Now She's Gone: A Novel (19 page)

She had changed. Maybe her doing this wasn’t such a bad idea.

“I’m sorry,” I said and kissed her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

She held my face still and stared into my eyes for a long moment. She looked a little tired around the eyes, nothing a little rest wouldn’t take care of. But she was still stunning.

“If you ever do it again,” she said. “I’ll kill you.”

I grinned. For some reason, if she had said it was okay, I would have been disappointed. It meant she cared; she still cared enough about me to say something like that, even if she really didn’t mean it. It said she still had passion for me. It told me everything I needed to hear.

“I want to fuck you now,” she said and climbed into my lap, straddling me. “I want your dick inside me and I want to be close to you.”

I got hard just from that.

She began to suck on my neck. I pulled her head back and sucked on hers. Then I threw her down on the sofa and climbed on top of her. She opened her legs and grabbed my face, kissing me. It was the best kiss I’d ever had, would ever have. That kiss told me that this hadn’t broken us and that we had weathered the storm and whatever came next wouldn’t break us; we were too strong for that.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” she said, staring into my eyes.

I moved back and stared into her eyes. “So did you find out?”

“What?”

“You said you wanted to find out if you could live without me, right?”

She nodded.

“Did you find out?” I asked.

“I did,” she said and stared me dead in the eye.

“And?”

“I can’t.”

I kissed her then, all of her, all of her body, loving the way she tasted. Loving that she was no longer crying or hurting. Loving to be near her. Loving that she had let me near her. Loving to know she didn’t leave because she hated me. She had many reasons why she had left. Maybe she just thought she should. Maybe she thought it was over. Maybe all of this had been a test. She had to see if I loved her, see if she could live without me. She couldn’t face a divorce. Another letdown in a long line of letdowns.

But the main reason she had left was because she had wanted me to follow.

She didn’t tell me these things, but I knew that was the real reason. I had found out all about her. And I wanted to know more.

What else could I do? I took her home. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where’s all my stuff?”