Chapter 14 #3
She climbs behind me, and I do not turn around. Her hand finds the rail. The boards have one creak at the seventh step, and it fires under her foot and not mine.
The door at the top is the same door that has been there for fifteen years. I unlock it and open it and step back.
She goes in first.
I have never seen the apartment from a doorway with another person in it.
The light is the harbor light coming through the one window.
The bed is in the corner where the bed has been for fifteen years, and the wool blanket on it is folded like my grandmother folded blankets, because there has not been anyone to unfold it for.
She does not say anything about the apartment. She studies the window. Her gaze moves to the bed, then settles on me.
“You live here.”
“Yes.”
“It is warm.”
I look at the stove. The stove is not lit. The warmth in the room is the heat I left in it when I went down at four this morning, the afternoon sun on the brick wall holding it.
“The wall holds the day,” I say.
“That is one of the things you would notice.”
She is taking the heron mask off the back of her hair, and she sets it on the chair. There is a bread crumb at the cuff of her sweater, and she picks it off and does not eat it and puts it on the corner of the small table.
I am still at the door.
She turns to me, and the deep voice comes again, the one she had at the fire, the one she did not have in any of the seven hours before it.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
I come.
The first contact is her hand at the front of my coat, and the second is mine at the side of her neck where the heron mask was.
Her hair is warm at the root from the mask having been there, and her ear is cool because the wind off the walk has not gone out of it yet.
The two temperatures are a quarter inch apart, with my thumb at the meeting line.
She lifts her chin a half beat.
The kiss of Sunday is in both of our mouths, and the kiss of tonight is a different kiss. Sunday was a question. Tonight is not.
The scent is at the back of my throat now, paper, warm, the soft-spine paperback kind, and beach grass, the cold-edged green of the dunes north of town, the two notes that have arrived for the count of mornings I have not let myself say aloud, only now arriving from less than an inch away.
Vesari.
The word forms at my lip a half beat before the sound.
Lip, breath, sound, in that order, always.
Her eyes are closed, so she does not see the lip move.
The breath arrives at the side of her ear with the word in it.
She makes a sound that is not a word, and the sound goes into the bone behind her ear and stays there.
The coat comes off, hers first, the oatmeal cardigan she has worn for twelve hours and through the bonfire and through the cold of the walk back, and it goes on the chair on top of the heron mask. Under it she has a soft shirt I have not seen, and the shirt is mine to lift if I lift it.
I lift it.
She has goose-flesh at her ribs from the cold of the room.
The nickel band is still at her right hand.
Her right hand is at the bottom button of my flannel.
Her left hand is at the back of my neck, where the hair stops being neck and starts being shoulder.
The button comes out of the buttonhole at the speed of a button.
“Slow,” I say.
“I know.”
“Then slow.”
“I know it.”
We get to the bed in four moves, and the count has gone quiet.
The blanket is the one folded the old way and I do not unfold it.
The bottom sheet is cold against the back of my shoulder where a lamp would have hit if there were a lamp on, and there is no lamp on, and the harbor through the window is the light we get.
She is above me at first, because the geometry works that way, her knees at my ribs, her hair in my mouth at one point. She laughs once at the hair-in-mouth thing, the laugh she had at the teahouse table on Sunday, not the bell, the other one.
Then she is not above me and the geometry shifts, and my forearm is under her thigh, taking the weight. The mass difference is what it is, and I do not pretend it is not there. I take the weight. She tells me with her hands when to take more and when to take less, and her hands are exact.
She reaches across me for the lamp on the small painted nightstand. My elbow meets her reaching at the corner of the wood. The lamp goes over. The bulb cracks.
I don’t regret the lamp.
The quiet I kept all these years was for holding a thing at a distance, and there is no distance now.
Her mouth opens at my collarbone. The nickel band is at the bone above my elbow. Her foot is at the back of my calf. The harbor light is on the wall. The inland country is somewhere out past the window, and I do not look for it.
She says my name once. I say hers once. We don’t say anything else for a long time after that.
After.
She is at my left side with her head on the place where my arm becomes my shoulder, her right hand on my chest, the nickel band at the third rib up from the bottom of my sternum. Her fingers move once and stop. Her breath is at my collarbone.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“That was.”
She does not finish it. She does not have to.
“I know.”
“Good.”
The blanket is folded at the foot of the bed in the old fold, and I take one corner and pull it up over the both of us, more for her than for me. She is small under it. The nickel band is the highest thing on her hand. The blanket sits a quarter inch under her chin.
Out the window the harbor light has gone from blue-edged to flat black. The night is not over yet by the clock on the small shelf, which has no hands, because I count without them. I count to four. I hold there.
“Stay,” I say.
“I am staying.”
“Good.”
She is asleep before I am. The nickel band stays warm at my chest. The harbor light makes one small sound against the glass. The cat is at the foot of the bed, and I did not hear her come up the stairs.
The blanket holds.