Chapter 27

“You brought him here?” Ryan asked, following Wallace out the door to his rusted hatchback. She was wearing Olivia’s bunny slippers but no coat, and the November wind off the Delaware cut right through her. “In that?”

“Can we leave my car out of this? And yes, I brought him here, because for two days he’s been doing nothing but drinking and talking about you. And I can’t take any more of it. So you get him.”

“What if I don’t want him?”

“This is your husband?” Nora asked over her shoulder.

Wallace nodded.

“Weren’t you just saying none of this was about a man?” Nora asked, and she could hear the smirk in her sister’s voice.

“Wallace, this is my sister Nora. Nora, this is Wallace.” They exchanged cool nods. Oh man, it suddenly occurred to her why she’d liked Wallace so much. He and her sister were so much alike.

“Ryan,” Wallace said. “He wants to make things right.”

“Then he shouldn’t have made them so damn wrong.”

“Bring him in,” Nora said.

“Nora!” she protested.

“Let’s get him inside,” Wallace said, ignoring her. Nora and Wallace worked without her to get Harrison out of the car and into the house. They dropped him on his back on the couch and Wallace pulled the afghan over him.

“There you go,” he said. “One husband delivered. I left Noelle at the hotel, so I’m going to get back to her.”

“You can’t just leave him here,” she said.

“I can,” Wallace said. “I am. He’s in bad shape, Ryan, and I think he needs you.”

“Well, I’m sick of being what he needs when he’s in bad shape!”

Olivia was on the stairs and Daddy came in from the kitchen. Nora was barely keeping a straight face.

Wonderful, it was now a family affair.

“Whatever,” Wallace said, throwing his hands in the air like it was that easy. “Work it out. I gotta go—I’m just about asleep on my feet.”

Nora shut the door behind Wallace.

Harrison was wearing his suit pants and a white shirt that looked like he’d spilled either bourbon or coffee on it. She leaned down to sniff him. Bourbon. Definitely bourbon.

When she’d said come and find me, she’d never expected him to come in person. She expected one of those jump-out-of-the-bushes guys who deliver envelopes and say “you’ve been served.”

But he was here. On the couch. Grandma’s crocheted American flag blanket tossed over his shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” she breathed.

He snored in answer.

“That’s your husband?” Olivia asked, seemingly fascinated and grossed out as only a teenage girl could be.

“Sort of,” she whispered.

“Sort of like Paul was a sort of husband?” Daddy asked, his tone incredibly clear. Has he hit you? Does he hurt you and make you think it’s your fault? Does he demean you and take from you?

She shook her head. “Whole different realm of sort of.”

Daddy took off his glasses. “Well, you better come on into the kitchen and explain it to us.”

Harrison tried to scrape away the metal band around his skull without opening his eyes, but somehow it wasn’t coming off. It just kept getting tighter. And disturbingly, he couldn’t really feel his hands. And it was so hot in the condo. Like super hot. Had Ryan turned off the AC again? She liked to make these stupid penguin jokes and they’d been waging a stealth war over the thermometer.

“Is he waking up?”

“I think so.”

He pried open his eyes only to find five people staring down at him. He blinked, thinking he might be dreaming, but no, it was real. In a surreal twist on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was lying down on a couch, surrounded by one girl and four old men with various amounts of hair on their heads and faces and in their noses, wearing what looked like head-to-toe camouflage outfits.

The Dwarfs were going on a military mission.

“Where am I?” he tried to say, but it only came out as a creak from a throat that felt like asphalt and gravel.

“You want coffee?” the girl said.

He tried to say no thanks but it came out like “blergh firfe.”

“He foreign?” one of the old guys asked.

The one with wild white hair and reading glasses perched on the end of his nose shook his head. “No clue.”

“What do you know?” another man asked.

“I know he’s on my couch and we need to get going.”

“We taking him with?”

Harrison tried to say “no,” but it came out as sort of a “gaaaaahhhh” sound. He had no idea where they were going, but he wanted no part of it.

“I’m not hunting with foreigners.” One of the old guys walked away.

“You gonna be all right with him?” the leader of the Dwarfs asked the girl.

He realized she was sitting on the arm of the couch he was lying on and he was hot because he was practically swaddled in an American flag.

What the hell?

He found his hands and rubbed at his eyes. Not a flag, a blanket that looked like a flag.

“Sure,” the girl said. Something about her seemed really familiar. The smile. Or her eyes.

How do I know her?

“If I have trouble, Ryan’s upstairs,” she said, and he sat up. Ryan?

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Philadelphia.” The girl stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Olivia. You’re my brother-in-law.”

Brother-in-law. Olivia. Philadelphia.

Holy Christ, that wasn’t a dream. Wallace and Noelle had driven him here to try and win back his wife.

“This … isn’t the best first impression.” He tried to sit up and get unswaddled at the same time, which made him lurch right into a beat-up coffee table, sending an empty coffee mug onto the rug. He tried to pick that up and nearly bashed his head on the corner of the table.

God. Please. Kill me now.

“And I’m Robert Kaminski. Your father-in-law,” the white-haired man said, glaring at him over the reading glasses.

He finally fought free of the blanket and sat upright. His father-in-law stepped back to give him room with the two remaining Dwarfs, who weren’t actually Dwarfs at all but clearly former soldiers, if the camo was authentic.

“I’m Harrison,” he said. “Harrison Montgomery.”

His sister-in-law winced and waved her hand under her nose. “You stink, dude.”

Awesome.

“Mr. Kaminski,” Harrison said. “It’s good to meet you.”

Robert ignored the hand Harrison held out to him. He was short and square, his white hair giving him a certain Einstein mad genius look, and it was very obvious he was not impressed with Harrison.

“I … ah … how long have I been here?” Harrison asked. It was dark outside the windows.

“It’s five a.m.,” Olivia said, jumping off the couch. “You’ve been passed out for about twelve hours.”

Harrison scrubbed a hand over his face. The last thing he remembered was a truck stop in Virginia; he’d wanted to go home, having sobered up enough to realize that showing up on Ryan’s doorstep unannounced might not be the best idea. But Noelle got him another fifth of bourbon and they continued north.

One of the older men in camouflage stuck his head around the doorway on the far side of the room. “We better get going, Robert,” he said.

“Go wake up your sister,” Robert told Olivia. “I don’t trust this man.”

“I’m not—” He didn’t quite know how to finish that thought. I’m not going to hurt anyone?

He’d already done that to Ryan. He’d hurt her so badly, she’d had no choice but to come back here to people who’d shoved her out of their lives as effectively as he had.

Guilt and shame rippled through him again. For the last two days since she’d left for Philly, anytime that happened, he’d tried to numb the pain with alcohol.

Just like his father must have.

“We’re going hunting,” Robert said. “I’ll be back by dinner. Olivia, wake up your sister and get yourself to school.” He lifted a gnarled finger to Harrison’s face. “Don’t steal nothing.”

And then he was gone, taking the rest of the men with him, leaving Harrison feeling about three inches tall.

“Don’t worry about him,” Olivia said. “He’s just like that.”

“I’m not … I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

Olivia nodded, looking so much like Ryan it hurt to imagine the days when Ryan was that young and that trusting. “You’re here to get Ryan back?”

That had been the plan, if he remembered correctly, that he and Wallace had cooked up, around dawn the day after the election. He’d realized that losing the election didn’t hurt half as bad as losing Ryan. As losing what they had been building, as losing the hope of a future different than his past.

Something better.

He’d told Wallace that and Wallace, the secret romantic, had called Noelle and convinced her to drive them to Pennsylvania so Harrison could woo back his wife.

It seemed impossibly stupid now, sober and sick and foul smelling.

Woo her back, what a joke.

“What have I done?” he groaned, burying his aching head in his hands.

“Look, you’re here,” Olivia said. “You showed up. My piano teacher says that’s half the battle. Just showing up. So, next what you’re going to do is shower, because you stink. And then Ryan’s bedroom is the second door on the right. Go say hi.”

“She’s not going to want to see me.”

“Nora says the day Ryan isn’t interested in seeing a guy is the day we win the lottery.”

“Nora doesn’t know your sister,” he said, anger cleaning out the sludge in his veins. Along with this father of hers trying to give him grief for hurting Ryan, when he’d spent the last six years hurting her.

If this was where Ryan came when things got bad, she needed a softer place to land.

Olivia’s mouth twisted in some unreadable expression of doubt or agreement, he had no idea which.

But then she handed him the mug of coffee in her hands and pointed to the stairs. “We won’t know unless you try.”

In his hung-over state, Olivia was totally the boss of him and he did as she told him, climbing the stairs up to a narrow second floor and the bathroom at the top of the steps. It was old-fashioned, covered in pink hexagonal tiles that matched the sink and the tub with the black-and-white-and-purple shower curtain.

He imagined Ryan growing up in this bathroom, doing her hair, putting on lip gloss. Figuring out her beauty. He wanted to hear about it, about all of it. Those stories she told him, they were funny and sweet, but there was a darker side, and he wanted that too.

All of her, that was what he wanted.

After his shower he couldn’t face putting on his clothes again, so wrapping a thin Snoopy towel around his waist he gathered up his dirty stuff and walked over to the second door on the right. The pale wooden door covered in an elaborate piano practice and performance schedule was closed, and he sincerely hoped he had the right room and wasn’t about to see Wes again.

Heart in hand, he eased the door open and to his relief, his wife’s scent curled out around him. Like a cartoon, it circled his head and coalesced into a finger beckoning him forward. He stepped into the shadows of the room and saw in the light from the open door his wife’s body on the bed, covered in blankets, her dark hair on the white pillow.

His hands got damp at the sight of her, and his stomach, already fragile and unhappy, squeezed itself into a tiny space behind his liver.

He was nervous. Nervous like he had never been before.

And he didn’t know what to do. Getting into bed with her seemed like a presumption of the worst kind. But going back downstairs in a towel was ludicrous.

“You coming in?” she asked, lifting her head from the pillow, her eyes glittery in the half-dark.

“I didn’t … do you want me to?”

“You’re letting in cold air, so come in or leave.”

Not quite a welcome, but after the scene in the hotel suite, he knew she wasn’t going to make this easy. And he didn’t deserve to have it made easy.

He closed the door behind him and tossed his dirty stuff in the corner. The room was tiny, the double bed taking up most of it, so he climbed into it from the foot, until he was lying down next to Ryan. The pillows were thin little pancakes and he doubled them up under his head.

“Hi,” he said, unable to help smiling. Because she was here. And she was pretty with her frown and the messy hair and the crease from the sheet over her face. And he’d missed her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, making it very clear she was not happy to see him.

He shifted on the bed, lying on his side, propping his head up on his hand, and her eyes followed the movement. Stroked over his arms, his bare chest, down his stomach.

The desire was unmistakable.

Well, well, he thought, maybe she’s not as mad as I thought.

“I wanted to apologize, for all the stuff I said in the hotel room.”

“All the stuff?” she said, her tone cold. Mocking. He should have come up with prettier words, but he was in ruins. Hung over, exhausted. A dog relegated to a doghouse.

“I never wanted to hurt you.”

“It seemed to me like for most of our relationship that’s all you’ve wanted to do.”

“I’m sorry … I’m sorry it seems that way. In the beginning,” he said.

“And then again, at the end.”

“No.” He shook his head, sure in that at least. “I was mad, but not at you. For you, yes.”

She snorted like she didn’t believe him, and he was all out of pretense.

“I want to start over again. I want a chance to make it work, to try and see if what we have is real.”

“You don’t know? You can’t figure out what feelings are real and which ones are fake? You’re a bigger mess than I thought.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Then what do you mean?”

He took his life in his hands to touch the side of her face, the fall of hair over her shoulder. A small study in softness, delicate variances between velvet and silk.

“No contracts. No agreements. Just you and me. I don’t want you to feel like you have to do something because of a piece of paper and I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage—”

Her open-mouthed kiss silenced him.

Stunned him.

Made him glad he’d used the toothbrush he recognized as hers in the bathroom.

We are kissing now. We were fighting and now we’re kissing.

“What—”

“Shut up.”

She was giving him no time to process it. She licked at him. Sucked at him. His lips, his tongue. Her hands slid down his body, over his belly to his cock beneath the towel.

Now or never, her touch said.

And he absolutely wanted now.

Again, his brain was kind of primordial goo, but he figured if they were having sex that had to be a good sign. Relieved and ecstatic, his arms swept around her, hauling her body up against his. He pulled down the blankets she was under and tugged her tank top up over her head, revealing her beautiful breasts, the swell of her stomach, and he fell on her like a man whose execution had been stayed. He kissed her skin, sucked on her nipples, and cupped her flesh in his hands with more gratitude than he thought he was capable of feeling.

It is going to be okay. We are going to be okay.

That was how he translated her exigency.

She kicked her legs free from the blankets and rolled over onto her back and he followed her, not done with his gratitude or her breasts.

Her fingers ran through his damp hair, sending cold drops of water onto his shoulders. He was surprised they didn’t sizzle against his skin.

And then she pushed on his head. The instructions were clear and he was more than happy to comply, and he kissed his way down over her stomach, rubbed his cheeks against the curve of her belly, and felt a flutter of something there against his cheek. And then another, a solid thump against the taut flesh of her abdomen. His heart tripped over itself and blood flooded his body, prickly and hot.

“Is that—”

“Shhh,” she said, and kept pushing him down.

Later, he thought, they would talk about it later. Because this urgency of hers, this command, it was so fucking exciting. She owned him right now; down to his bones he was hers.

He slid down, pushing her legs out wide with his body. She curled one long, smooth leg over his back and he felt utterly surrounded by her. Cocooned in her softness and her scent and her sleepy warmth. It was sexy and real and home in a way.

In a basic, elemental way.

I belong here. Right here. All my life this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve wanted.

“Lick me,” she breathed, and he opened her with his fingers, spread the pink lips, breathing over the revealed flesh until she twitched and groaned and arched toward him. “Now.”

He chuckled as he set his mouth on her. Careful and reverent, trying to let her in on his feelings by the way his tongue circled the hood of her clit.

“Harder,” she whispered, arching into his mouth, lifting her hips into his face. “Suck me.”

Oh God. He sucked her into his mouth, worked his tongue over her clit. She didn’t want soft. She wanted hard. Fierce.

And he felt the answer rise up his blood.

“Use your fingers.”

He slid his hand between them, easing a finger into the damp, clinging heat of her body where he could feel the twitch of her muscles.

“More.”

He groaned against her skin, sliding another finger into her. She arched against the bed, her muscles strung taut. His mouth, his fingers, they were tools put to her use and he fucked her, sucked her, until she was gripping his hair in her fingers, licks of pain radiating down his skull, across his neck, his back, down to his hips and around to his cock until he felt like he was made of her electricity.

“God … yes!” she cried and groaned and shook, and he held himself still against her. Still so he could feel all of it, every twitch and pulse.

She let go of his hair and he crawled up over her body, nosed away the arms she’d thrown over her face. Her cheeks were pink, sweat rolled down the side of her face, and when her eyes blinked open he smiled down at her, feeling this moment blend into every future moment between them.

“Hi,” he breathed and leaned down to kiss her, but she ducked sideways and then pushed against his shoulder, until he rolled away from her.

His brain was slow and muddy and his body electrified and single-minded, so it took him a second of watching her pull on clothes from her bag at the side of the bed before he caught on that she was leaving.

“Ryan?”

“You were always so worried about taking advantage of me.”

He leaned up to kiss her neck, to cup his hand over her shoulder, but she shrugged away and stood.

“You know what makes what we have not taking advantage?”

She waited for him to answer, but he didn’t say anything until she turned around. Something was happening, some tidal shift, and he had no control over it. And he could see the anger in her eyes, hot and mean, and he braced himself for what was going to come.

Ryan was going to tear him apart.

This is how she felt, he thought with stabbing premonition, in that hotel suite.

“Love,” she spat. “Love makes it all right. It makes everything we’ve done a gift freely given and joyfully received. And I could have freely given you everything I had, but you couldn’t have received it as a gift. Because you don’t know how to do that. You took advantage of me, Harrison, because you don’t love me.”

He got up on his knees in the bed and reached for her. Luckily, the room was so small she had nowhere to go and he had her hands in his before she could maneuver around the bed.

“Ryan—”

“Now I’ve taken advantage of you. We’re even.” She didn’t have to pull her hands too hard; he let her go. The stack of his clothes he’d set by the dresser got picked up and flung in his face. “Get dressed and go.”