Becoming Mrs. Lewis(109)

I’d worn my hair down for the night, and it fell over my shoulders. The wind fluttered through and whipped it into my eyes as I spoke. “No, but I’d like to stop being your little secret. We’re married. I know not in the eyes of God. I know not in the eyes of eros, you’d say.” I stood then and looked down to him. “But we are married. And no one knows.” Tears rose in my eyes, ones I’d held back for so long. “I feel as if you’re ashamed of me. That you like to keep our friendship in this little cardboard box where only we and a few others have access.”

“Joy, I have brought you into my life fully. I have introduced you to Oxford and Cambridge. I’m with you every day.” His face fell with sorrow. “There isn’t an area I have hidden from you.”

“Do I embarrass you?”

Jack stood to face me. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“I no longer know what to believe about us.”

“If you don’t want me to stop coming round, what is it? Would you like me to tell everyone that we had a civil marriage so you could stay in the country? I told my very dearest friend Arthur in Ireland.”

I held my hand to stop his defenses. “I just ruined the night,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, and probably not making much sense. My old insecurities are rising. But keeping our marriage a secret feels clandestine and dirty. And dismissive.”

“Joy.” He took two steps closer to me, the aroma of the common room at the Kilns, cigarette smoke, and autumn air of crushed leaves engulfing me. He took my hands and pressed them to his chest as if it were something he’d done a million times before, not this, the first time.

“Would you and the boys like to move into the Kilns then?”

“Pardon?”

Had I heard him right? Had he just asked us to move in? Not a vacation, not a holiday or a feast, but to move. Were the wine and moonlight playing tricks? Were we another Janie and Maureen?

“I’ve been puzzling it out, and you’ve made me see that it’s time to stop merely thinking about it. It’s time to do it. We will make a life there, Joy. There won’t be any more gossip, and I’ll tell everyone that we’ve married.”

“But not in the eyes of the church, and not in flesh?”

“The church will never allow it.”

“King Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, the love of his life. But that doesn’t happen much—a love grand enough to defy the strict rules that make little sense.” I paused. “Here I am, a terrible divorcée just as she was.”

“No.” The pain in his voice made me look up, and I watched his face crumple. He swiftly brought my hands to his lips.

I closed my eyes and let the sensation wash over me, the simple bliss of his lips on my skin, my heart racing for more, the autumn air ruffling his hair in the moment that he asked me to move in with him. He released my hands, and I opened my eyes.

His hand rose, and at first I couldn’t imagine why, an exotic choreography in the dance of our relationship. Then his hand was behind my head, fingers wound into my thick hair, and with a slight tug he pulled me forward.

He kissed me.

Gently.

Finally.

My lips found his as easily as the sea finds the shore, as sun reaches earth. Our mouths soft, yet eager within the gentleness. My hands were behind his neck on the soft space beneath his hairline where I had often gazed as he walked ahead of me. I touched his skin. Against me, I felt the outline of a body I’d already memorized. All inside me loosened and untied, a surrender to anything he would want of me.

We lingered there for a few moments under that Selena-full moon.

Some things are more intense in the imagination, and some more powerful in reality. His touch and his lips—I could not have imagined the ecstasy of both. Nothing had ever been as worth waiting for as this.

He withdrew and rested his forehead on mine before kissing the soft spot below my ear. I shivered with the want of more. When he stood apart from me, holding both my hands, he smiled, but it wasn’t a smile I’d seen before. This one, curled at the corners with his eyes on mine, was just ours. Only ours.

“Good night, my dear Joy.” And with that, he was gone.

I felt almost as I had the night when God entered the cracked places of my ego in my sons’ nursery—as if my boundaries had been dissolved, as if all that I was would become one with all that was another. Just as that night, it didn’t fix anything, but it was the beginning of something that could change me, change us.

Pure love, it seemed, was not limited to a singular experience.

For two weeks I thought of little else but his kiss and his touch, yet I attempted to work. My mind spun back to that moment his lips found mine, and I’d discover myself standing stock-still wherever I was, my hand over my heart and my eyes closed. This was a state of longing and expectancy where time opened.

The days were blissful except for the aches in my legs and hips, but even this was colored by growing desire. When Jack broke free of Cambridge for short times, there had been more kisses: soft ones of promise without spoken words. He held my hand on the long walks through Shotover Hill. He slowly drew nearer, closer, as if he needed to court me when already I loved him.

When he was in Oxford, he stayed late with me as he always had, but now rested comfortably against me when we were alone. I hadn’t pushed—waiting so patiently to experience who we would become when we lived together.