29. Margot #2
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I’m not sorry for doing it. I’m sorry for what she did with it. I’m sorry someone took something that was yours and used it to hurt you.”
She holds me tighter. The crying slows. Stops. Priya’s hand is in my hair. Stroking, slow. Her breath is warm on the back of my neck.
Then her hands move.
Slowly, carefully. She puts one hand on my breast. One hand on my backside.
Both at once. The same gesture. The same placement.
But the hands are different this time—tentative, light, a question asked with palms instead of words.
Her hands are saying: I know what this means now.
I know what it cost. I am putting my hands back where they were twenty minutes ago when everything was good, and I am asking if we can go back there.
The feeling is… complicated. I laugh. The laugh surprises me.
It surprises Priya. I feel her hands tighten for a second, uncertain, and then relax when she hears the laugh and understands that the laugh is not rejection.
The laugh is surprised. Priya’s instinct after hearing the worst story of my life is to put her hands back and try again.
That is so Priya. The stubborn, hopeful, unstrategic trying again of a woman who looks at ruined things and sees what can grow there.
The laugh is for the trying. The laugh is for the absurdity of it, the gesture that was a joke becoming a wound becoming, in this kitchen, in these hands, a joke again, a new one. Ours.
“You’re ridiculous,” I say. My voice is rough.
“I know.”
“You just heard the worst thing that ever happened to me and your response is to put your hands back on my breast.”
“And your butt.”
I laugh again. The second laugh is closer to the real one, the one that has been getting easier and more frequent since September. I put my hands on her. One on her breast. One on her backside.
“Double trouble,” I say.
The words taste different. The words still carry the quad and the earring and the twelve years in their syllables. But they also carry this floor. This kitchen. This woman. The words can hold all of it, it turns out. The words are bigger than I thought.
She kisses me. The kiss is salty, the residue of the crying still on both our faces.
We stay in the kiss for a long time. There is nowhere else to be.
The crying is over and her mouth is warm and tastes like chai and tears.
Her hand is in my hair. My hand is on the back of her neck.
The kiss deepens without either of us deciding to deepen it.
The heat arrives like dawn, as a gradual brightening that you notice only when you realize you can see.
Her body shifts against mine. The shift is small, her hips pressing closer, her chest against my chest, and the warmth between us changes register. Tenderness discovering that desire had been in the room the whole time, waiting for the crying to finish.
She makes a sound against my mouth. Low, wanting. I pull back. I look at her. Her face is flushed and tear-streaked and beautiful and I want her so much my hands hurt with it.
She sees it. She sees whatever is on my face, and her breath catches and she reaches for the hem of her shirt and pulls it over her head.
The kitchen air on her bare shoulders. Her bra. Her skin.
I pull my sweater over my head.
“Come here,” she says.
The bras come off, mine first, then hers. She pulls me against her and the feeling of her breasts against mine is a sentence I have no language for.
And then I need more.
The rest comes off. Pants, underwear, hers and mine, the removal urgent and clumsy and mutual, her hands on my waistband and mine on hers, both of us pulling and kicking free and the clothing ends up somewhere that is not on our bodies and I do not care where.
She slides down against the cabinet, her back against the wood, pulling me with her. We go down together, graceless, laughing, her hands on my hips guiding me as we sink. The linoleum is cold and hard against bare skin.
“God, my butt. Hang on.” She reaches sideways and drags the kitchen mat from in front of the sink: thick memory foam, faded sunflowers. She shoves it under herself, settles back against the cabinet, and looks up at me.
I settle over her left thigh, one knee on either side, cushioned by the sunflower mat, my belly against hers, my breasts against hers, the full warm press of us. I brace myself against the cabinet with one hand while my leg slides between hers and presses against the heat of her.
She is wet against my thigh. I can feel it, the heat of her directly on my skin, and I am wet against hers, and the feeling is so overwhelming that my mind produces no analysis.
No framework. No catalog. Just the sensation of two women’s bodies pressed together on a kitchen floor, wet and bare and aching.
She moves first. A slow roll of her hips, and the movement grinds her against my thigh.
Her breasts against mine, the slide of them, the soft heaviness shifting with every roll of her hips.
Our stomachs pressing together, warm skin on warm skin.
My nipples are so hard they ache and every point of contact sends a current straight down through my body to the place where I am pressing against her.
I am making sounds, the sounds that come from the place where the roar lives, louder than last time because the crying opened something and the opening has not closed.
The pressure— the pressure is exactly what I need and I hear myself say this. Out loud. Breathless on the kitchen floor.
“Oh fuck, Priya. There.”
The word shocks me. Fuck. I do not say fuck.
I have not said fuck in— I do not say fuck.
I say the evidence suggests and I would argue and the passage clearly indicates.
I do not say fuck on a kitchen floor. But the word came from the same place the roar came from, and so did the Priya that followed it—the name, tender inside the heat.
Both are true and I am not taking either back.
She makes a noise, half moan, half breath. I feel her press harder.
“Say that again.” Barely whispered into my neck.
“What—”
“My name. Like that.”
I take a breath. “That wasn’t—”
“I know you didn’t mean to. Margot.” Her mouth against my throat. “I want it again.”
I pull closer to her. The wanting in her voice brings the words to the surface again and I let them come—