Chapter 16 — Asleep85
@solena.rising
“Nobody warns you how loud it is to finally be wanted, loves. Fifteen years I performed for a world that never quite chose me back. Here I walked into a room and felt a hundred people look at me like I was the answer to a question. I don’t have the caption for what that does to a person.
I only know I’m not ready to give it up. ”
(draft)
They sat us at the head of the long table that night, which at Tidewell was a thing that happened to winners.
There was a better candle. There was, I am fairly sure, a slightly nicer fish.
Word of the morning’s grade had gone around the basin the way grades do, and people kept catching my eye down the length of the table and giving me the small reverent nod a person gives a couple who are doing it right, and I sat there in the candlelight accepting the silent congratulations of a cult for the quality of my edging and felt, God help me, like the prom king.
Coral came by with the water jug and the face of a proud aunt.
“I won’t embarrass you,” she said, embarrassing us.
“But what I saw this morning. Two tides, one current. Do you know how rare that is, this early? Most pairs spend a year reaching for what the two of you did on instinct. The Keeper noticed. I’ll only say that.
Diver isn’t a someday for you two anymore. It’s a when.”
And there it was, the carrot, gleaming on its stick.
Diver. The rank with the silk and the fast track and, somewhere past it, the passports and the door.
The thing we were climbing for. I felt the competitive animal in me sit up and beg, and I hated it.
Coral refilled my mother’s glass, which did not need refilling, and moved on down the table.
“We’re honored,” I said, and meant the opposite, and she beamed like I’d meant it.
Then Fathom and Calla came over, and that was harder.
They were the couple I’d spent all morning locked onto like a missile, the unbeatable ones, and they came around the table holding hands the way they always held hands, and there was nothing in either of their faces but a warmth that made me want to leave the island on foot, across the water, immediately.
“We had to come and say it,” Fathom said. He was a big soft man in his sixties with a voice like a cello. “Watching the two of you find your current this morning. Calla wept. I won’t pretend I didn’t go a bit myself.”
“He did,” Calla said, fond. She was small and bright, the both of them buried under more tide-bond debt than they would clear in their lives, and happier than anyone I knew. “It took us three years to ride a crest like that. Three years. And you’ve barely arrived.”
“We got lucky,” I said.
“No.” Calla put her small hand over mine on the table, the second woman to do it that night, and looked at me with a sincerity that went through me like a draft from a door left open. “You can’t fake one current, love. We’d know. You two have got the real thing.”
I did not have a single word for that. The fraud being congratulated by the faithful is supposed to feel like getting away with something.
This was the opposite. This was being seen, by kind people, for a thing I had not agreed to be feeling, and I sat there with the warmth of two women’s hands on the back of mine and understood that the most dangerous thing on the island was not the rites or the leash or the man on the wall.
It was a sweet bankrupt couple telling me the truth by accident.
We didn’t talk on the walk back, and we didn’t talk getting ready for bed, and the absence of speech had a texture to it by then, thick enough to lean on.
There is a particular silence two people make when they both know what is coming and neither will be the one to put it on a schedule.
We moved around the little room inside it, finding the sink, finding our own sides of the bed, doing the ordinary machinery of a night with every ordinary thing gone loaded.
“You were good today,” she said to the mirror.
“I’m good at things I don’t want to be good at. It’s a lifelong problem.”
She took out one earring, then the other. “You held me right at the edge for an hour and never once dropped me. Most men would have.”
She said it like a note on my form, the way Coral might, except neither of us was looking at the other and the room had gone very still around the words.
“That was the assignment,” I said.
“It was.” She set the earrings down without a sound. “Doesn’t mean you weren’t good at it, Sean.”
I had no safe answer to that, so I gave none.
She undressed the way she did everything now, unhurried and without quite looking at me, and I watched her in the dark glass of the window because watching her directly felt like a confession, the line of her back, the thing she did with her hair, the same body I’d spent the whole morning holding an inch from blowing in front of forty people.
Every pass in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall was a near miss.
I brushed my teeth for what felt like four minutes, purely to have a job. Then she killed the lamp.
And then we did the thing.
We lay down a careful distance apart, on our own sides, the backs of our hands not quite touching in the cold middle of the bed, and we went still, and we began, the two of us, grown adults, to pretend with everything we had that we were falling asleep.
This was the part I had stopped being able to explain to myself.
Because we both knew. We had known since the candle.
And still the ritual had to be observed, the long minutes of breathing slow and even and lying to each other in the dark, because the breathing was the wall, and the wall was the only thing that let the next part be a thing that happened to us rather than a thing we chose.
So I lay there and counted her breaths and wondered, the way I wondered every night now, how long.
How long we were going to do this. Whether there was a number, some fixed quantity of fake sleep that had to be banked before the books would let us begin.
Three minutes. Ten. I lay in the dark on my honor as a liar and waited for one of us to crack.
It took longer that night, because we had more to lose by rushing it, and the longer it took the worse it got, the dark going tight around us, the both of us lying rigid and elaborately asleep with our hearts going like we’d run somewhere.
She cracked first. Or I did. The wall never recorded a culprit.
What happened was that the distance closed, and it closed the way it always closed, in increments small enough that each one could be a sleeper shifting and none of them a decision.
Her foot found my shin first, cold, and stayed.
A while later, an age later, her back was nearer than it had been, though neither of us had been seen to move.
Then there was no cold middle of the bed at all.
There was just the warmth of her along the whole front of me, and my arm came over her the way it came over her every night, except this time my hand did not lie still where it landed.
It moved. Slow, deniable, a sleeping man’s hand, up the warm plane of her stomach and down again, learning her through the thin cotton, and she let it, and her breathing changed, and that was the gate.
My face went into her hair. She pushed back into me, just slightly, just enough, the small sound she made the sound a sleeping woman might make, and I was hard against her before either of us would admit to being awake.
My hand kept up its slow deniable wandering, lower with each pass, and at some point she reached down and met it, not to stop it but to guide it, pressing my palm flat and low against her, and the heat of her there even through the cotton went through me like a current off a downed wire.
Then, without a word, she drew the hem of what she slept in up out of the way, and reached back for me, and brought her thighs together, slow and deliberate, the offer made in the one language the dark allowed, the one with no words in it and no morning after.
I was past careful by then, feverish with it, and I pushed forward and up, blind and greedy, trying to find her, trying to get inside her, because some animal part of me had stopped reading the rules.
She didn’t let me. She rubbed my side, slow, a soothing hand, the kind for an excited animal, and at the same time tilted her hips a fraction so the angle was gone and the way shut, and what she gave me instead was her thighs, pressed tight and slick between, so close to the other thing that for one swimming second I thought I’d done it, thought I was in her, and I pumped into that belief like a man getting away with something.
Then the truth caught up. I hadn’t. She wouldn’t allow it.
And it did not matter, because the hot wet clutch of her thighs was still there to drive into, still hers, still enough, and we both went on breathing like the sleeping, and it went on, and that was the difference that night, that it was allowed to go on.
The other nights had been quick and furtive, a thing stolen and finished before it could be named.
This was slow and torturous and evil. She set the pace with her hips and I followed it, the long drag of me between her thighs, slick now with how much she wanted it, the wet of her easing every stroke.
Neither of us hurried, because hurrying was a decision and slowness was just sleep, and so we drew it out past sense, the deniability and the wanting feeding each other until I couldn’t have said which one was driving.
Her hand found my hip and held me to the rhythm.
My hand stayed low between her legs where she’d put it, and I felt every pass of myself against the backs of my own fingers, felt her against them too, swollen and slick and past all shame about it, and I started to work her there in time with the rest, slow circles, and the sound she made into the pillow had stopped pretending to be sleep.
I had my mouth open on the back of her neck.
She had her thighs locked around my cock like she’d lose something if she let go.
We climbed it together the way the rite had drilled into us without either of us meaning to learn, matched, one current, except there was nobody grading it now and nobody at the master switch, no Coral, no serene little hand to take the tide away at the worst second and tell us we’d done well.
The thing they had spent all morning refusing us was just lying there in the dark, ours, and the only thing left to stop us going over was our own threadbare insistence that this wasn’t happening, and that insistence was burning off fast.
She went first. I felt it take her, the long shudder of it rolling up through her whole body, her thighs clamping and her spine arching back into me and a broken sound coming out of her that she caught half a second too late and crushed into the pillow, and she rode it grinding back against my hand and my cock at once, gone, shameless, nothing in her asleep anymore, and feeling her go over like that, knowing it was me that did it, dragged me most of the way there with her.
When it started to crest in me I got greedy all over again, and I tried to slide into her for real, one last blind selfish push for the thing we were not allowed, and she would not let me have it.
She tilted away from it and pushed back harder and drew her thighs tighter and worked me through it, ruthless now, the pretense gone ragged in both our breathing.
I groaned and came hard between her thighs and slid my hands up to squeeze her breasts, my face buried in her neck and the sound of it muffled there against her skin.
It kept going, far past what the furtive nights had ever allowed it, all the denied tide of the whole obscene day coming up and out of me with nowhere left to put it but her, and she held me through every last pulse with her fist knotted in the sheet and her body locked back into mine, taking all of it, and we did not say one word.
For a while neither of us moved, and the calm that usually came after did not come.
The wet of it cooled between us and the dark went strange, and I could feel that she was awake too, both of us lying there with our eyes open and our backs to each other, the careful cold inch of mattress back between us as if the night had never happened.
Except it had. Except it always would now.
I didn’t know what we were doing. I didn’t know if she knew.
I lay there raw and wide awake and already, somehow, wanting her again and hating that I did, and on the far side of the bed I could feel her working some version of the same problem and coming up with nothing, the two of us a foot apart and more lost than we’d been before we started.