No Going Back
930 Words
She thought about it for two days.
Not in the anxious way she had thought about things in the early part of her life, when uncertainty meant danger and taking too long to decide could cost you everything. This was different. This was the thinking of someone who knew what she wanted and was making sure she was choosing it clearly, with eyes open, for the right reasons.
On Sunday she went to Club Noir and sat in her office for three hours doing the accounts and thinking about Damian Voss. She thought about the first night in the kitchen with the knife and the folder he had left for her to pick up on her own terms. She thought about the coffee and the newspaper and the Milan call and the laugh she had not heard before and the photograph of two boys in summer light.
She thought about foreheads together in lamplight.
She thought about what Marco had said. A man with genuine principles in this world is harder to read.
She thought that she had read him now. Clearly and thoroughly. And what she had found was not what she had expected and was also, undeniably, exactly what she wanted.
She drove back to Blackthorn Terrace on Sunday evening.
He was in the kitchen when she came in, which was where he usually was in the evenings now, and he looked up from the stove where he was doing something with the quiet competence he brought to cooking and she set her bag down by the door and crossed the kitchen and stood beside him.
Not on her side of the counter.
His side.
He went very still.
She looked at what he was making, which was the pasta again, the simple precise one that tasted like someone had made it with genuine intention, and she picked up the wooden spoon from beside the stove and stirred it once with the easy familiarity of someone who had decided to stop treating this kitchen like a place she was visiting.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"I know." His voice was even. She could feel the stillness of him beside her, the quality of someone holding something very carefully.
"I thought about it the way I think about everything. I looked at all the ways it could go wrong and all the structural risks and all the reasons it would be simpler not to." She kept stirring. "And then I thought about day seven."
She felt him turn to look at her.
She set the spoon down and turned to face him. They were close in the way that standing beside someone at a stove made you close, and she looked up at him with the directness she used when she had decided to stop being careful and he looked back at her with the openness that was still new enough on his face to make something catch in her chest every time she saw it.
"I'm not someone who does things halfway," she said. "You know that about me by now."
"I know that about you," he agreed quietly.
"So I need you to understand that this isn't me being swept up in proximity and late nights and the particular way this house feels at half past midnight in the rain." She held his gaze. "I've thought about it clearly and I know what I'm choosing and I'm choosing it."
His hand came up slowly and settled at her jaw the same careful way it had in the sitting room, and she felt the warmth of it all the way through.
"Sienna," he said.
"I know," she said, for the second time. Because she did.
He kissed her the way she had expected he would do everything, with complete attention and no wasted movement, unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world and intended to use it well. She felt the kitchen shift around them, the warm familiar room becoming something new, the same way a city looked different after rain, the same shapes made strange and vivid by the light.
She kissed him back with the directness she brought to everything that mattered.
When they finally separated the pasta was slightly overcooked and neither of them cared at all.
He looked at her in the warm kitchen light with an expression she had not seen before and which she understood, immediately and completely, was one he had not shown anyone in a very long time.
She reached up and put her hand flat against his chest, just for a moment, feeling the steady beat of him.
"The pasta," she said.
He laughed again. She was collecting those laughs the way she collected useful intelligence, carefully, for keeps.
They ate the slightly overcooked pasta at the kitchen table and talked about Prague and Milan and nothing important and everything important and the night settled around the house and neither of them was in any hurry for it to end.
Later, when she was back in her room with the key in her hand and the city quiet outside her window, she thought about the clean feeling of having chosen something clearly and completely and without reservation.
She thought about four months and what they looked like now.
She thought about after the contract.
She slept well for the first time since she had arrived at Blackthorn Terrace, deeply and without waking, in the old house that had stopped feeling like someone else's space some time ago and had simply, without announcement, become somewhere she lived.
- Writer
