CHAPTER 19 #2
She put them together herself, in front of her, at the height of her waist.
I bound them loosely, so that her hands stayed in the frame of the glass and her fingers could open. I turned the fist over and made her open it once in the mirror. The brass sat flat on her palm. Then I closed her fingers back over it myself, one at a time.
“If you want it to stop, you open your hand,” I said.
“I know exactly what it is for, and you gave it to me before you ever gave me a whole sentence,” she said.
I put my mouth on the back of her neck under the hair. I held it there until the skin was warm. Then I took it away and let the cold air get to the wet.
She made a sound at that. I put my knuckles at the top of her spine and drew them down, slowly. I watched the mirror to see where she moved.
There was a spare bootlace from the barn in my back pocket, leather, stiff with use. I drew it across her nipples once and she went up onto the balls of her feet. I did it again, slower, and kept doing it, and she got loud, which neither of us had planned for.
“Watch the glass. Don’t look at me. Look at yourself.”
She got her eyes back up. I put my left hand under her bound wrists to keep them in the frame. My right hand went down over her belly and between her thighs. She was already slick.
Two fingers into her pussy and my thumb working her clit, and all of it inside the mirror, and both of us watching it happen. Her mouth came open and stayed open. I took the fingers out and held them up in the lamplight so she could see. Then I put them back into her cunt and did not stop again.
She came standing up, hard, with her weight going backwards into me and the brass still shut in her fist.
I stepped in behind her to take the weight, and for that one step the mirror had nothing of me in it.
My hand opened. “Sundown.” The casing hit the boards, rolled once, and stopped against the leg of the chest.
My hands were off her before the sound had finished. I moved back a step and then another. I did not ask her anything. I untied the cloth at her wrists and let it drop, and lifted the blanket off the bed and put it around her shoulders, and then I took my hands away from her again.
The glass of water was on the chest. I set it down on the boards beside her foot where she could reach it without standing up. Then I crossed to the far wall and sat down on the floor with my back against it, and put both hands flat on my knees where she could see them.
“I am on the floor by the wall. You can see me,” I said.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the blanket held closed at her throat. Her breathing went out long and came back short and then went out long again. The counterweight knocked once inside the frame box and neither of us moved for it.
She drank some of the water and put the glass back down on the boards. She stayed where she was for a while and I let her have all of it.
Then she got down on her knees on the floor and picked the casing up herself. She turned it over once. She closed her hand on it and stood up.
I did not move. My hands stayed where they were.
“Get back in the mirror where I can see you, and start again from my hands,” she said.
I got up and went into the glass and stopped half a step behind her right shoulder, where all of me showed. I touched two fingers to her sternum and tapped twice. She tapped twice back, hard enough that I felt it in the bone.
I started at her hands, because that was the instruction. I turned each one over. I put my mouth on the inside of the wrist, then the palm, then the pad of the thumb below it. Her fist stayed shut around the brass and I worked around it and did not ask her to open it.
Then her forearms, and the inside of the elbow, and up. She watched every part of it happen in the glass and I stayed in the glass while it did.
The blanket came off her shoulders and onto the chest. She put both hands on the mirror at the height of her face and moved her heels apart. She did it before I could tell her to.
“Do not go behind me again tonight,” she said. “Stand where the glass has you and stay in it.”
I put my cock into her slowly, standing, with one hand spread on her sternum and the other on her hip.
Her hands squeaked on the glass and then went still against it.
I kept my eyes on her face in the mirror and I didn’t take them off it once, not when she started to say my name, not when her chin came up, not at the end.
She came the second time with her forehead nearly on the glass and my hand holding her up under the ribs.
I came with my forehead against the back of her neck and my eyes still on the mirror.
“I was watching you,” I said.
“I know that you were,” she said. “You’ve been doing it since the first night in that building, and tonight is the first time in my life I could see you doing it.”
I went down for the kettle off the stove and came back with warm water in a basin and a cloth. I washed the inside of her thighs and then her wrists, where the strip had left faint bands, and then her hands. I worked around her and let her stay exactly where she was.
I folded the cloth strip and set it on the chest. I put the chair back against the wall. I latched the window and the counterweight knocked once inside the frame box and settled. I refolded the blanket and laid it along the foot of the bed.
Then I sat behind her and combed her hair out with my fingers, one section at a time, from the ends upward, so that it did not pull. She let me, and I took as long as it took.
Last, I put the brass back into her right hand and closed her fingers over it, one at a time, and held the fist shut inside mine until she had the weight of it herself.
She slept with the lamp off and the window latched and her hand curled where I’d left it. I went out across the gravel in the dark and up the fixed ladder with the cold back in the knuckle, and it clicked, and I let it.
The screens came up. The fence line sat square in the middle one where I had left it, three hundred and ten meters out, gray and empty. I put my eye to the glass and looked at ground I’d already looked at.
There was one place on the northern fence line I could not see, and I left it until morning.