Chapter 19 #2
I follow him the one door back down the hall into his room, which is the room of a man who irons his own weather.
Books upright. Lamp squared to the corner of the desk.
A bed made so tight you could bounce a quarter off it and then file a complaint about the acoustics.
I have made fun of this room at volume, in daylight, in front of witnesses.
Tonight I stand in the middle of it and none of it is funny.
It looks like a house somebody built by hand out of nothing so the wind couldn’t get in.
He shuts the door and stands with his back against it. And here’s the part nobody in that barn would ever believe.
I have him. I know every seam this man has got.
I know the horn undoes him. I know that if I put my mouth under his jaw and say his first name into the skin there, the whole ordered life comes off him like a coat on a warm day.
It’s the best work I’ve ever done, that file, every page of it right there behind my eyes.
I could spend one line of it tonight and have him.
I don’t open it. I have never opened it. Standing in a man’s room with my hands empty is the only honest thing I own, so that’s what I bring in with me.
“Casimir,” I say. Just the name. Nothing loaded on it. Nothing under it.
He comes off the door.
He kisses me the way he does everything, which is all at once after a long time deciding.
His hands come up into my hair and hold on.
Mine go under his shirt and find all that heat he keeps stored under two layers and a bad attitude, and he makes a sound against my mouth, low, half a word in a language I don’t speak.
My knees do a thing I would deny under oath.
I pull back an inch. It costs me.
“Hey. Look at me. Say it out loud, because I’m not doing this if it’s a thing you have to take back in the morning.”
“I want this.” There’s no flat in it anywhere. “I want you. Say yes to me.”
“Yes. Ostie, yes. Yes in both languages I’ve got.”
He kills the lamp. He always kills the lamp.
There was one room on the wrong side of a closed mountain where he didn’t, and that’s the only time I’ve seen this man’s face while he comes apart.
I’ve stopped asking for it since, because you don’t ask a guy to hand over the last thing he’s still holding.
We get the shirts off somewhere between the door and the bed and that’s the most organized this night is going to be.
He puts me down on the quarter-bouncing bed and follows me into it, and I get my hands on the whole broad cold-weather back of him and pull, because pulling is the only move I’ve ever owned.
His mouth goes down my throat. Teeth in the muscle over my shoulder, hard enough to leave a thing I’ll have to explain to a trainer, and I want the thing to explain.
“You know what your problem is,” I tell the dark over his shoulder. “No bedside manner. None. Zero. You come at a guy like you’re killing a penalty.”
“Emile.”
“I’m just saying. A little small talk. How was your day, Emile. Nice practice, Emile. Love what you’ve done with the crease.”
He goes still against me, the whole length of him, and I’d kick myself around this room if I could get out from under him, because I brought the ice in here and that was the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do.
“Not tonight,” he says. Low. Into my collarbone. “Not in this room.”
“No. You’re right. Bon. Scratch it. Forget I have a mouth.”
“I am not going to forget you have a mouth.”
And that is the closest thing to a joke this man has made all season, and it takes me apart worse than any of the rest of it, because he went and found a joke somewhere in all that machinery and handed it over.
He did that because the loud one was scared.
Nobody has ever done that for me in my life.
Then he’s got my sweats off and his hand around my cock and I stop having opinions about anything.
I talk anyway. I always talk. I tell him yes and there and don’t you dare stop, and a couple of things in French I would not repeat at Bev’s counter.
He lets me have all of it. Nobody knows that about him.
They all think he wants the quiet. He doesn’t.
He wants the noise. He just built a whole life where he was never allowed to ask for it.
“Talk,” he says, into my hip. Rough. “Keep talking.”
“Oh, now he wants conversation.”
“Emile.”
“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”
So I talk. His mouth goes low and takes me in, and I lose the thread of whatever I was saying and pick up another one, and what comes out isn’t chirp anymore.
It’s true things at a volume I’d never use in daylight.
That I’ve wanted this since the equipment room.
That I think about his hands when I’m supposed to be watching tape.
That he’s the first thing I look for in every building I walk into and has been since the first day, and that I’ve stopped pretending it’s scouting even to myself.
He makes a low sound with his mouth full of me and I feel it in my teeth and the backs of my knees and everywhere else, and I have to get a fist in the sheet to keep myself on the bed.
“Your bag,” I say. “Side pocket. Where I left it coming down off that mountain, and don’t pretend you didn’t know it was in there this whole time.”
“I am not pretending.”
I hear the cap go. Then I hear nothing for a while, a long nothing, and the nothing is him standing over me in the dark making sure his hands aren’t cold before he puts them anywhere near me. The whole man, right there. Nobody else in the barn is ever going to be told.
Then his hand is on me and in me and I stop being able to finish anything I start.
He takes it in stages. Every stage he waits me out, and I swear at him for the waiting in the language my mother swears in, and he does not hurry for it, he never hurries for anything.
When he gets at the thing inside me that turns my whole spine to water I lose the commentary entirely.
I go down to one sound. I make it over and over into my own forearm, and he keeps handing me reasons to.
“More. Casimir. Come on. More.”
“I have you.”
“I know you have me, that’s the whole problem, that’s been the problem since.” And whatever I was going to hang on the end of that sentence, I don’t. It’s too big for a room with a season in it. So I take the corner off it. “Since day one and your stupid glove.”
His breath catches. He heard the swerve. Of course he heard it, he hears everything, he’s just never made me finish a sentence I couldn’t afford.
“Now,” I say. “Now. I want you in me. I’m asking out loud so you can’t tell yourself later that I didn’t.”
“Yes.” Wrecked. “Yes.”
He presses in slow and I make a noise I’ll be hearing in my own head for the rest of my life. There’s the burn of it and then the part after the burn, where the whole thing turns into something with no word attached to it. He stops. Of course he stops. He’d stop if the building came down.
“Okay?”
“Go. I’m okay. Go.”
He goes. Slow at first, that terrible patience of his, the same patience that lets him hold a post on a two-on-one while every other man in the barn is already reaching.
Then the patience gives out on him. I feel it go.
I feel the exact stroke where he quits holding the line he’s held all season and just takes the thing he has spent months not taking, and the headboard starts talking to the wall on our behalf.
The thin place. Our wall. The one I’ve conducted an entire relationship through, and tonight it’s on the wrong side of me and I don’t have to listen through it for anything.