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Usually followed by sharing a shower or their bed.
He shut that idea — and the memories — away. This wasn't like her being postpartum with Eva, with them going a couple weeks past her six week checkup before they’d made love again.
“What are you thinking about so deeply over there?” Her light teasing exploded in his thoughts, and he reached for his wine, unable to say a simple nothing.
After a sip, he set his glass aside and lifted his hand, palm up. “Our sex life.”
She blinked, then tucked her hair behind her ear. “Oh.”
He cleared his throat. “We might need to talk about it.”
“Possibly.” Glass in hand, she curled up on her end of the sofa, a foot tucked beneath her. His arm stretched along the sofa back, he fiddled with a lock of her hair, winding it around his finger.
“I’m not trying to push you.” He rubbed the silky strands with his thumb. “I just want to understand, give you what you need from me.”
She cast a look at him from beneath her lashes. “I know.”
A pause hummed between them, and she lifted a shoulder in an irritable shrug.
“I can’t tell you what I don’t understand myself.” She sipped at her wine. “I feel better. I do. I’m simply restless and sometimes I feel empty, even with you and the girls.”
“I get that.” Trying to fill up that emptiness had pushed him away from her after Grandma’s death.
She shook her head. “It’s different from losing Giulia, though.”
He got that, too. Daddy’s death, losing Louise — those cut deep. But not having this baby sawed into him, rough and pressing and constant. Time would help him acclimate, but he needed her, needed to make sure they were solid.
Clearing his throat, he jumped in. “The night you cried . . . Cait, did I do something wrong?”
“No, it’s me.” And she didn’t want to talk about it, her face closed.
He nodded, waiting, so time and space could unfold about them.
“I’m sorry I’m not what you—”
“Wait, no.” He shook his head and held up a hand. Sometimes her mind still worked like that, dipping into the old patterns of thinking she wasn’t enough, when she was everything. “Don’t go there. You’re everything I want and need. Right now, this is about me being what you want and need.”
A tremulous smile touched her lips. “You are.”
“Cait, you know what I mean.”
She turned her face toward the pool, shoulders shuddering with a shaky breath. “It’s like that climb in Nepal, like falling, all over again.”
Nodding, he held his own breath, afraid to disturb the sacred ground unfolding before him.
Her lashes fell, dusting her cheekbones. “I’m simply afraid.”
The memory of her pain and distress the night she miscarried rose to torment him. Hell, afraid was too weak a word. The idea of her experiencing that terrified him.
And his dumb ass still hadn’t rebooked to have his vasectomy repaired. First thing Monday morning for sure.
He twirled her hair about his finger again. “What can I do?”
She slanted a small smile in his direction. “What you’ve been doing . . . being here with me.”
“It’ll work out,” he breathed, damn grateful for Gene’s timeless advice. “We’ll work out.”
Her smile widened, a fleeting glimpse of their life before. “Gene is a wise man.”
