Chapter 29
Maggie
Now I wake on my own, no alarm and none of the panic that used to come stapled to the front.
The clock on his side says it’s not quite six.
A Wednesday. I’m sitting up against the headboard in his bed with the blanket at my waist, and the cold off the harbor is coming in along the top of the window, which does not close any better than mine does.
The carafe is downstairs in the kitchen.
I can hear the small sound it makes, the drip that isn’t quite a drip and the soft tick of the warmer plate, because he’d been up before me, like he is every morning, and he came back to bed smelling like the roast and put his cold feet against my shins, which is a thing I have decided to allow.
The bed is a double. He runs a head and a hand too long for it. We’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
I sit up. The room is the gray it gets before the gray gets light.
The harbor is out the window past the slate of his shoulder, where he’s still half asleep with one arm thrown over the place I was, and the foghorn goes off across the water at its own count, every six.
I count three of them before I look at the dresser.
On the dresser there is an earring.
A single small silver one, a thin hoop with a flat drop, the match to the one at my ear, which I put in last night in the dark before I came up the back stairs with my boots in one hand.
Both boots. The pair. First time since the night it rained.
I said come up. We ate crullers at my counter, the deck shut on the table behind us, and I told him nothing I should have.
I’ve carried the single one in a pocket since October.
I don’t carry it now. The pair of them is split between the dresser and my ear, and tonight when I take the one out it goes back in the box next to its match, and that’s a sentence I’m not going to say out loud to anyone, including myself, including him.
I murmur the list anyway. Quiet, under my breath, to the window and the gray.
“First, the carafe is on,” I say, to the window. “Second, the pie is happening today. Third, the bus does not run on Thursdays, and I’m not on it.”
The eleven was the count for the woman I was when I came here. The curd will come or it won’t. Either way is alright.
The third one isn’t the comic pivot. I let it not be.
The boards downstairs do the thing they do. The seventh step fires under a weight that isn’t mine. He’s bringing something up.
He comes back upstairs with two cups.
He has to turn his shoulders at the top of the stairs and duck the lintel like he ducks every lintel in this apartment, and he’s cradling the two cups in his two hands, the care of a man who handles breakable things without making a show of it.
He sets them down on the dresser next to the earring without looking at the earring. Then he looks at the earring.
“You have both,” he says.
“I do.”
“Mm.” He gets back into the bed, which is a production, the mattress going down on his side like a thing giving up.
The cold of the early kitchen is on his arm where it comes around me, and the heat of the rest of him is the heat of a man who has been standing over a Diedrich since four.
“I set the kettle. The coffee will go cold.”
“It can go cold.”
“I just made it.”
“You make it every four minutes of your life,” I say. “There will be more coffee. The coffee is not the scarce resource in this room.”
He laughs like he laughs, more breath than sound, low enough that I feel it against my back before I hear it, and his hand comes up my side and stops where it stops, weightless, over the ribs on the left.
It’s stopped there since the first time and it stopped there before I ever told him why.
He doesn’t lean on it. His weight comes a quarter inch toward me and he takes it back.
He touches the earring at my ear. Just once. The flat drop of it under the pad of his thumb, a quarter-second, the smallest weight, and then his hand goes down to the side of my neck and turns my head, and his mouth is at my shoulder where the shoulder starts to be neck.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“It’s barely morning.”
“It is.”
“We open at—” and that’s as far as I get, because his mouth has gone up the side of my throat to the place under my ear, and the tusk on that side clears my jaw by a thumb’s width like it clears it now, the angle a thing we both know, a thing his body and my body worked out over a bonfire and a rainy Thursday and a Saturday with a seam in it.
I turn in his arm to face him, and the turning is easy.
The turning is the easy thing now, and that’s the difference.
There’s no question in the room this morning to be answered. There’s only the morning.
I put my hand on his jaw, the tusk side, like I do, and I don’t do it slow and deliberate like I did it on the night with the seam in it, the night I was claiming something I was afraid I’d lost. I do it like a thing I already know the shape of.
He goes still under it for a half second, and then he doesn’t.
He gets me out of the shirt I sleep in, his shirt, which is comic because it’s always comic, the size of it, how I disappear in it and how it comes off over my head while he watches.
I let him watch. The cold along my ribs lasts the one second before his hand is at the small of my back, and then the cold is gone.
This is the part where the body does the talking, and I let it.
He reads the geometry a step ahead of me, every time, because the bed is a double and he is what he is, and the size of him is the architecture of every morning we’ve had up here.
He doesn’t pull me on top this time. He turns onto his side, half of it, his weight gone to his elbow and the mattress and not to me, and he brings my knee up over his hip with the hand that was on my ribs, his palm under my thigh keeping the angle, because the angle is the thing his size makes a problem and the angle is the thing he solves, every time, without making a speech about it.
“This okay,” he says, against my mouth, which is the whole of the asking, because we’re past the long asking now. I say yes against his mouth, and I mean it with the whole of my body before I’ve finished the word.
The first of it is the stretch, because the size of him is the size of him and that doesn’t change because we’re familiar, and there’s the breath where my body takes the measure of it, and he’s most of the way and he holds there, his forehead coming to mine, his hand under my thigh steady.
I don’t list out loud. There’s no surface to put the clauses on, since the surface is the one I’m on. But the dry thing that catalogues, the one that runs in the back of my chest where the kitchen voice lives, it doesn’t leave me, and it runs now, fast, in three.
First: the coffee is going cold.
Second: I do not care.
Third: oh god.
“You can,” I say.
He moves.
It’s faster than the night with the seam in it, faster than the first night, the bonfire night, because those nights were a yes after a long not-saying and a question and a thing being put back together, and this is none of those things.
This is a Wednesday. This is a man I sleep next to moving in me on a Wednesday with the coffee going cold on the dresser and the foghorn off across the water at its count of six, and the speed of it is how settled it is, because the thing between us is not in danger this morning, and there’s nothing to be careful of except my ribs, which he is, weightless, his hand come back to the left side where it goes.
His weight is half on his elbow and half on the mattress and none of it on me, and I have his shoulder under my hand, the slate of it gone warm.
My other hand is somewhere in the sheet.
His finds it, the big one, the scar across the back I know by how he opens a chamber door.
My hand goes small inside his. He holds it to the mattress beside my head.
Not down. I was just held. The lock at my shoulders had always been about holding me, not holding me down.
The sound he makes at the back of his throat isn’t a word. It’s low and it lands in the room, and I keep it, because he doesn’t make them for anyone else and I’m the one in the room.
I come first this morning. The asymmetry is back like it was the first night and not like it was the night with the seam.
It builds under his hand and the angle he’s keeping with my thigh over his hip, and it isn’t the loud thing of the reconciliation night.
A Wednesday-morning thing. Quieter, all the way through me and out my breath, rough on the out like his ear listens for.
I say his name into the slate of his shoulder with no full stop. He stays with it the whole way.
And then it’s his. It comes up in him, the change in his breath, the in steady and the out gone short, and his hand tightens on mine and then eases, because the body that has watched its own hands for twelve years doesn’t stop watching them now.
He comes with his forehead at my collarbone.
The sound is the low surprised one again, from the bottom of his chest. I hold his hand inside mine and don’t let go.
He doesn’t say the word this morning. The orcish one, the one that means morning light, the one he gave me in the dark on a Saturday with a seam in it and explained at my kitchen table with the blank page between us.
I see he doesn’t, like I saw the earring on the dresser.
The filed years had a not-saying in them too, a kind I could put my hand on like a wall.
This isn’t that. He gave me the word when I needed to hear it, and he doesn’t need to give it to me on a Wednesday, because the Wednesday is the giving.