Chapter 23: The Room at the Top of the Stairs

The east wing of the farmhouse had a bedroom with a slanted ceiling and a window over the orchard.

Rhett shut the door behind us at ten at night and turned the old brass key.

Effie was asleep across the hall in the room with the painted stars, with her door open a crack and Gerald on her pillow.

Edith was downstairs, and had announced at dinner that she was going to bed with the television up loud.

"She is not even a little bit deaf," Rhett said.

"I know."

"She did it so we'd have the wing."

"I know," I said. "Be quiet, Ketterman, and come here."

We had never done it slowly.

The motel had been snow and one night.

The cottage had been grief and anger and five years of hunger, twice.

This was the first time we had a door that locked, a bed that was ours, and a morning to wake up in.

I think we both felt it at once.

He stood in front of me in the lamplight, and his hands came up to my face.

"I love you," I said.

His whole body went still.

I had not planned it.

It had been sitting in my chest since the kitchen chair, and it simply came out.

"Say it again," he said roughly.

"I love you. I loved a man whose last name I didn't know, and I love the one who held my daughter's head under the tap."

He kissed me.

It was not the starved kiss from the parking lot.

It was long and deep and unhurried, and he made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my knees.

He undressed me one button at a time.

He pulled the green sweater over my head and kissed each shoulder as it came free.

He found the scar on my hip, the faint white one from the pregnancy, and ran his thumb over it, and looked at me.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Night I Gave My Best Friend's Brother a Child from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.