Chapter 15: Unlocked

I heard the street door at ten past nine.

I was standing in the middle of the flat in my bare feet, with the lamp on and the mattress made.

I had changed my shirt three times.

His boots came up the stairs slowly, and he stopped on the landing.

"Phoebe."

"It's open."

He came in and shut the door behind him, and he turned the lock himself.

"You said unlocked," I said.

"I'm not leaving it that way tonight."

He stood there in his canvas jacket with his hands at his sides, breathing hard from the stairs.

I crossed the floor and pushed the jacket off his shoulders, and it dropped.

"You get one speech," I said. "Make it short."

"I'm not going to be noble."

"Good."

"I'm going to do everything you said in front of that woman with the cookies."

"Then do it."

He kissed me.

It wasn't the kiss from the rainy night.

That one had been hunger with a brake on it, and this one had no brake.

His hand went into my hair and took the pins out, one after another, and dropped them on the floor.

My back met the wall beside the window.

I pulled his shirt up over his head and put my mouth on his chest.

The hair there was rough and warm and smelled of cedar.

He made a sound I had never heard from a man.

"Mattress," I said against his skin.

"In a minute."

He undid my buttons with fingers that were not steady.

When my blouse slid off he stopped and looked at me by the lamp.

I wanted to cover myself.

I was thirty-five, and for four years my body had been a project that kept failing.

It had been a long time since anyone had looked at it for any other reason.

"Don't," Abel said, and caught my wrist before it reached my chest.

"I haven't wanted anyone in so long," I said. "I don't know if I'm any good at it."

"Your body did everything right, Phoebe. It was never the one failing."

His thumb moved on the inside of my wrist, the same place as the night of the handkerchief.

"Now let me look."

So I let him.

He went down on his knees in front of me on the floorboards, with his hands at my hips.

He kissed the skin under my navel and then lower, slowly, until I had to hold the windowsill.