Chapter 8 #2
I do not, this time, rush to the joining.
I take my time with her here too. I learn what works—I have been learning what works for three weeks, and the learning is not, I find, ever finished.
She is breathless. She is saying my name in small soft pieces.
Her hand is tight in my hair, and her hips are lifting against my mouth, and the firelight is on the line of her body, and I find, in a way I had not, until this moment, allowed myself to find, that I am not afraid.
Not of her. Not of myself. Not of the math.
She comes apart against my mouth, quiet, shaking, her hand pressed hard to the back of my neck. I stay with her. I do not pull back. I let her ride it down to the steady breathing on the other side of it, and only then do I rise back up the length of her body and gather her against me.
She is laughing.
It is a small breathless laugh, half against my collarbone. "Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"That is going to be hard to talk about tomorrow."
"I am not planning to talk about it tomorrow."
"Good."
I kiss her. She kisses me back. Her hand finds the line of my hip, and then lower, and the touch—steady, sure, the touch of a woman who has, in three weeks, learned this body the way I have learned hers—undoes me completely.
I roll onto my back.
She rolls with me. She is on top of me now, knees on either side of my hips, the cherry medallion swinging forward between us. I sit up against the pillows. I am, in this position, looking up at her. The firelight is behind her. Her hair is a dark cloud around her face. Her eyes are bright.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
"Are you sure?"
"Thaddeus."
"I am asking."
"I am sure."
She lowers herself onto me.
The joining is slower than the first time.
Both of us are tired, and the tiredness has, paradoxically, given the slowness room.
She lowers herself with care—an inch, a pause, another inch, another pause—and I hold her hips and watch her face by the firelight, watch her lips part as she takes me, watch her eyes go soft and dark when she is fully seated.
We breathe together for a moment when we are joined.
Her forehead comes down against mine. I am all the way inside her and the heat of her around me is steady and tight and unhurried, and the wolf in the back of my mind makes the small approving sound he made in the workshop three weeks ago, the click of the key in the lock, the same key, the same lock, the lock now open and staying open.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"I am here. I am with you. We are here."
It is the same thing she said to me three weeks ago, when I lowered myself into her the first time, with my forehead against hers and my breath unsteady.
She is saying it back to me now. She is, I realize, saying it to herself as much as to me.
She has carried a week of grief, and the grief has needed this, the same way mine has needed this, and the meeting of us in the dark is the only honest answer either of us has.
I say her name against her neck.
I say it the way I have been saying it in my head for a month. Rue. Rue. Rue.
She begins to move.
It is slow. It is unhurried. She rocks against me with the small soft rhythm of a woman who is taking her time on purpose, who is not chasing anything, who is using the motion itself as a kind of grief-work, a working-out of the week, a slow rebuilding of the thing that the week has, in both of us, very nearly broken.
I do not, for a long time, move with her.
I let her have it. I keep my hands at her hips, light, steady, not directing, just present. I let her work.
She works.
She rolls her hips against mine in long unhurried sweeps.
She rises almost off me—the slow drag of leaving—and then she lowers back down, all the way, the slow seat of return, and the rhythm she finds is a rhythm I have never been inside of before, slow and full and the kind of intimate that has more to do with breathing than with motion.
I watch her by the firelight. Her hair has come fully loose.
Her hands are braced against my chest, palms flat over my heart.
The cherry medallion swings forward between us with each downstroke and taps softly against my sternum.
Her head is tipped back. Her throat is long and pale and exposed.
The fire pops in the front room. The stove ticks as it settles. Outside the cottage, the snow has thickened again; I can hear it against the small bedroom window, the soft endless tapping of December against glass.
When I do begin to move with her, it is slow.
She gasps. Her hands move to my shoulders.
She braces against me. I lift up under her—a slow careful rise from beneath—and she rocks down to meet me, and the rhythm we find between us is slower than any rhythm I have ever found with anyone, slow and full and the kind of intimate that has more to do with breathing than with motion.
I slide my hand up the length of her body—from her hip, up the line of her ribs, to the soft curve of her breast, where I cup her, where my thumb finds the small tight point of her and circles slowly.
She arches into my hand. The angle of the arch shifts the angle of me inside her, and she gasps—the small open vowel she made in the workshop, the one I have been listening for—and her hips jerk down hard against mine.
I find the angle. I keep it. I lift up under her at that angle, slow and deep, and her breath fractures and her thighs tighten around my hips and the wet heat of her around me is steady and tight and building.
I move my hand from her breast to the place where we are joined.
I find the small soft place above where I am inside her.
I touch her there—light, then steady, then with the slow patient circle that worked in the workshop three weeks ago, the rhythm I have been learning, the rhythm I will spend the rest of my life learning—and she makes a sound against my temple that is not a word and not quite a moan, something in between, something private.
She says my name.
I say hers.
I sit up against her. Her arms come around my shoulders.
I bury my face in the curve of her neck where her hair has gone damp at the hairline.
The change in position drives me deeper, and she gasps against the top of my head, and her thighs lock around my hips and she begins to ride me in earnest—small tight motions, controlled, building—and I can feel her pulse against my mouth, fast and steady, the small persistent insistence of her alive against me.
This is what alive is.