Chapter 17 Mickey
I open Benji’s photo again at two in the morning. I’ve opened it eleven times. I know because the cop part of my brain counts things automatically.
The bathroom is pink. That’s what I’m supposed to be looking at.
The pink tile, the cracked mirror, the shower that Benji has described to me in three separate rants as a crime against plumbing.
I see all of that. I saw it the first time he sent the photo this morning at six-thirty when I was eating sponge eggs and waiting for the physical therapist.
But my eyes go to the mirror. Every time. Eleven times.
His back. The cracked mirror caught more of him than he meant to send. He’s shirtless. The light from the bathroom window is hitting his skin and his back is tan from Miami, smooth, the muscles lean and defined.
His shoulders are much narrower than mine, his silhouette tapering from shoulders to waist in a way that my hands would fit around. The gray sweatpants sit low. The ridge of his spine is visible, the slight hollow above each hip.
He’s not posing. He’s standing in a bathroom in sweatpants brushing his teeth and this is what he looks like when nobody’s watching.
That’s the part that gets me. This is accidental. This is Benji at six-thirty in the morning, barefoot and shirtless in sweatpants, and it’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever seen because he didn’t mean for me to see it.
I close the photo. I open it again. Twelve times now.
I’m not going to pretend this is about the bathroom anymore. My body still knows exactly what it wants. That’s the problem.
My mouth is dry. Every part of me that still has sensation is responding to a photograph the way my whole body used to respond.
God, what I would give for one night of feeling his head on my chest and his breathing going slow against my skin.
Just the weight of him. The simple, heavy weight of another human pressing down on me.
Everyone is praying about my legs. The legs are what the doctors talk about and what Tex worries about and what my mama cries over on the phone.
But lying here in the dark at two in the morning, it’s not the legs I’m grieving.
It’s the six inches between my hand and his hair that I couldn’t close.
It is the ability to be the one who reaches, the one who pulls his body against mine.
I wonder what Benji would look like in bed. Specifically, my bed in Panama City with the navy sheets I bought because a magazine said they looked good. I’ve never cared about what sheets look like until now. I think about his blonde hair against the navy.
I think about his throat, how it moves when he swallows, how the tendons show when he tilts his head back to laugh.
His waist, slim enough that I could wrap one arm around it.
His hands, the painted nails, the quick fingers that take my hand like they belong there.
I want to know the temperature of his skin when he’s sleeping.
I want to know if he’s a furnace or if he’s always cold.
What would Benji be like in bed? I’ve seen him angry, his whole body vibrating with the intensity of a man who feels everything at full volume. That’s not someone who is quiet or passive in bed. That’s someone who brings the same energy to everything he does.
I can build the scene down to the last detail — his weight on top of me, the way his eyes would go dark right before he kissed me — and then the picture ends at my waist like a torn photograph.
I’m lying here at two in the morning with a fantasy I can’t finish and a man I can’t reach. I close the photo.
Dante arrives tomorrow. The man from Miami who knows Benji better than anyone.
Tomorrow, the bubble that exists between me and Benji in this room opens to include a third person. And I get to find out what that does to me.