Chapter 10 #2
We had an hour to kill before he had to drive back to the city.
James turned on the fireplace and we sat on the couch.
I nursed the leftover white wine James used in the sauce while Silver snaked between our ankles.
When he wasn’t looking, I dipped my finger in my glass and waved it to the side.
She rose to lick it, her tongue warm and scratchy.
Then she stuffed her head into the glass and lapped ferociously.
“Hey.” James touched my face. Somewhere in the room, a fly buzzed. “I’m going to miss you in the next few days.”
“I’m going to miss you, too.”
Silver coughed and jumped onto my lap.
“We have some time,” said James, then he put his hand on my neck. “Do you want to?”
I looked down at Silver. Her eyes were narrowed in contentment.
“Um,” I said. “What about her?”
James carried Silver out of the room before I could protest. Her face blinked in the gap of the door before it closed.
“Thanks,” I said, though I wanted her company more than I wanted sex. “It felt perverted to me.”
James took off my shirt. The room was cold, and the heat of the fireplace flickered unevenly over my chest. I raised my arms to cover myself.
“You’re cold.” James ran his fingers along my goosebumps.
I nodded, feeling somewhat virginal. His body was warm and firm.
James continued to undress me. I realized I was letting something happen to me, something that I didn’t want but didn’t feel like stopping, either.
The fly buzzed louder. I reached to slap my ear.
I pictured Silver alone on the other side of the house, where my new tin of paints sat unopened on the kitchen table.
Thinking about the paints flushed me with misery.
James’s voice had remained tender, even as he insisted on buying them.
I couldn’t blame him. I let him pay, I didn’t even bring my wallet. Had I always been this way?
James kissed my breast. “Lie down,” he said, his voice gentle.
I squirmed. He repositioned our bodies so we lay side by side.
I took his hand, led it up and down my ribs until he repeated the motion on his own, his strokes slow and heavy.
My limbs needled with the surprise of pleasure.
Noticing, he increased the pressure. I inched closer to him, the pressure of his strokes increasing, until I felt his weight solidly, heavy enough to suffocate me, and then, without thinking, I turned and bit his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, flinching.
“Sorry,” I untwisted my leg from beneath him. “I felt stuck.”
“Better now?”
“I think so.”
“We can stop if you want.”
“Well,” I said, considering it, and other things: our first night here, the sea then lovely and unbroken, the house observing me with watchful eyes.
Lou’s voice in my head, coaxing me to see reason: it wasn’t so bad, at least I had James.
The last time I saw her, the night of my twenty-second birthday, her tongue purple from the cupcakes.
Our legs crossed in the living room, which was also the kitchen, the areas separated only by a large bookshelf, repurposed as an organizer for Lou’s bags and shoes.
It would be empty now, the bookshelf, all her things sitting somewhere bigger and better.
I didn’t understand why she’d chosen to live with me when she could’ve picked anybody else.
I thought about her job at her uncle’s gallery, conspiring with talented people in beautiful shoes.
Maybe she knew she was my only option. She felt sorry for me.
I said, “Let’s keep going, I want to,” and James went inside me with a small gasp from the both of us while I thought about my lack of a place or plan or job.
Softly he breathed in my neck while I pictured Silver’s tiny ears, the perfect size of her life.
My limbs lolled to the side. “Oh,” he said, and relaxed.
“That’s so nice.” “Yes,” I said while he took my arms and bunched them toward my chest. “It is,” and then I thought of the paints again, all that money for only ten tubes.
“It’s so nice,” James repeated, holding me.
It was useless, I was useless. I was numb and small and at least a little bit happy being more thing than person.
Yes, I had always been this way. Yes, Lou was right, a threshold existed, and it had passed below me, or had at least begun to, so that each day I was moving deeper into James’s world, with its knowledge and judgments and objects that could not be unthought or unbought, which was to say that each day I was moving further away from my mother.
Not thinking about what was happening did not make it any less real.
Yet, I realized with a feeling of having been tricked, confronting it would not stop it from continuing. I only had one option left.
“You feel so good,” James said.
I turned to face him. “Lou moved out, and her cousin is kicking me out of the apartment. I no longer have a place to live.”
James stopped. That was unfortunate; I was finally starting to enjoy it. “You can keep going,” I said. My skin slid against his, both of us sweating now. He put his hands on my hip bones and pulled out.
“Wait, what?”
“There’s a fly somewhere in here,” I said. “Is a window open?”
“Lou moved out?”
“Yes, but you don’t have to make a big deal about it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? This is big.”