Page 121 of If Not for My Baby
“I fired Jen, too,” he adds.
“Good riddance.” I dunk my head. When I come up for air and peel my hair from my eyes, he’s smiling and the entire bathroom is glittering along with him. Our legs twine between us.
“It’s not normal, how much I missed your smile,” I admit.
“I’ve no clue about normal.” He shakes his head. “I’vethought of you every day and night. Desperate and suffocating…Now you’re here in my tub.” His hand spans the porcelain rim, stretching toward me. “It doesn’t feel real.”
I lay my cheek on his fingers and close my eyes. “I love you.”
“I’ll never tire of hearing that.”
When I meet his stare, it’s that of a man whose yearning has finally been quenched. Suffering ended. He looks at me like I’ve fixed whatever was broken in him for some time.
“What happens now?”
“Now you tell me what you want.” Tom slides close until I’m in his lap and my legs have wrapped around his waist. His scruff brushes my shoulder and his lips press against my wet skin. “Whatever you want out of this life, and I’ll have it done.”
His hands circle my waist, and he’s sighing, breathing me in. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be, and nowhere, I realize, that I cannot go as long as we are together. “What if all I want is you?”
“Like you once said to me…” Another kiss. Warm hands on my back…
And when he speaks again, I’m reminded how we got here. How his voice alone drew me to him like a siren’s call that terrifying day on a Greyhound bus heading for Memphis. His lyrical baritone. My home in a sound.
“I’m yours.”
Epilogue
Five Years Later
“Tom, we’re going to belate!” I’m nearly at the front door when I remember my thermos of Barry’s steeping in the kitchen. My voice needs all the help it can get for the last show tonight.
“Conry’s gotten into a patch of something,” he calls from the garden. “I just need a minute—”
The kitchen is diffused in pearlescent sunlight. I close the window to keep springtime insects out and watch a blue-feathered bird land beside another on a leafy branch. Tea secured, I walk past Tom’s drawings and out the front door, weaving through our long, overgrown grass. Come summer we’ll need to trim it back before it turns brown and paper-thin, but when it’s vivid green like this we can’t bear to shear it.
Tom comes around the back and slides into the driver’s seat not a minute after me. I roll down the windows and inhale the late-afternoon air. Somewhere, a sprinkler clicks on while crows jabber and squawk.
“The rooks are chatty tonight. You hear ’em?”
“Just like in Kerry,” I say.
“A universal truth,” he says, taking my hand in his. “Rooks are chatty everywhere.”
There’s quite a lot about the Greenwich countryside that reminds us of County Kerry. The winding forest roads, the foxes and rabbits in our yard. It was part of why Tom bought the farmhouse in the first place.
After I’d gotten the chorus role inWest Side Storyand moved to Manhattan to live with Indy, we’d done long distance for a handful of months. I’d become an excellent flyer, using the seven hours from JFK to Dublin to study lines and sheet music. Sometimes I’d spend the whole flight devouring whatever book Tom and I were reading—we took turns, a mystery, then a classic.
Then I’d gotten Frenchy inGrease. It hadn’t felt real until my mom took her first flight in two decades to see me perform on opening night. She brought Everly, Beth, Mike, and his new girlfriend. Tom flew out, too, and brought Conor. We’d all played Monopoly back at Indy’s and my cramped Avenue C apartment. The ceiling in the bathroom was so low there Tom had to shower on his knees.
Eventually I was booking too many shows to fly home and to Ireland as often as I wanted to, and Tom was beginning to record his new album with a producer in the West Village. It only made sense then for him to get a place outside the city, and only took two years until Indy and Jacob got engaged and I moved in with him.
“Conry all right?”
“Sure, he’s delighted with himself. Destroyed the sunflowers you planted, though.”
I shrug. “They would’ve been terrible for my allergies.”
“Ah. That reminds me.” Tom fishes something out of his back pocket as he drives. “I didn’t know if you had any for tonight.” He hands me a travel-sized packet of Zyrtec. “These winds have been murder.”
