Chapter 58: Coming Home To Him

The flight back took fifty one minutes.

The same sky. The same clouds. The same city assembling itself below as the plane descended. But everything felt different from the inside looking out. The particular specific difference of someone who had gone somewhere significant and come back changed in ways that were not dramatic or visible but that were real and permanent and settled into the body like something that had always been there and had simply been waiting to arrive.

Thomas was at arrivals.

He did not say anything. He was Thomas. He took my bag and opened the car door and drove without requiring conversation and I sat in the back and watched the city come back around me and felt the particular feeling of return.

Not just to New York.

To everything New York contained right now.

The apartment lights were on when we pulled up.

I looked at the building.

North facing windows on the fourth floor dark because the studio was empty. The apartment floors lit warm and gold through the glass. A city burning around it in its beautiful indifferent way.

I went up.

The elevator opened into the apartment and the first thing I heard was Noah's voice from somewhere down the hall explaining something to Gerald with the comprehensive authority he brought to all important communications and the second thing I felt was Damien.

He was in the kitchen.

He looked up when I walked in.

He did not say anything immediately.

He simply looked at me the way he looked at things that mattered. Completely and without the performance of looking. Just seeing. The full specific honest seeing of someone who had been waiting and was now receiving what they had been waiting for and was taking a moment to confirm that it was real.

I crossed the kitchen.

I walked directly to him and put my arms around him and he put his arms around me and I pressed my face into his neck and felt the warmth of him and the solidity of him and his heartbeat against my cheek steady and certain and there.

"Hi," he said quietly into my hair.

"Hi," I said.

We stood in the kitchen holding each other for a long moment without saying anything because nothing was required and the holding was sufficient and entirely the point.

Then Noah appeared in the doorway.

He looked at us.

"Mia is back," he announced. To Gerald. As though Gerald had been unaware.

"Yes," Damien said. Without releasing me.

"Gerald is glad," Noah said.

"So am I," Damien said.

Noah accepted this and disappeared back down the hall and Damien pressed his lips to my hair and I felt him exhale slowly against me the particular exhale of someone releasing something they had been holding since seven that morning.

We stayed like that until Noah appeared again four minutes later with Gerald and a request for the gnocchi situation to be revisited for dinner.

Damien looked at me over the top of Noah's head.

I almost smiled.

"Gnocchi," I said.

"Obviously," Damien said.

We ordered gnocchi.

We ate at the kitchen table with Noah between us conducting a detailed debrief of everything that had happened in the apartment during my absence which included a significant development in Gerald's relationship with the pillow situation and a drawing Noah had made at school that he considered his best work to date and that he presented to me with the gravity of someone offering something of real value.

It was a drawing of five figures.

Stick figures. The particular style of four year olds who drew people as circles with lines attached and considered this a complete and accurate representation.

Five of them.

Standing in a row.

Beneath each one a name written in the careful oversized letters of someone learning to write.

DAMIEN. NOAH. MIA. BABY. GERALD.

I looked at the drawing.

At Gerald included without question in the family lineup.

At BABY written with the same certainty as all the others.

At my name between Noah and the baby in the middle of the row.

"This is beautiful," I said.

Noah looked at it critically.

"Gerald's ears are too small," he said. "But the rest is accurate."

"Very accurate," I agreed.

I folded it carefully and put it in my bag.

Noah went to bed at eight with the patient resignation of someone who had been informed that bedtime was not negotiable and had decided to conserve energy for tomorrow's negotiations instead.

Damien put him down.

I stood at the living room window while he did and looked at the city and thought about Washington and Halliwell's face when he understood that the documents were already filed and my father's street in Paris and the spare room and a message that said if you want.

Damien came back.

He stood behind me at the window.

His arms came around me from behind and his chin at my shoulder and we stood looking at the city together.

"Tell me," he said quietly.

I told him.

All of it. Halliwell's practiced smile and the private members club and the dark wood and leather and the moment his eyes changed when I told him the documents were already filed. My father's assurance. The acknowledgment. And at the end the thing I had not expected which was a powerful man in a Washington club saying simply it was true.

Damien listened without interrupting.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment.

"He watched," Damien said.

"He was curious," I said. "About whether someone genuinely unmanageable existed."

"And you showed him," Damien said.

"The documents showed him," I said. "I just delivered the information."

Damien turned me gently so I was facing him.

He looked at me in the low lamp light of the living room with those dark eyes doing the reading thing and finding whatever it was he was looking for and being satisfied by it.

"No," he said quietly. "The documents were the mechanism. You were the thing he could not manage."

I looked at him.

"I had help," I said.

"Yes," he said. "But you walked into that room alone and you walked out with what you went for." He reached up and pushed my hair back from my face slowly. "That was you."

I leaned into his hand.

The apartment was warm and quiet around us and Noah was asleep and the city was outside doing its night thing and nothing was required of either of us for the first time in what felt like considerably longer than it had actually been.

"I am tired," I said.

"I know," he said.

"The good kind," I said.

"I know that too," he said.

He took my hand and led me down the hallway and the apartment received us in its warm quiet way and he closed the bedroom door softly and the city light came pale and gentle through the curtains and we stood in it facing each other and he looked at me with those dark warm eyes that were not the dinner table eyes or the studio eyes or the carefully managed public eyes.

Just his.

Entirely and only his.

He reached out and tucked my hair back again. Slower this time. His fingers at my jaw afterward. Warm and deliberate and entirely present.

"You came back to me," he said quietly.

"I told you I would," I said.

"I know," he said. "I am saying it anyway."

He kissed me.

Soft and slow and with the particular quality of a kiss that had no agenda beyond itself. No urgency. No destination. Simply two people who had been apart for one day and had missed each other with a completeness that one day had no business producing and were now remedying that with full and unhurried attention.

I kissed him back the same way.

My hands at his chest. His hands at my face. The city quiet outside. The lamp off and the curtain light doing its pale gentle thing across the floor.

He pulled me close and I went completely and his arms were around me with that careful tightness that was also its opposite and I pressed my face into his shoulder and felt everything that the day had been settle into its proper place.

Which was behind us.

"Stay close," he said quietly. Against my hair.

"Always," I said.

And the night held us in its quiet and the city burned outside and somewhere in Paris a spare room was waiting.

And in the morning there would be pancakes.

And Noah would have opinions.

And Gerald would have feelings about the pillow situation.

And all of it was ours.

Completely and permanently and without question.

Ours.