31. Margot
MARGOT
She is coming against my thigh, her hand still on me, and I feel the wave of it in her body, the tremor, the tightening, the release, and that feeling while her fingers are between my legs is what tips me.
This orgasm is sudden and total, arriving from everywhere at once, from her hand and her thigh and the sound of my name in her mouth and the please that is still in mine.
My back arches. My hands tighten on her breasts.
The sound I make comes from the place where the roar and the fuck live, the place that has been opening all year, room by room, and that is, in this moment, open.
Her hand slows. Gentles. Stays.
I am breathing hard against her neck. She is breathing hard against mine. We are quiet, two bodies resting against each other, heart rate slowing, skin cooling, the sweat and the chai and the tears all drying together on the linoleum.
She shifts. Settles me against her chest, her back against the cabinet. My ear on her heartbeat.
Kali has relocated to the living room, either out of discretion or disinterest. Moti has not moved.
The evening light comes through the window over the sink, warm and gold, and falls across the floor and across us and across the spilled chai and across the towel she dropped when she swatted my backside twenty minutes or an hour or a lifetime ago.
Her chest rising and falling under my cheek. The kitchen ticking. Kali sighs from the living room. The light moves on the floor.
“I love you,” I say.
The sentence arrives without construction. No framework. No subordinate clause. No optimal moment selected for delivery.
Her hand stills in my hair. One breath.
“I love you too.” Her voice is steady and full and it breaks on the too. “I have loved you since you wrote my sentence in your margin. Your perfect handwriting. I watched your hand move across the page and I thought—” A breath. “I thought, oh. I’m in trouble.”
I laugh. The laugh is wet because I am crying again, apparently, the crying and the laughing simultaneous, and this is the life I am choosing. It is messy and loud and the floor is sticky and I am saying I love you, and the sentence does not require a system to survive.
I close my eyes. She strokes my hair. The floor is ours.