25. Margot
MARGOT
Late February. The research space. The work is essentially finished, the paper submitted, the committee response pending, the formal reason for our proximity technically concluded.
We are here anyway. We have been here anyway every Tuesday and Thursday, finding reasons—edits, citations, supplementary materials that may or may not require our co-presence—and the reasons have grown so thin they are nearly transparent and neither of us has acknowledged this because acknowledging it would require naming why we are still here, and naming it is the thing we have not done.
Priya brought wine. She opened it with a corkscrew she produced from the enormous bag—the bag that has never once failed to contain exactly what the moment requires—and she poured two glasses into the Lavender House mugs we keep in the research space.
We are reading passages aloud. Proofreading, ostensibly, checking the final text for rhythm, for the quality good prose has when read aloud that bad prose lacks, the sense that sentences want to be in each other’s company.
We have been doing this for an hour. The wine is half gone.
The lamp is on. The fluorescents are off.
The room has narrowed to the two of us and the warm light and the sound of each other’s voices reading words we wrote together.
She is standing against the wall beside her desk, the page in her hand, reading a passage.
She reads it, and her voice does the thing it does when she is reading something she cares about: it drops lower, slows, attends to the rhythm with a care that transforms the words from text on a page into something that lives in the room.
Her voice is low and the room is dark and the wine is warm in my chest and the words are about living things that find each other across impossible distances and the words are ours and she is reading them to me in the voice that I have been listening for since September.
She finishes. She looks up.
I am standing. I do not remember standing. The chair is behind me and I am on my feet and I have crossed half the distance between us without deciding to.
She is looking at me. Her eyes are dark in the lamplight and the passage is still in the air between us and I—
I am so tired of this distance. I am tired of measuring it and managing it and calibrating the exact number of inches between my body and hers and treating the calibration as a professional exercise.
I am tired of the system. I am tired of the walls that have been slowly and carefully and irreversibly undermined by a woman who did not try to breach them, who simply existed beside them and let the existing be enough.
I close the distance. I lean forward.
“Margot,” she says.
I put my hand on the side of her face.
Her skin is warm. Her cheek is warm under my palm. My hand—the hand that holds pens and arranges papers and manages every variable I have controlled for twelve years—my hand is on her face and it is steady.
She looks at me, her eyes bright and full.
Her mouth curves into a smile I have never seen before, slow and sure and aching with the weight of how long she has been waiting for my hand to be exactly where it is.
She puts her hand over mine on her cheek and presses it there, holding it, as though she is afraid I might take it back.
“Kiss me,” she says.
I kiss her.
Her mouth is soft. Her mouth is— my mind reaches for the analytical framework, for the vocabulary of precision I have spent my career developing, for the words that describe what this is with the accuracy and specificity I bring to everything, and the framework crashes.
The vocabulary empties. The precision fails.
Because her mouth is on mine and her lips are warm and slightly parted and she tastes like the Pinot Noir and something underneath, something that is just her, and my mind—the mind that has catalogued the angle of her handwriting and the frequency of her almost-smiles and the exact temperature differential when her shoulder was touching mine—my mind produces, in the moment of the kiss, the following thought:
Fireworks.
Fireworks. My mind said fireworks. I, Margot Voss, Professor of Comparative Literature, said fireworks.
As though I am a greeting card. As though I am a romantic comedy.
As though every precise, analytical, carefully constructed sentence I have ever produced has been leading to this moment in a basement where a woman’s mouth is on mine and the best my mind can do is fireworks.
The kiss deepens. She leans into it, or I lean into it, or we both lean, the direction irrelevant, the leaning mutual, the two bodies that have been maintaining a distance for five months finding that every inch of space between us was not a boundary but a runway.
I kissed a woman in a basement and thought fireworks and was not wrong.
She makes a sound. A small sound, in the back of her throat.
The sound undoes me. Her hand is in my hair.
She has put her hand in my hair. The touch is so specific and so gentle and so exactly what I wanted without knowing I wanted it that my breath catches, audible, and her fingers tighten, slightly, in my hair.
The kiss is brief. It is also eternal. These two things are both true and the simultaneity is another cliché and I do not care.
We are both very still after.
Her hand is still in my hair. My hand is still on her face.
We are breathing, both of us, the breathing audible in the quiet room, slightly faster than normal, the sound of two respiratory systems that have been disrupted by a kiss and are recalibrating.
The lamp is casting its warm circle. The wine is on the desk.
Then Priya speaks: “Finally.”
One word. Delivered with a certain, slightly exhausted relief.
Finally. As though the kiss was not an event but an inevitability, and the inevitability has been present since September and all that was required was for me to stop treating it as something to be managed and start treating it as something to be allowed.
I almost laugh. The almost laugh, the one I have been practicing for five months, the one where the composure threatens to break and I catch it in time.
Except this time, the way the roar broke open on Saturday morning, the way the window opened in my living room when my daughter and this woman roared beside me, this time I do not catch it.
I laugh. Out loud. In the research space.
With my hand on her face and her hand in my hair and the wine on the desk and the lamp casting its circle and the clichés still ricocheting around my mind—fireworks, the earth moved, weak in the knees.
I am a tenured professor of Comparative Literature and my mind is producing weak in the knees.
I am laughing because the mind is right, the knees are weak, the clichés are true, every single despised conventional metaphor for what happens when you kiss someone you have wanted for five months is true, and I was wrong about all of them and I have never been happier to be wrong.
“Finally,” she says again, softer this time, and the word is a warmth I can feel on my mouth because her mouth is close enough to feel.
“I thought fireworks,” I tell her. I do not know why I tell her this except that the honesty of the evening has exceeded my capacity for management, and the management is down and the truth is out. “I kissed you and my mind said fireworks.”
She laughs. The real laugh. The full one. The one that fills rooms.
“For the record,” she says, “I have been wanting you to do that since approximately the second week of October.”
“The second week of October.”
“The day you used the Chemex for the first time. You poured the water in slow circles and watched the bloom like it was a piece of literature and I thought— I had a very specific thought that I am not going to share with you right now because we have just had our first kiss and the thought was not a first kiss thought. The thought was a much later thought. I have been carrying it for four months.”
“You’ve been carrying an inappropriate thought about me for four months.”
“I’ve been carrying several. It’s quite a collection.”
“Priya.”
“You just kissed me and thought fireworks.”
“That is also true.”
We do not go further tonight. The kiss is enough, the first sentence of something that has been building since September and that I am not going to rush because I do not rush anything and because this matters more than anything has mattered in twelve years and because I want to do it right.
Doing it right means choosing it with the same precision I bring to everything, the full weight of the decision visible in the choosing.
I am going to choose this. I need to choose it awake, in daylight, not in the half-lit warmth of a late evening with wine.
“Goodnight,” I say.
“Goodnight.” Her hand slides from my hair. The absence of her fingers at the nape of my neck is a loss I catalogue and hold.