Harvey stands at Grace’s unopened front door, abruptly weary and uncertain. He experiences an unbidden rush of self-awareness—it’s been happening a lot lately—that merely serves to illuminate how confused he is. Having never coveted clarity, Beam is underwhelmed by its staccato arrival in middle age.
He’s about to knock when the door opens and Grace stands before him. She is wearing a thin white dress, no shoes, her hair splayed around her shoulders. Oh God, Beam thinks. He instinctively bends down to remove a shoe because his dick is getting very hard, very quickly. For fuck’s sake, Harvey.
In the cab he had prepared himself for a night of talking, for the revelations about Grace’s marriage to Matt that she’d always glossed over. For hours about sliding doors and missed opportunities, regret and resolve. For an inevitable ending.
But Grace only wants Beam, for now at least, to make love to her. She tells him this as she roughly takes Harvey’s hand and leads him along the dark hallway to her bedroom. The bed is unmade, awash with sheets and cushions, and Grace climbs into the middle of it and waits for Harvey to remove a suit that might as well be a straitjacket secured with magician’s padlocks so frenzied are his movements to escape it.
Not for the first time, perhaps for the thirtieth or fortieth, Beam finds himself feeling utterly grateful and unworthy of this woman’s body. Of her unlikely presence in his life.
He’s grateful too that he hadn’t had the conversation with Matt tonight that might stop all this. To hell with courage.
If this is the last time he gets to make love to Grace, Beam is going to ensure its preservation in both their memories. He is acutely present, slow and deliberate, addressing every contour, every hollow, every part of her that might never have been kissed. He returns to her mouth again and again, makes it about them, about her. When he is deepest, Beam holds himself deathly still inside her, rejecting every compulsion to rush. He grasps the small of her back as she comes and tells Grace he loves her over and over.
Everything that is wrong with the world can be fixed, he thinks.
In the morning, Beam awakes to Grace’s fingers playing with the hairs on his chest, disappointingly grey and wiry in the unforgiving early sunlight.
‘You know what’s weird, Harvey,’ she says at last.
Beam improves his arm’s cradling of Grace’s head, looks up at the ceiling fan and smiles to himself. ‘Twins?’
Grace laughs loudly and Harvey inwardly thanks his funny daughters. An image of Suze snaps into his vision and he blinks to flick the channel.
Finally Grace says, ‘No, what’s weird is that you came back here for closure, but I’m the one who found it.’
And Beam nods, though he isn’t entirely sure why.