn’t speak. He cups my face. He kisses me.
The kiss is slow. The kiss doesn’t start at the lips and travel. The kiss is the lips and stays the lips, his mouth on mine, full attention, as if there is no other surface in this kitchen worth touching except the surface of my mouth in this moment. His hands stay on my face. He doesn’t wander. He doesn’t press. He kisses me the way a man kisses a woman when he’s decided that the kiss itself is what he wanted, and anything that comes after is a bonus.
I lean into him. The kiss deepens. Slow. Slow. The kind of slow that makes you understand the word.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine for one long second. He says, very quietly, "Maeve."
I say, "Yes."
I do not know what I am saying yes to. He doesn’t need me to know.
? ? ?
We walk down the hall.
Slow. He holds my hand. We do not run. We do not rush. We walk like a married couple at the end of a long evening who has decided that the bedroom is where the next part of the conversation is going to happen. The hall is dim. The night-light in Nora's empty bedroom doorway is on because we leave it on every night, even when she’s at Eleni's, because the architecture of the brownstone has decided that the hallway light is now a fixed star and we are not going to be the ones who turn it off.
