27. Margot #3
I kiss behind her ear, down to her neck, the hollow at the base.
I unclasp the red bra, the matching, the deliberate choosing of this bra for this evening.
The sight and feel of her breasts, impossibly soft and warm as they rest in my hands, in my bedroom in the lamplight produces a response in my body I did not anticipate.
A heat. A hunger. I have been managing desire for this woman for five months in the abstract, the green sweater, the strip of skin, and the abstract is gone.
There is nothing abstract about the curve of her breast or the dark of her nipple or how her chest rises with her breathing. This is a body. Her body. In my bed.
I kiss the slope of her breast and I take her nipple into my mouth and she arches, her whole body arches, and the sound she makes is a gasp that becomes my name—Margot—in a register I have never heard from her, lower, rougher.
I want to hear that sound again. I move lower. Her stomach, soft, the warm skin, moving with her breathing. Her pants are still on. I reach for the button and I pause.
“Yes,” she says. “God, yes.”
I unbutton. I unzip. She lifts her hips, and I slide the trousers down and her underwear with them. And there, a scar low on her abdomen, silver, horizontal. I press my mouth there, briefly. She inhales. I pull back. I want to look at her.
Her hips. The width of them, the curve from waist to thigh.
Her thighs, full and strong, thighs that walk through forests and across campuses with the physical ease I have been watching since September.
The dark hair between her legs. I am looking at all of this with the focused attention I bring to everything and the focused attention is, in this context, desire. The looking is the wanting.
I kiss her hip, the place where the soft strip of skin appeared during the argument, the place I have been carrying in my mind for weeks, and arriving at this place with my mouth feels like a homecoming.
My hands find her thighs, feel the give of them under my palms. She inhales sharply.
Her hand finds my hair—my hair that is down, the pins gone.
Her fingers tighten and the tightening is both permission and plea.
I settle between her thighs. I put my mouth on her.
The first breath, the first second of contact, my mouth on the heat of her, I am still.
I am arriving, the way you arrive at a place after a long journey and you stand in the doorway for a moment before entering, not because you are afraid but because the arriving deserves its own beat.
She is warm against my mouth. The taste of her—the specific, intimate, unmistakable taste—is something I have not experienced in twelve years and that my body recognizes before my mind has processed the recognition.
My body remembers this. My body knows what to do.
The knowing has been stored in the same place as the double trouble and the roar and the crying, in the sealed room, under the architecture, waiting.
The precision redirects. The precision that I bring to everything, the close reading, the tracking of what a text is doing and what it is not doing, all of it redirects from the intellectual to the physical.
I am reading her. I am reading the way her hips respond to pressure, the way her breathing changes when my tongue moves from one place to another, the way her hand tightens in my hair when I find something she likes and loosens when I move past it.
The feedback is continuous. The text is alive. I attend to it.
Her hips move against my mouth. The sounds are louder now.
Priya is not quiet, Priya has never been quiet about anything.
She is saying my name and she is saying yes and she is saying there, and I follow it.
Precision, it turns out, is not the enemy of passion.
Precision is passion’s most effective instrument.
She comes the same way she does everything, fully, without restraint, her whole body involved.
The orgasm moves through her in a wave that I can feel against my mouth, against my hands on her hips, in the tightening of her thighs and the arch of her back and the sound, the sound she makes is not a cry and not a moan but something between and beyond both.
The sound fills the room. The filling is the room becoming what it was meant to be: a place where someone is loud, and alive, and held.
I rest my head against her thigh. Her hand is in my hair, not gripping now, stroking, the slow movement of fingers through loosened hair, the tenderness after the urgency.
Her breathing is slowing. I can feel her pulse against my cheek, the rhythm of it decelerating from the rapid pace of the orgasm to something steadier, something that sounds like rest.
“You,” she says. The word barely a sound, barely a breath. “You and your precision.”
“I’m a thorough researcher.”
She laughs. The laugh is exhausted and warm and lands in my chest like sunlight.
I move back up and settle down next to her. We lie for a while. Her hand on my hip, my arm across her shoulder, the room settling around us.
“I want you to stay,” I say.
She looks at me. She kisses me, soft, unhurried, her mouth warm against mine. She pulls back, smiling.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
She falls asleep. Her hand stays on my hip. The weight of it, light, warm, present, is the first weight I have welcomed on my body since Sophia fell asleep in my arms as an infant, the weight of a sleeping child telling me, in the language of gravity, that I was trusted.
I wake at 5:00 a.m.
This is my usual time. The body’s clock, unchanged by the revolution of the previous evening. I wake and the first thing I register is: there is a hand on my hip. The second thing: there is a woman in my bed. The third thing: the woman is Priya.
The twelve-year instinct activates. The instinct says: get up.
Make tea. Establish distance before she wakes.
Be dressed, be composed, be in the kitchen with a mug in your hand and the morning’s armor in place before she opens her eyes and sees you in the undefended state of having just woken up.
The instinct is strong. The instinct says: the most dangerous moment is the one after intimacy, when the walls are down and the body is soft and the other person has the power to hurt you because you have given them access to the unprotected parts.
I do not get up.
I stay. I do not make tea. I do not establish distance.
I lie in the grey early light of a March morning and I choose to be here, undefended, undressed, unsystemed, with a woman whose hand is on my hip and whose trust in me is expressed in the fact that she fell asleep and stayed asleep and did not worry that I would be gone when she woke.
The choosing costs me something. I feel the cost, the flutter of fear in my chest, the instinct banging on the door I have closed against it, the voice that says get up, get up, you know what happens when you stay. I hear the voice. I do not obey it.
Priya opens her eyes.
She blinks. She sees me. She sees that I am here, that I stayed, that I did not flee to the kitchen, that I am lying beside her in the morning light looking at her fully. Without anything held back.
She smiles. The one that starts in her eyes. The one that has been reorganizing my life since September.
“Good morning,” she says.
She moves closer. Her hand slides from my hip to my waist, pulling me toward her, and I go, I go the way I have been going toward her for five months, inevitably and completely, and her body is warm against mine and the morning light is coming through the window, falling across the bed, and the room is full.
“Also also,” she says, into the skin of my shoulder.