Chapter 17 #2
The corner of his mouth tips up. The kitchen light is at his back, slanting in from the hall, so what I’ve got of him in here is the harbor side of his face, the side that goes to the window first when he’s at the counter listening for something, and the tusk at the corner of his lower lip where my thumb went the first time, in the back room of Finley’s on a Sunday.
I take my coat off and I don’t hang it, I put it on the little painted chair by the dresser. His coat comes off after mine, the wool one with the wide collar, and he lays it on top of mine on the chair without making the laying-it-down a production.
His shirt is the flannel he wears under the apron. His hands are at his sides. Mine are at mine.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
He comes.
From the doorframe to the bed is three steps for me and two for him.
The bed at the back of my knees is a quiet pressure.
The bed at the back of his is going to be a problem, because it’s a double and he’s a head and a hand longer than a double, and that’s a problem I’m not going to solve before we get to it, so I solve the part I can solve and my chin tips up.
His hand goes to the side of my neck. The palm at my jaw is wider than I’ve let myself measure in nine weeks of watching it across a counter.
His fingers find the hairline at the back, where the hair stops being neck.
The thumb at my jaw is the thumb that’s set six thousand cups onto six thousand saucers and not broken a single one of them.
The kiss isn’t the Sunday kiss and it isn’t the back-room-of-Finley’s kiss.
It’s the kiss of a Thursday when I asked him up and he said alright and we walked six blocks in the rain and stopped at the brass mailbox and turned a key.
The whole mass of him is in front of me.
He’s the thing holding the rest of the night up.
I don’t have to find the words for what his mouth is doing. My mouth already knows them.
The sweater comes off over my head, and he lifts it for me.
The cardigan’s already on the chair from the door.
The thin gray shirt I’ve had on under the sweater since the rain started is at the hem now where his hand is, and the lift is slow, the speed of a lift you’d stop the second anything was wrong with it. Nothing’s wrong with it.
I’m cold for one second. Then I’m not, because the room has the harbor at the window and a sash that won’t close, but his hand at the small of my back is the exact temperature of a kitchen at four in the morning that’s been running a Diedrich since before sunrise.
The garnet on my right hand hasn’t turned again.
It’s the one Gianna put on me the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, the small stone seated against the pad of my finger, when she said it should sit warm to your skin, Mags, and I said Gi, it does.
Thursday, my apartment, November, and the garnet is the one small warm thing that hasn’t left my finger since six this morning.
The flannel comes off. The buttons are the buttons I’ve watched him do up at the bar.
The undershirt under it is the white cotton I’ve folded with the Friday laundry without making the folding a thing.
The bone at the top of his sternum is the slate gray of the rest of him, and the matte of it goes warmer at the throat.
The scar on the back of his left hand lands at my hipbone, and I don’t look at the scar, because I already know the scar by what my body knows about how he opens a chamber door.
The bed takes us. He sits first. I’d thought I’d sit first. He reads it a step faster.
From his sit he draws me in by the waist until the height difference comes down to something we can both work with.
I’m in his lap. His mouth is at my collarbone.
The brass at the headboard stays quiet. Nobody’s asked it anything yet.
Piccola, I think, not at him, at the moment, at the simple fact of being in this bed in this room with him and nowhere I’d rather be, and the kitchen voice rises in the back of my chest with the smell of milk on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t say the word out loud, and the carrying of it is my own.
He stretches me back against the quilt, and his weight doesn’t come down through me.
His forearm goes flat on the mattress alongside my shoulders, like his hand on the bar, the lock that takes the load down into the wood and not into the small breakable thing sitting on the wood, and the mass of him goes exactly where he’s putting it and not anywhere near my ribs.
I’m held under him without being held down, and his hand rests over my bad-side ribs so light I lose track of whether it’s there.
His mouth at my throat. His mouth at the place where the throat starts becoming collarbone.
The tusks pass the side of my neck like they passed it at the back-room kiss in October and at the bonfire at Vrennthala, and the care his hands have at the cups they have here too.
The pressure is at the bone behind my ear.
He breathes there. He breathes a word there.
I don’t catch the word. I catch a syllable he makes that isn’t a word I know, and the syllable goes into the bone behind my ear, and what I do with it is hold onto the sound of it and let the meaning go where it wants.
What I never once do in any of this is the upstairs voice.
My contractions shorten. The half step up disappears.
The honey is gone. The room doesn’t give any of it a place to show up in, because there’s no one here I’m performing for.
There’s the room with him in it and me in it, the garnet on my right hand at the back of his neck, the quilt, the lamp off, the kitchen light a long way down the hall, the rain on the harbor side of the window, and not one thing in this room is asking me to be a brighter version of myself than the one in this bed.
I help him with the rest of it, and I help me with the rest of it.
There’s jeans-button geometry, and there’s the whole question of what to do about my socks, which is comic the way socks are always comic, and the laugh I do at the socks is the kitchen laugh, the one Nonna’s enamel pot used to hear all the way out at the back stoop.
He laughs once with me, low, more breath than sound. The laugh stays in the room.
The bed is brass and the bed is small, and he works with what the bed gives him. My right knee at the inside of his hip. His left hand under my lower back, lifting. He has me at the angle where his size won’t become a thing. I tell him with my hand when. I tell him with my breath when. He listens.
The first beat is the stretch. The second beat is my body deciding the stretch is exactly what it asked for. The third is my body deciding it wants more of it. The garnet’s at the back of his neck, warm against him from a whole Thursday on my finger. The quilt’s at my shoulder.
He’s at me and into me and my body is the entire contents of this minute.
The clause-piling that’s my baseline at the counter is going at full pressure in my chest with nowhere to set it down, because the only surface I’d set it on is the one I’m living on right now.
His weight comes a quarter inch toward me and he takes it back, and what he doesn’t say is in the take-it-back.
I’ve never once filed anything in this bed.
What I do at a beat like this is store it: the breath at the bone behind my ear, the slate gray going matte at his throat, the heat of him against me, the small bed shrinking under both of us at once.
I’m storing it at a speed I won’t get around to counting until tomorrow.
His mouth says my name once. Maggie. He says it at the bar, period and all.
“Yes.”
I say yes twice more before I say anything else, because yes is the only word my body’s holding onto in this bed. The garnet stays. My hand at the back of his neck stays. The brass at the headboard makes a small sound and then answers itself, and we keep going.
There’s a beat where the comedy lifts its head.
He folds his knees a quarter foot to keep his feet on the mattress.
It’s a small choreography we both register.
Neither of us says a word about it. That’s the quiet laugh of it.
Nothing here needs fixing. The bed’s a double and he’s a head and a hand longer than it, so we’re staying just as we are.
The peak. I’m not going to narrate it like I would a list at the counter.
What I’ve got is the heat of him at my chest, the bone behind my ear keeping a sound for me, my own oh arriving in the room small and round and not the least bit embarrassed, my mouth at his shoulder, my teeth at the muscle there like a body asks for a thing to bite without breaking it. He lets the muscle take it.
After.
His weight comes off me slow. He stays close.
The forearm alongside my shoulders is the last part of him to lift away.
The rest of him goes first. The bed is small.
He’s on his side at my left, head propped on his hand, his other hand flat on my belly, the size of his palm a thing I don’t have to look down to know.
“Maggie.”
“Yes.”
“Good?”
I laugh once, the kitchen laugh. “Yes.”
He hums. It’s the hum I’ve heard him do at the carafe at four in the morning when the temperature’s settled to where he wants it. The hum lands. I store it.
The garnet’s on his neck still, where my hand’s gone.
My hand lifts off his neck and then goes back, and the garnet warms again against him.
The kitchen light at the end of the hall is still on.
The window won’t close at the top and the cold comes in along the sash, and the warmth in the room holds anyway.
“There’s a kitchen out there,” I say, after a while.
“Yes.”
“And Garza’s bag on the counter.”
Something eases at his jaw. “There is.”
“Crullers.”
“Still soft, if Garza fried them right.”