“Thank him for your pain?”
“Yes, and for your relief.” He stopped and kissed me deeply. “The love I have for you has built a bridge to my true self, Joy. The self I only momentarily touched before you. If this pain is part of the bargain, so be it.”
“Why did it take us so long to see this? To know?”
His answer was merely a kiss. Sometimes that is the best answer, I thought, and I kissed him in return.
We walked slowly, every step a triumph, as I’d once been told I would never walk again and that my grave would be my resting place by now. I stopped before the garden and released Jack’s hand to touch his face. “The very fact that I’m standing here and the cancer has been arrested feels like a miracle that you orchestrated.”
“Love always chooses for another’s highest good, but I don’t know if I chose this. I only know that I would have, and maybe God has done the same.”
“I will choose you every time, Jack. Even with this cancer. Even with this suffering. Even with all that came before, I would choose you and this one evening in a garden, our bodies leaning against each other.”
Jack drew me as close as he could with calipers and braces, with canes in the way and pain deep within our bones.
Silence, the sublime sort, hovered for a long while until I asked, “Did you write this morning on the new book?”
“I did, but I was also counting the minutes until you awoke. I couldn’t focus knowing you were waiting. It’s difficult to focus on the Psalms when love like this is sleeping downstairs.”
He kissed me with the passion I’d dreamt of for many years. I tasted his pipe tobacco and his humanness and soft mouth. I wanted every inch of the man I loved so dearly.
I didn’t know if others understood his deep love for me. I’d wondered and then let it go—it didn’t matter anymore what Tollers or the Inklings or the Sayers believed. Maybe Jack had admitted his love or maybe he hadn’t, but all that mattered was that I grasped the truth. He loved me when I was brash. He loved me in my weakest state. He loved me after I stopped trying so hard to make him love me. He loved me when I was outwardly unworthy. I thought of Aslan and his words in Prince Caspian, “You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”
I looked over the Kilns property washed in twilight, the golden light of another day’s end, another day Jack and I had together. “It’s time to fix this place up a bit.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lewis, I wondered how long it was going to be before you said so.”
“I mean, honestly, could you possibly still want your blackout curtains and crumbling walls and yellow paint?”
“I could.”
I laughed.
“Remember all those years ago in the pub the night before you left for Edinburgh?” he asked. “It was on your first visit when we talked of what it meant to show our real faces, when you told me of your decision to always show me your face without veil. That was love, Joy; it’s what we’re doing now.” His brown eyes seemed fathomless, their depths holding the answers. “Although it was your mind I loved first, it is not what I’ve loved best. The heart of you is the heart of me now, and I want to know it fully.”
“You just want me to stay around so I can help you with your work,” I joked, but knew he was being true.
He pressed his cheek to mine and we were there, skin on skin, touch on touch. “It isn’t the work you do or the pleasure you give, it is you, my beloved, that I want. You.”
I kissed him with the same urgency and fervor I would have had when I was well and had rung the bell all those years ago and Mrs. Miller had opened the door. I wound my hand behind his neck and pulled him closer until his free hand, too, was in my tangled hair.
His voice was thick with desire; I had come to know the tone, feel the fullness of it. “Since the day we met and walked over Magdalen bridge and spoke of trees and rivers, I’ve preloved you in the same way my poems prewrote my prose, in the same way your poems and essays preloved God.”
We were quiet, each lost in the desire that had come suddenly for him and exquisitely long ago, flourishing in time, for me. Just the week before I had heard him tell Dorothy Sayers, “Sometimes love blooms when a third adversary enters the scene, and what is a more worthy adversary than death?”
“Look at us,” he said, drawing back to take me in. “Two crumbling old people acting as if we’re in our twenties and desperately in love.” He took my hand. “Come with me, Joy.”