Reconciled for Easter Read online

  Thomas laughed with her, more warmly and openly than she’d seen him laugh in a long time. “I wish I’d been there.”

  “You should have been there. It was the funniest thing.”

  They were both slouched on the couch, and they’d finished the wine he’d brought over.

  “Whew! I think I’m buzzed.”

  “You never did have much tolerance.”

  “You don’t have to make it sound like it’s a flaw in my design.” Feeling overly warm, she pulled the fabric of her tank top away from her chest and tried to blow some air down her neckline. Then her eyes widened dramatically. “I don’t have a bra on.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He gave a matter-of-fact shrug. “Doesn’t bother me. I’ve seen the parts in question before.”

  Abigail huffed for a minute, until she decided on the reasonableness of his claims. But just to make sure they were on an equal playing field, she said with what she thought was impressive acumen, “I’ve seen your parts too. Don’t forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. You were always very good to my parts.”

  Even through the pleasant blur the world had become, Abigail recognized something off about his words. She sat up straight and gasped, “You’re buzzed too!”

  “Nope.”

  “You are! How much wine did you drink?”

  “Not much. You drank most of it.”

  “I did not. I drank...” She paused, trying to rehearse the number of glasses she’d drunk. Neither one of them were big drinkers, but her tolerance was particularly low. Finally, she gave up on figuring it out. She slumped back in a happy daze and turned her head to stare at Thomas.

  He looked overly warm too. His face was slightly flushed, and there was a sheen of perspiration on his skin. As she watched, he took the bottom of his shirt and lifted it to casually wipe some of the sweat off his face. The move bared a flat, toned belly. One she’d always found irresistible.

  She reached over to poke it.

  Thomas grunted.

  She poked his belly again.

  He grunted.

  He caught her hand before she could poke him one more time.

  “Hey!” she said reproachfully.

  “Hands to yourself.”

  “Hmph. You used to like my hands on you.” She tried to glare at him but couldn’t quite coordinate the expression.

  “You used to like my hands on you.”

  “Oh.” It was an excellent point. She couldn’t think of an appropriate rejoinder.

  So she gave a long sigh and concluded, “I’m buzzed.”

  “You said that before.”

  She wrinkled her nose and prepared to give him a good set-down. Then she noticed how incredibly gorgeous he looked, sprawled and rumpled on the couch beside her.

  And she got a better idea. He must have always thought she was uptight and unsexy, so she would prove him otherwise. She crawled across the length of the couch and plopped down in his lap. “Maybe we can be buzzed together,” she said, stroking his head with eager fingers.

  Thomas exhaled slowly, thickly, and his hands settled on the curve of her bottom. “Don’t see why not.”

  Abigail’s head was spinning and a giddy flush warmed her skin. Conscious of nothing but the sudden urge to touch, she leaned forward toward his attractive, so familiar face.

  Her lips landed, not on his mouth, but on his chin.

  Undeterred by her poor aim, she pressed a series of wet kisses in a line along his jaw. “Being buzzed is fun,” she mumbled as she mouthed her way up to his ear.

  “Mm hmm,” Thomas agreed, one of his hands still squeezing her ass and the other edging up toward her chest.

  She sucked on his earlobe vigorously, closing her eyes as Thomas palmed one of her breasts. Humming in pleasure, she finally released his lobe and stuck her tongue in his ear.

  He grunted.

  Delighted by this reaction, she tried the move again, this time fluttering her tongue while she rubbed her fingers over his scalp.

  Thomas grunted again, and his tense body gave a little twitch.

  Abigail felt an arousal pulsing between her legs, but she couldn’t identify exactly what had triggered it or when she’d become aware of it. With fuzzy satisfaction, she kept tonguing Thomas’s ear and caressing the back of his neck, which she remembered had always been particularly sensitive.

  She sensed his body growing tighter and tighter beneath her, and he huffed out guttural, uncontrolled sounds that thrilled her. Even before things had fallen apart, he’d always seemed so careful and controlled.

  But she knew she was turning him on at the moment, and her blurred thought-process understood this as reason enough to keep doing it.

  Eventually, her tongue got tired, so she moistened her lips and then rubbed them along his temple. When he moaned softly, she asked, “You like that?”

  “Mm,” he hummed. He’d been doing his best to fondle her breasts through her tank top, hampered by her awkward position above him on the couch.

  “You’re not saying much,” she complained, feeling like she was doing all the work in sustaining the conversation. Still straddling his lap, she raised herself higher on her knees so she could run her lips across his forehead.

  “Otherwise occupied,” Thomas murmured, taking advantage of her higher position to pull one of her breasts out of the neckline of her top.

  Abigail was briefly peeved that he sounded slightly more articulate than her, but that mild irritation vanished when he closed his lips around her nipple. He suckled with more enthusiasm than skill, but the stimulation caused her intimate muscles to clench.

  She reached down and discovered he was hard in his pants. She did her best to massage him, rewarded when he groaned softly.

  Then suddenly he was lifting her off his lap, putting her down on the couch beside him. It was like something had changed in him, clicked in him, turned off.

  Or maybe on.

  “What’s going on?” She started to move over him again, her body desperately craving what only he could give her. “I wanted to—”

  “I know, baby,” he murmured, gently moving her hand from his groin. “I’m sorry. But not like this. Not when you’re buzzed.”

  Her face twisted in frustration. “I want to. I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t buzzed.”

  “I know.” He said again, grabbing her wrists so she couldn’t reach for his erection again. “That’s why we have to stop.”

  There was something final in his tone that even her fuzzy mind could recognize. So she slumped down, against him, disappointed, frustrated, and heavy with something even deeper. “I wanted to,” she murmured.

  He wrapped an arm around her. “I know. I did too.” He sighed. “Shit, I drank too much.”

  “Is the room spinning for you?”

  “Nope.”

  She huffed. “Party-pooper.” Then, when a wave of dizziness hit her, she said, “Oh.”

  “Tell me if you’re gonna be sick.”

  “Nope.” She grinned up at him, pleased that she’d thought of such a witty retort.

  “Nope—you won’t tell me? Or nope—you won’t be sick?”

  “Nope, won’t tell you and won’t be sick,” she said with more confidence than was entirely warranted.

  With an uneven laugh, Thomas tightened his arm.

  Abigail sighed, rubbing her cheek against his shirt. “You feel nice.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do. I’ve always loved how you feel.”

  “You feel nice too.” He tilted his head down and nuzzled her hair.

  She didn’t see anything wrong with that. She felt like nuzzling too. So she nuzzled his shirt, since it was the only thing she could reach in her present position. “I do?”

  “Mm hmm,” he murmured, blowing her hair with his breath. “Soft and warm and...”

  “And what?”

  “Abigail-like.”

  That sound
ed perfectly reasonable to her so she smiled against his shirt.

  She turned a little, vaguely looking toward his face, although she couldn’t really focus on it. “You okay?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Good,” she sighed. Her head still spinning, she nestled against him and closed her eyes.

  The world went dark before she could process anything else.

  ***

  When Abigail woke up, her head pounded, and her mouth felt like it was filled with foul-tasting cotton.

  She edged her eyes open just slightly and smacked her lips a few times. “Oh God,” she groaned, as she realized how bad she felt.

  With some effort, she managed to sit up, although her head hurt so much she squeezed her forehead with one hand. She looked down at herself to find she still wore her yoga pants and tank top from last night.

  And suddenly she knew why. A flood of knowledge hit her like a wave.

  “Oh God,” she groaned again, as the previous night came back to her.

  “That bad?”

  She gasped at the male voice from her doorway. Thomas stood, fully dressed and relatively presentable in the clothes he’d worn last night. He must have already showered since he looked fully awake. There were dark circles under his eyes, however. He held two glasses of water.

  She reached out for one as she tried to think of something to say. A glance beside her revealed that the other side of the bed had been slept in. Her eyes shot over to Thomas. “What...what happened?”

  He sat cautiously on the edge of the bed beside her. “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember…Oh no, fumbling around on the couch, groping and…Oh no!” Blazing with mortification, she fell back in the bed again. “Is that all we did?”

  “Yes. That’s all.”

  “Did I pass out?”

  “I think you just fell asleep. I carried you to bed.”

  Abigail looked over at the opposite side of her bed. “You slept over?”

  Thomas’s face was very still, very careful. “I did. I wasn’t in any shape to go home. I hope that’s all right.”

  “Yeah. Of course.” She rubbed her face and groaned a little more. Then she found the initiative to sit up again and drink some water.

  “I’m making coffee,” Thomas told her, his eyes scanning her face closely.

  “Thanks.”

  She groaned, remembering how shamelessly she’d been pawing at him last night. “I can’t believe I did that. I’ll never live this down.”

  Her father had always been impatient of any sort of weakness, any sort of foolishness. He’d believed human nature needed to be rigorously kept under control. She no longer believed the same things her father had about that, but it was hard to kick the feeling of never being good enough.

  Of shame. At being weak. At being foolish. At doing things a good girl would never do.

  “I’m the only other person who was there,” Thomas said softly.

  That was true. There was a kind of safety in that, in only his knowing her foolishness. More than once during their marriage, Thomas had left her feeling not-good-enough too, but he wasn’t acting like that now. He didn’t look like he was judging her, resenting her.

  He’d changed. She had too.

  This wasn’t the end of the world.

  She smiled at him shakily. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” He looked genuinely confused.

  “For stopping us. I appreciate it. I remember enough to know what happened.”

  “I’m sorry I let it go as far as it did.” He rubbed a hand over his face.

  “Well, if truth be told, you were a little buzzed too.” Before he could object or reply, she added, “Okay. No big deal really. We drank too much. These things happen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” She groaned one more time as it felt like someone was taking a hammer to her head. “Shoot, it’s after eight. Mia. I’ve got to go get her.”

  “Let me drive you,” Thomas said. Before she could object, he said, “I’ve got to get to the hospital anyway, and you’re in no shape to drive this morning. I’ll drop you all back and then head to work.”

  “Thanks,” she said, holding onto her head but feeling another wave of appreciation for Thomas’s consideration. He’d never been particularly romantic, but he’d always seemed to think of little things and take care of them for her. “Did you say there was coffee?”

  ***

  Abigail relaxed against the passenger seat of Thomas’s car.

  Her headache had eased some, and now she just felt bone tired and kind of achy about last night.

  She wished she hadn’t been so silly, but it wasn’t as bad as it felt. It was embarrassing. And it would have been nice if it had never happened.

  But it seemed like it wasn’t going to change the positive progress that had happened between them.

  They still had a few months before they had to jump back into all the struggle and angst of really working on their marriage. If things kept going the way they were, maybe both of them would have grown and changed enough for them to finally settle everything that was wrong.

  Praying silently over their marriage, Abigail sipped her coffee and looked out the window. They were stopped at a red light, about to turn onto the highway, which was the closest way to get to the other side of town, where Thomas’s parents lived.

  The light turned green and Thomas started off.

  An unspecified noise caused Abigail to look across the intersection. She stared in a blurred haze at an approaching vehicle.

  A vehicle approaching way too fast.

  Her final thought was that the pick-up truck would never be able to stop in time to brake for the red light.

  The pick-up didn’t stop at all.

  It just crashed into the passenger side of Thomas’s car, in a deafening impact of noise, metal, and glass.

  Three

  Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay.

  She heard the words, the vaguely familiar voice, coming out of the darkness.

  And then somehow she was saying them, knocking on the door to Thomas’s study, a small finished porch off the back of their rented house in Durham. It was only seven months after they’d gotten married, and she was muttering under her breath, “Please be okay, please be okay with it.”

  She was so nervous her hands were shaking, but she steeled her will and knocked louder when her first faint tap got no response.

  He’d been at the hospital for nearly twenty hours straight, and he’d gone right to his study when he got home.

  She understood that his surgical residency program was high stress and incredibly hard work, even more so now than it had been when she’d first met him, but it felt like days went by without her ever seeing him. And she hated the feeling of being afraid to interrupt her own husband.

  Her father had been that way. He’d be reading the Bible or doing devotions, and she and her mom were never allowed to bother him.

  She’d sworn her own family wasn’t going to be like that.

  But here she was. Knocking on the closed door. Absolutely terrified.

  When he called out a monosyllabic response, she opened the door and stuck her head in. “Hey. Do you have a minute?”

  Thomas looked up at her from the book he was pouring over and smiled. He looked tired and a little distracted, and stress was evident in his eyes, in the lines on his forehead.

  When they’d first gotten married, she’d been determined to help him really relax when he was home, but she’d given up on that fairytale eventually. He simply wouldn’t relax.

  “Hi,” he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing a hand over his brown hair. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah. I just needed to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “Sure.” Thomas glanced back at his book. “Give me five minutes and I’ll be done in here.”

  Abigail let out her held breath and ducked out of the study. Restless and anxious, she pac
ed the hall and then wandered into the one bathroom in the two bedroom house.

  There, she picked up the plastic stick from the home pregnancy kit she’d been staring at for the last hour. “Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay with it,” she murmured, closing her eyes as a new wave of fear washed over her.

  They hadn’t been married for very long. She was still working on her Master’s, and Thomas wasn’t anywhere close to finishing his residency. They’d talked about kids before they got married and agreed they would wait until they were settled.

  This wasn’t supposed to have happened.

  She was praying silently, desperately, her eyes closed, when she heard his voice in the hall and came out to meet him, holding the little stick behind her back.

  “Are you all right?” Thomas asked, eyeing her with a quiet scrutiny that was very familiar. “You look a little shaky.”

  Sometimes she wondered what he was thinking, what secret flaws and failures he thought he would find, when he peered at her with such intent observation.

  “I’m all right.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

  His brows drew together, and he glanced back at the bathroom. “Are you sick again? If you are, I’m calling the doctor. No arguments this time. You shouldn’t have gone to class or Bible study this week.”

  “I enjoy Bible study.” She’d only begun a new women’s Bible study a month ago, but she felt closer to God than she ever had before, for the first time understanding how grace meant she didn’t always have to try to be good enough. The study felt like a revelation to her, and she didn’t want to miss a single week. “And I have to go to class if I want to pass.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t really need to pass, do you? It’s just something you’re doing to kill time, so what does it matter? If you’re sick, then you should stay home and get better.”

  She started to object. She’d started the degree primarily for something to do outside her mostly empty home, but she’d begun to enjoy her coursework and was invested now in the degree—something he should know since she’d told him all about it quite often this semester—so it bothered her that he kept referring to it like a hobby that had no real significance.