There had been wine with dinner that night—Paul had insisted, despite Julia's protestations. Richard had smiled sheepishly and laboredly sipped the crimson liquid through a straw, his free hand grasping his bride's tenderly, if not chastely. Tommy had fallen asleep in his seat before Julia insisted that they retire, and she thought she spied a knowing wink from her red-cheeked father as he slipped into his bedroom, leaving the reluctant newlyweds loitering in the hall.
"Well," Richard began, turning back towards the stairs and the couch he had called home since his return into her life, "goodnight—"
"Wait." She reached for his arm and pulled her timidly towards her. "I thought…you could sleep in here. With me. We did get married this morning."
"Yes…" His voice trailed off, impossible to read as always.
"I mean," she continued, with a nervous laugh and a flush in her cheeks, "we might as well consummate the thing."
His lip quivered nervously, as it had when she'd first voiced this not-so-crazy notion of marriage, but he took her hand and let her lead him into the mysterious room at the end of the hall (in all their months of friendship, he had never seen it firsthand). The room was small—a girl's room, really—with faded wildflowers dotting the walls, bisected in several places by thin fissures between strips of wallpaper. Rickety shelves sagged with books, stacked atop each other every which way. A simple vanity, so unlike the ornate confection that held Gillian's feminine tools, was pushed into a darkened corner. On the nightstand sat a tiny portrait in a frame of gold filigree: an angelic young woman with honey-hued tendrils flanking her sweet but melancholy smile. The resemblance was staggering, and Richard needn't ask to know that it was her mother who stared up at him from behind the glass.
Julia cleared her throat, and Richard turned just in time to see her dress drop to the floor. She wrapped her arms over the thin silk of her fraying slip, avoiding his gaze as the lamplight danced across the gentle curves of her face, her neck, her shoulders…he hesitated in spite of himself, forgetting for a moment that she was legally his to explore. Normally, he would have lost himself in internal conflict over whether he deserved such luck, but her eyes had locked with his and he could feel his feet carrying him towards her, feel the soft skin of her jaw beneath his fingertips, feel the hunger on her lips as they pressed against his.
His touch was tentative at first, polite and uncertain. Julia's mind drifted to the night on the beach that had occupied her nightly thoughts so often in the long months since, and she wondered how much charge she would need to take tonight, as before. But there was a confidence in his grasp that was entirely new, and a wildness in the way he lifted her slip above her head and threw her down onto the waiting mattress. As he towered over her, a glint of mischief in his eye, she couldn't help but ignore her lingering reservations about inviting him so definitively back into her life. At this moment, all she could see were the taught muscles lining his arms, the soft pouch of belly fat (no doubt the result of those few weeks on the farm with his sister that he had mentioned so bashfully). It would be a long road to forgiveness, but the familiar stirring within her promised that the journey wouldn't be without its scenic stops.
She had expected to walk him through it all once more, and was surprised when he let his lips trail from her collarbone to each breast in turn, then down her naval until his face disappeared between her legs. She had half a mind to push him back in disgust before his tongue found her, sending tremors of unmatched pleasure surging through her. With barely a thought spared for just where he learned this ingenious trick, she found her fingers entwining through his thick, black hair, holding his mouth in place as the tremors reached a fever pitch. Never before had she experienced a release such as this, not even in the midnight touch of her own fingertips, and she tightened her thighs around his ears to prolong the flood of satisfaction for what felt at once like an eternity and no time at all.
And then he was inside her, strong hands gripping her thighs as he plunged ever deeper, her fingernails digging into his sweat-beaded shoulders and her lips enveloping the faint scar across his adam's apple that echoed the ragged grunts now emanating unconsciously from beneath it. She held him close as their bodies would allow, a lifetime of hardship melting away between them. His unexpected self-assurance only made her want him more, and she wrapped her legs around him to slow his progress, to hold this moment between them for as long as possible. As she felt his body shiver towards climax, she didn't care that he had hurt her, didn't care that this was a marriage of necessity for someone else's child; all she cared about was the honesty in his deep, grey eyes that swore he would never leave her again.
He collapsed atop her, chest heaving and every instinct urging him to hurry from the room. But he couldn't bring his muscles to cooperate and before he knew it his eyes were fluttering open in the suffocating dark of the night, and she was fast asleep in his arms like that morning oh so long ago now, when it had been the roar of the waves that had ushered him awake. He struggled to make sense of his surroundings before the previous night came rushing back. He planted a grateful kiss upon Mrs. Harrow's brow and held her closer, amazed at this tiny glimmer of normalcy, however unlike the fantasy he had long entertained. This reality was far from perfect, but it was real, and that was worth more than any ideal he could have dreamt in the depths of his self-loathing. It was worth dressing in silence and easing from her bed, worth the long walk to the lone hotel at the end of the boardwalk, worth the proposition that formed in his mind as he trudged through the sand and fog to the one man who could help him provide for his new family as they so richly deserved. He hoped their clandestine meeting would be brief enough to allow him time to slip back into Julia's arms before the cold light of dawn coaxed her from her well-earned slumber and into her first full day as his wife.