Chapter 25

CHAPTER

25

PRESENT

Irving to Cambridge is nearly a four-hour drive, and worse on Thanksgiving. We agreed to carpool, which I thought very little of at the time, but now—crammed into my Volvo with the heater blasting and Reagan in the back seat, her usual road trip playlist cycling through The Lumineers and Vance Joy—it all feels very domestic. Were it anyone else, it would probably be too soon for all this, but it’s Teddy, so it’s almost too easy. Familiar.

As soon as Reagan moves past her determination to embarrass me by rattling off stories about how I was always hogging the computer to Skype with Teddy whenever she wanted to play Club Penguin, we settle into a comfortable rhythm, alternating between talking and listening to music. When we pass over Bay Bridge, Teddy sinks in his seat and mumbles, “God, I forgot how long this thing is.” I laugh and Reagan teases him. It’s almost too perfect: a clear, windswept November day, the blue expanse of Chesapeake Bay stretched out on either side of us.

When we pull into my parents’ driveway a little under an hour later, Teddy’s the first to get out, groaning and stretching his legs.

“There they are!” Mom calls from the porch. Her Farrah Fawcett hair is fluffed away from her face, the grays half-hidden with box dye, and she’s wearing a puffer vest and riding boots like she took a cue from an old Pinterest board. “How was traffic?”

I hold out a hand and tilt it back and forth, so-so, as Reagan bounds up the empty driveway and flings herself at our mother. The white work truck is gone, an oil stain the only evidence of its usual parking place. I remove my sunglasses and tuck them into the neck of my sweater as I draw near the porch. “Where’s Dad?” I ask.

“Sent him to the store,” she says, waving us inside. “Ran out of Old Bay.”

Teddy shoots me a quizzical look as we cross over the threshold, and I know exactly what it’s about, because what does Old Bay Seasoning have to do with Thanksgiving? But there’s little need to explain when we’re greeted by the salty tang of seafood on the air, a stainless steel vat bubbling on the stove. The Thanksgiving crab boil: a Fernsby family tradition. A long folding table is erected in the living room, surrounded by mismatched chairs and draped in a checkered tablecloth.

“So, Teddy, I’m curious,” Mom says, stirring the large pot with a wooden spoon. “Where have you been all these years?”

I sigh through my nose and toss a vexed look at her back, though she doesn’t notice. Wasting no time, apparently, but I should’ve known better than to think my mother would beat around the bush.

“Ah—” Teddy glances at me uncertainly, like he expects some guidance, but I have none to offer. He’s on his own, here. “Pittsburgh, mostly.”

“Mmm.” She doesn’t turn away from the stove, but I can tell, just from this small, noncommittal noise, that she’s not satisfied with his answer. He could give her a breakdown of every place he’d set foot in the past decade, down to the latitude and longitude, and it wouldn’t quite be the explanation she was looking for.

The front door creaks open, followed by the rustle of grocery bags. “I see a car out front,” Dad calls. He alternates between his boots clomping and the click of his cane as he crosses over to the kitchen, depositing the bags on the counter. He pulls me into one of his sideways hugs and plants a scratchy kiss on my temple. “Clare Bear,” he says. He leans over to plant a kiss on Mom’s cheek, and she practically glows. All those months of arguing, years of struggling to get by, they’re a distant memory.

Dad’s ironclad stare has shifted to my date. He thrusts out a calloused hand. “Teddy. It’s been a while.” He manages to make it sound like a warning, but Teddy takes it in stride.

“Where’s The President?” Dad asks.

“She ran to her room as soon as we got here,” I say. “Or my room, maybe.” She’d mentioned something about wanting to go through my old clothes, which my parents never had the heart to donate. Apparently the low-rise jeans I swore I’d never wear again are back in style.

“The sewing room, you mean,” Mom corrects me—never mind that I’m supposed to be sleeping in it. We packed our bags to stay overnight rather than make the four-hour drive back to Irving after dinner. There was still an extra bed, last I checked.

Thanksgiving dinner consists of Maryland blue crab and corn on the cob, boiled with a generous helping of Old Bay Seasoning and served with melted butter. It’s just the five of us; my grandmother refuses to leave her house in Knoxville these days. Things are a little stiff, at first, but my parents ease up on Teddy once we all start eating, and by the end of the evening they’ve dropped their line of questioning entirely, just happy to have somebody here for the holiday. Mom serves her red velvet cupcakes for dessert.

My parents know better than to bother trying to insist that Teddy sleep on the couch, but it’s more awkward telling them good night, knowing that they know damn well we’re going to be sleeping in my old room together. A part of me wishes they would’ve just pretended to be old-fashioned about things and saved us all the weirdness. I shut the bedroom door and lock it behind us. There’s a plastic organizer full of sewing supplies and a brand-new Singer sitting on the dresser, still in the box, but otherwise, it’s like a room frozen in time. The walls are papered in album covers I printed off Photobucket and the bookcase in the corner overflows with used books, colorful sticky flags still peeking out of tattered pages.

“They seemed to warm up to me again,” Teddy says, “after a while.”

“Yeah.” I flop onto the bed. It’s full-sized, a generous bed for a teenager but not quite large enough to comfortably accommodate two adults, but we’ll have to make do.

“What did you tell them? About everything that happened, I mean.”

“Nothing really,” I say. “Just a… rough outline, I guess.” It’s an evasive answer, but I don’t feel like getting into what all my parents were privy to—Dad especially. I called him and broke down six years ago, when I realized that this wasn’t just another road bump in our friendship, when it seemed I’d lost Teddy for good.

Teddy sits on the edge of the bed and bends over to kiss me. His hand skates up my arm. I’m still wearing my sweater and jeans; I need to change into pajamas. “I have a lot to make up for,” he says against my lips.

“We have all the time in the world.”

He draws back a little, his gaze softening as it flits around my face—not searching for answers, but just looking, like he means to memorize me. As though either of us could ever forget what the other looks like. His eyes snag on my necklace and he takes it into his hand, polishing the nickel with a swipe of his thumb. “I can’t believe you still wear this thing.”

“I never stopped.”

His gaze rises to meet mine. In those three words, I’ve told him everything, bared my soul. We’re not talking about my necklace anymore. And in three more words, he confirms what I already know: “Neither did I.”

My breathing hitches. “We’re supposed to be taking things slow.”

“It’s been seventeen years.” His eyes drop back to my lips. “It doesn’t get much slower than us.”

With that, he kisses me, slow and oh so tender. He shifts over me, his body a pleasant weight. I pop the button on my jeans and shimmy them down my body until they’re around my ankles, kicking free. He reaches for me, his fingertips tracing the lace trim of my underwear before he inches up to the hem of my sweater and lifts it over my head, tousling my hair. I’m left in my bra and underwear. He kisses me again, his tongue flicking over mine, and I arch my body against him.

“This doesn’t seem very fair,” I point out, breathless. “You still have all your clothes on.”

He answers by kissing lower, skimming my jawline and trailing down between my breasts before he nudges my knees wider and positions his head between my legs. I lean back on my hands, watching as he tugs the fabric of my underwear to the side. When he puts his mouth on me, I have to bite my lip to keep from making noise. His fingers press into my thighs to keep me from squirming.

Pressure builds and ebbs inside of me, but I know I can’t come like this, so after a moment I drag him back up to my mouth, kissing him hard. He fumbles with his belt, and then with the button on his pants before freezing with a hand on the zipper. “Fuck,” he mutters, pressing his forehead against mine. “I forgot to bring a condom.”

I nudge his hand aside, reaching into his boxers and wrapping my fingers around him. “Birth control,” is all I say.

His eyes, normally so serious and pensive, are swallowed in a sort of haze, but he’s lucid enough to ask, “Are you sure?” even as his hips seem to move almost against his will, thrusting into my hand.

We’ve talked about this in passing; I know there’s no one else. I nod. We might have promised each other to take things slow, but right now, I’m pretty sure I’m sick of slow. I drag his hips toward me, our mouths tangled up in each other, and then he’s pushing inside me, both gasping at the new sensation.

After that, there’s no taking it slow. He rocks into me again, swallowing the sound that escapes me, and then again, his pace quickening. Clumsy fingers find my bra straps and tug them over my shoulders, pushing my bra down around my waist so that he can cup my bare breasts. His hands skate over my body, like he wants to touch me everywhere, all at once. They settle on my thighs, his fingers sinking into soft flesh, angling my hips toward his.

The sensation is too much; I can’t think. There’s nothing but him inside of me, and then he’s touching me. I left my vibrator at home, but my thoughts are so wrapped up in him that I forget to remember that I can’t come without it. I’m completely vulnerable with him right now, and he’s patient enough to bring me to the edge. My arms are around his back, hands scrabbling for purchase in his shirt. And before I know what’s happening, I come undone. I muffle the strangled cry that escapes me with his shoulder, and his thrusts grow more erratic, like he was waiting for me to come first, regardless of whether I’d insisted I couldn’t. He catches my mouth in a rough kiss and we collapse into each other, our energy spent.

Afterward, we lie naked in bed together. He plants a soft kiss on my shoulder. “I love you,” he says, barely more than a whisper.

“I love you, too.” The words hang between us for a moment, so much more real now that we’ve spoken them out loud. A part of me has always known, even in the intervening years when I tried to convince myself that he was a man I had loved, past tense. And when he showed up this semester, I tried to tell myself that we were strangers. That I couldn’t let myself fall back in love with him. But there was no falling, this time around—there was only remembering how to love him, a sort of muscle memory. “Where do we go from here?” I ask softly.

He pops up on an elbow, tracing the contours of my body with a hand. “I’ll stay through the holidays, head back to Pittsburgh to put in my resignation at Carnegie, tie up any loose ends. And then I suppose I’ll see about finding a position here in Maryland.” There’s a pause, and then he adds, “If you’re set on the tenure thing, that is.”

I adjust my head on the pillow, frowning at him. “You keep making those little comments.”

“I’ll support you, whatever the decision,” he says quickly. “I just can’t help wondering what a Tudor historian is doing in Maryland.”

“You specialize in the colonies,” I point out. “History of the Mid-Atlantic. It’s not like there would be a ton of jobs for you in Edinburgh.”

“I specialize in colonial maritime history,” he corrects me. “Key word there. Which generally involved a lot of back-and-forth across the Atlantic, so I think I’d be just fine.” Another pause, during which he seems to fully absorb what I just said. “Why Edinburgh?”

I shift, suddenly a little self-conscious. “Just something Lorna Foster mentioned before the guest lecture. I sort of got the impression she was offering to vouch for me, if I ever wanted to apply to be a visiting researcher.”

He looks at me like he’s worried I’m coming down with a fever. “Why wouldn’t you take her up on that?”

“Because I might be getting tenure here,” I say, defensively. “And then it’ll be years before I can take sabbatical, and anyway, I don’t know.”

“Strong finish to a strong argument.”

I shoot him an exasperated look. “And what would you do if I packed my bags and jumped on a plane to Scotland tomorrow?”

“Follow you,” he says, not missing a beat.

“Without finding a job first?”

“I’ve got enough in the bank that I’d be fine for a year or two. I could take my time. Focus on research. Write. And if you decide you want to stay longer, I’d just have to look for a job.”

It all sounds so simple, when he says it like that. Idyllic, even. I’ve spent so much of my life chasing after security, both emotional and financial. But somewhere along the way, it feels like I lost sight of the finish line. “I don’t know,” I say again. “It’s a lot to think about.”

“Then take your time,” he says. “Think on it.”