Two weeks later, on a night when Noah had a sleepover at a friend’s house and the whole cottage felt too quiet, too full of Damian, I finally told him about Michael.
We were curled on the couch, my back against his chest, his arms around me, and I found myself talking before I’d decided to.
“He didn’t die coming home from work,” I said. “That’s what everyone thinks. That’s what I let them think.”
Damian went very still, listening.
“He was in the car with someone. A woman from his office. They were parked at the lookout above the gorge, the two of them, together, while I thought he was working late.” My voice didn’t shake, which surprised me; I’d cried this story out so many times alone that I’d worn the shaking away. “A logging truck lost its brakes on the hill. Hit the car side-on. Killed them both instantly.”
“Sarah…”
“I found out he’d been cheating on me the same week I found out he was dead. I didn’t get to be angry at him first. I just had to grieve a man who’d broken my heart and hadn’t given me the chance to hate him for it.” I looked down at my hands. “I was seven months pregnant with Noah when they told me.”
He turned me gently in his arms until I was facing him, and there was nothing pitying in his expression, only a kind of fierce tenderness that undid something in my chest.
“You didn’t deserve that,” he said. “None of it. Not the lie, and not the raising a son alone in the wreckage of it.”
“People don’t say that. They say I’m strong. They say I’ve done so well.” My eyes were stinging now, the tears finally coming, six years late. “Nobody says I deserved better.”
“You did.” He wiped a tear from my cheek with a thumb gone cool against my heated skin. “You deserved to be taken care of. Every day since. I’m sorry it took this long for someone to start.”
And then he kissed me, not the careful, testing kiss from before, but something deeper, something that tasted like every unspoken thing I’d swallowed for six years. His hand slid to the back of my neck, tilting my head the way he wanted it, and when I made a small, helpless sound against his mouth, I felt him go still for a heartbeat, as though he were memorizing it.
“Tell me if this is too much,” he murmured against my jaw, his lips tracing a line of heat down to my throat. “Tell me and I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop.” My fingers were already fisted in his shirt. “Damian, don’t you dare stop.”
He lifted me into his arms as though I weighed nothing at all and carried me down the hallway, and I felt the low, rough sound he made when my mouth found the cool skin of his throat in return, felt it as much as heard it, a vibration that went straight through me.
In the bedroom he laid me down like something he intended to take his time with, and he did. He undressed me slowly, deliberately, pressing his mouth to every inch of skin he uncovered as though he were reading a book he never wanted to finish, my collarbone, the inside of my wrist, the curve of my waist, until I was trembling under hands that never once hurried, no matter how I arched against him, no matter how many times I whispered his name like a plea.
“Look at me,” he said once, low, when I turned my face into the pillow, overwhelmed by how thoroughly I was being watched, being wanted. I looked at him. His eyes had gone dark, pupils blown wide, and there was nothing careful left in his expression, only a hunger he’d clearly been holding on a very short leash for a very long time. “I want to watch you.”
I gave up trying to hide after that.
He was patient where I expected haste and reverent where I expected only need, taking me apart with an unhurried thoroughness that left no part of me unattended, no doubt unanswered, every question my body had been asking since the day he caught that basketball, finally given a slow, devastating reply. When his weight finally settled over me and our bodies came together fully, he held himself there a moment, forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard, and murmured something that might have been my name in a language I didn’t recognise before he began to move, slow at first, then less so, until the whole room narrowed down to the sound of his voice in my ear and the cool, steady weight of him and the heat building low and relentless until it broke over me in waves I felt all the way to my fingertips.
Afterward, boneless and wrecked in the best way, I lay in the circle of his arms and cried again, not from grief this time, but from the shock of being wanted so thoroughly, so gently, after so long believing I was simply a woman other people managed rather than desired.
“Stay,” I whispered against his chest.
“Always,” he said, and I didn’t yet understand how literally he meant it.