Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
And I've waited a year and a lifetime and one long storm for this, and I'm not about to wait through a single second more.
And I do what I've wanted to do since an alley and a diner and a booth full of stolen dumplings.
I kiss him first. And I take my time about it. A whole year of wanting him poured slow into one kiss, no script to read from, no lesson to hide inside, no page number left between us and nothing held back. For one breath he goes still against me, the old reflex, the wall coming up out of pure habit. Then it comes down, and this time it stays down.
Mine, he thinks, the word breaking loose in him at last, the one he'd swallowed a thousand times and never once let himself keep. Me, crossing a cold alley to kiss him first, a year of hurt behind us and not one wall left standing between. And that, more than the kiss, is the thing that undoes him. His arms come around me like he's been drowning and I'm the first air in two years, and he kisses me back like a man who's finally, finally stopped guarding the door and walked all the way through it. He kisses me like he has the rest of his life to do it and every intention of spending all of it right here. Slow. Sure. Like he's learning me by heart and is never once going to need the notes again.
Right there in the alley. In the cold. Under the ugly buzzing light.
The best kiss of my life, and I've had lessons.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER, I'M standing on a red carpet in a dress that fits like it was scared not to, and my husband is trying very hard not to strangle a photographer.
"He's four feet away," I murmur, waving at a wall of light. "That's a legal distance."
"It's a rude distance."
"You think every distance under a mile is rude."
"Only where you're concerned." His hand finds the small of my back, exactly where it went the first time we ever danced, and steers me down the line like a man escorting the crown jewels through a bad neighborhood.
The film is the biggest thing I've ever done. My name is above the title. There's a version of me, a broke girl on a diner floor with somebody else's heart and two small suitcases, who wouldn't believe a single second of this night, and I carry her down the carpet with me because she earned it too.
Later, we come home to a place that doesn't have a single locked door left in it.
And he takes his time with me. That's the part that's only ours, the one I'll never tell anyone. The most controlled man I have ever known, the one who used to ration his own smiles like they cost him blood, is the one who comes undone the slowest, on purpose, like he has decided we have the whole rest of our lives and he means to spend every last minute of them.
He undoes the dress one clasp at a time and lets it fall and doesn't hurry after it. He kisses the hollow under my jaw where my pulse always gives me away. He kisses the scar down the center of my chest, the one he used to look at like it hurt him to stand near, and kisses it now like it's the reason he gets to have any of this at all. My hands are in his hair. His name is the only word I have left in me.
"Maximo," I breathe, the name that is only ever his now, and I feel what it still does to him, reaching some room in him that stayed bricked up for years and isn't anymore.
He says my name back into my skin like a vow he can't quite believe he's allowed to make. And when there's nothing left between us, no wall, no rule, no page number, no careful arm's length he used to keep like a religion, he moves in me slow and sure and shaking just a little, a man holding the one thing he was certain he'd never once be allowed to keep. I come apart in his arms with my whole loud heart. He follows me with my name in his mouth. And for once in his careful, rationed life, he lets himself be loud about being happy, too.
Afterward, with the dress a puddle on the floor and the city humming far below the windows, I lie against him in the dark and put my ear over the strong, sure sound of his heart.
He rests his hand over mine.
Over the one that isn't mine. That was never mine.
"I used to think I was guarding Mary's heart," he tells me, into my hair, his hand warm over the beat of it. "I was wrong. Mary's gift brought you to me. But every beat I love now is yours."