12. Priya #2
Kali greets me with the full-body devotion of a creature whose concept of time does not include the distinction between two hours and two years.
Moti raises his head, confirms my identity, returns to sleep.
I feed them both. I stand in the kitchen.
The boys’ drawings are on the refrigerator—Ravi’s watercolor of a sunset, Dev’s diagram of a watershed he made for school.
The house is theirs even when they are not in it.
Their presence is embedded in the surfaces, in the drawings, the height marks on the doorframe, the stain on the counter from the time Ravi mixed paint in a cereal bowl.
The house is full of them even when it is empty of them.
I shower. I brush my teeth. I get into bed. Kali arrives approximately eleven seconds after my body hits the mattress—the Kali coefficient, perfectly maintained—and settles across my feet. Moti remains in the living room on his oversized bed.
The dark settles. The house is still. I am alone in a way that is not lonely, a distinction I have learned to make over three years of co-parenting, three years of the boys being here and then not here and then here again, the rhythm of presence and absence that has taught me that solitude and loneliness are different countries and that I am, tonight, in solitude, and the solitude is fine.
Except.
Except the evening is in my body. The dinner. The research space. The lamp and the lemongrass and the six feet between us that felt, tonight, less like a distance and more like a dare. The way she said you stayed. The way she paused at the door with her bag on her shoulder and looked at me.
I am lying in the dark and the evening is replaying behind my closed eyes.
The replay is happening on its own, like a dream, my mind selecting the images it wants to revisit, curating the evening into a highlight reel that is, I notice, not organized by importance but by intensity.
Not the conversation about Sophia. Not the discussion about the research.
The moments between—the ones that had no content but had temperature.
The moment she reached across her desk for the soy sauce and her sleeve rode up and I saw her wrist—the inside of her wrist, the pale skin where the veins are visible.
One second. She pulled the sleeve down. But I saw it, and the seeing produced a response in my body that was not about soy sauce and was not about wrists in any general sense but about her wrist, specifically, and the thought I had—the thought I have not allowed myself to think until now, in the dark, in the alone, in the space the boys left when they flew to Chennai—was: I want to put my mouth there.
The thought is in the room now. I let it in. The door was never really closed.
I want to put my mouth on the inside of her wrist.
The thought does not stop at the wrist. Thoughts like this, once admitted, do not observe boundaries.
The mouth on the wrist becomes the mouth on the forearm, tracing upward along the soft skin toward the bend of the elbow, and the Margot in my mind goes still.
The way she goes still when something unexpected enters her awareness. The stillness that is a question.
My hand moves under the sheets, the body following the thought.
My fingers find the hem of my shirt and slide beneath it, pressing flat against my abdomen, and the skin there is warm.
The warmth of my own hand is not the warmth I want, but it is the warmth I have and I am alone in a dark house with a dog on my feet and the freedom to follow this thought wherever it goes.
I close my eyes. The Margot in my mind is in the research space.
The lamp, the warm circle, the evening light.
She is reading aloud, with that voice: low, measured, the slight rasp at the bottom of her register that I feel in my spine like a vibration, like the resonance of a string being drawn.
She is reading and I am watching her mouth shape the words, the precision of it, the way her lips form each syllable with the attention she gives everything—nothing wasted, nothing approximate—and I think about that mouth on my skin.
On my neck. On the place below my ear where the jaw meets the throat.
My hand moves lower. My fingers slip beneath the waistband of my underwear and I am wet.
I have been wet, I realize, since the wrist, since the thought, since the door opened and the thoughts came through.
I press into it and the sound I make is quiet and involuntary and the quiet of the house absorbs it.
I think about her hands. The hands I have been watching for months, the precise hands, the hands that hold a pen the way a surgeon holds a scalpel, with total attention, with the understanding that the instrument is an extension of the self.
I think about those hands on me. Deliberate.
Margot would not be gentle. Margot would be specific.
She would touch me the way she writes—with intention, with precision, knowing where the sentence is going before the first word is spoken.
She would find the place and she would stay there and she would not rush because Margot does not rush anything and the slowness would be—
My fingers move in slow circles. My breathing has changed. The dark room, the quiet house, the dog on my feet, the boys ten thousand miles away, and I am here, alone, in the space they left, and the space is full of her.
The image deepens. I am not in the research space anymore.
I am somewhere private, somewhere warm, and Margot is above me and her hair has come loose from its arrangement and is falling forward and I can feel the brush of it against my face, my neck, and her mouth is on my throat and her hand is where my hand is and she is saying something I cannot hear because the image has moved past language into sensation and the sensation is building, tightening, the heat concentrating to a single bright point—
I think about how she would look at me. That focus.
That absolute, undivided focus that she brings to everything she cares about turned fully on me, on my body, reading me like she reads a text, closely, carefully, attending to every signal, missing nothing.
I think about her watching my face while her hand moves, and the thought of being the object of that focus, that precision, that complete and total attention—
My back arches. I am close. The heat has gathered to a point that is almost unbearable and my fingers are moving faster and my breath is—
Sixty pounds of golden retriever lands on my chest.
Kali, who was on my feet, has—at the precise moment that her human’s breathing changed in a way that her limited but deeply earnest emotional processing system has interpreted as distress—launched herself from the foot of the bed to my torso with the full-body commitment of a rescue operation.
She is on my chest. Her face is in my face.
Her breath, which smells of the dental chew I gave her an hour ago, is hot on my chin.
Her tail is wagging with the frantic concern of a creature who believes she has identified an emergency and is addressing it with the only tool she has, which is her entire body applied directly to the source of the distress.
“Kali.”
The tail wags harder. She licks my face.
She shifts her weight and her paw lands on my breast and I make a sound that is neither pleasure nor pain but the specific noise of a forty-one-year-old woman who was approximately twenty seconds from an orgasm and has been body-slammed by an animal whose emotional intelligence operates at the level of breathing different means crisis.
“Kali. Off.”
She does not get off. She doubles down. She is committed to this rescue.
She presses closer, nestling her considerable head into the curve of my neck, her body covering mine like a weighted blanket.
From the living room I hear Moti shift on his oversized bed: a single, judgmental adjustment of position that communicates, across 30 feet of hallway, his assessment of the situation.
I extract my hand from my underwear. I place both hands on the dog. I stare at the ceiling.
“You have terrible timing,” I tell her.
She licks my chin. Her tail thumps against the mattress.
She has no idea what she interrupted. She will never have any idea.
She is a dog. I lie in the dark with the dog on my chest and the heat still in my body.
It is banked now, unfinished, the arousal receding but not gone, settling into the low hum that will be there when I wake up tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, because the wanting has been let out now and it is not going back in.
The door is open. The thoughts are in the room.
“We’re going to talk about boundaries,” I tell Kali.
I lie in the dark. The house ticks. The wanting hums. Kali snores.
Tomorrow I will see Margot in the research space. I will sit across from her at a distance of six feet, and I will know exactly what I want to do with those six feet and I will do none of it.
This is going to be very, very difficult.
Kali shifts in her sleep. Settles deeper. Her paw twitches. Chasing the squirrel, probably. The eternal squirrel. The squirrel she will never catch.
I close my eyes. I do not finish what I started. The boys are in Chennai. The wanting is in my body.
I fall asleep with all of it—the warmth and the hum and the dog and the dark and the unfinished thing that has a name and the name is Margot and the name is not going away.