3. Jade #2
Cara was describing a man whose body told her everything. I said exactly and held out my glass for more wine.
It wasn't nothing, what I felt in those moments. Just something I don't have a clean word for, like I'd been present for all of it and missed the part where it was about me.
The men after Ryan were their own comedy of errors.
The spring one was careful to the point of performance—consent as a document filed in triplicate, which I appreciated in principle and felt nothing about in my body.
I told him to use a condom both times because I didn't trust him, and I couldn't explain what trusting him would have looked like.
We stopped seeing each other mutually and painlessly, the way you put down a book you were never really reading, and I felt nothing about that either.
The other one was worse because he was actually attractive and we had an actually good time right up until he finished outside me and then said, still catching his breath, that he hadn't wanted to complicate things.
Like the inside of my body was a complication to be avoided.
Like staying meant something he hadn't signed up for.
I lay there looking at his ceiling and thought: at least with Ryan I knew something was at stake.
That is a genuinely low bar. I cleared it for two years and called it a relationship.
My phone has three unread client emails that can wait until Monday.
I work freelance. Brand and print, mostly, the kind of work that travels as long as you have WiFi and enough discipline to check in.
I texted Noor before I left the city: taking a few days, nothing urgent til the 15th.
She sent back a thumbs up. I thought I'd be back in my apartment before she noticed I was gone.
I should be on the highway right now.
I think about Cormac.
I'm done pretending I'm not thinking about Cormac. My body has not been pretending for at least two hours. One of my hands is on my stomach. The other is gripping the sheet.
He poured my glass first. Reached across the table without looking at me, his hand on the bottle—the roughness of that hand, the knuckles a little thickened from years of actual work—and my glass was full before his own, before either of his sons'.
He didn't make anything of it. He just did it and went back to eating like it had always been going to happen that way.
I watched Killian's jaw tighten. I watched Ryan cut his food into very small pieces. Cormac reached for the bread.
And at the sink, when he took my wine glass from me to set it to dry, his hand brushed mine—just the backs of our fingers, just a second—and I got a lungful of him from six inches away: oak and warm skin, something underneath that I've been filing away for two years under not mine, not mine, not mine.
My breasts are full against the cotton of my shirt. I shift my hips. There is no position that helps.
I lie in the dark with my body pulled toward his door.
My hand has moved lower twice. I have moved it back twice.
His room is two doors down the hall. I know the layout of this place better than my own apartment.
Where the keys hang. Which floorboards creak.
Which window in the kitchen catches the morning light.
I have been paying attention here in a way I have not let myself admit.
His room faces the north slope. On cold mornings the light comes in gray and early.
I know that because of one Christmas morning, the second Christmas I spent here with Ryan.
I came downstairs at six and found him already at the stove starting the coffee.
The two of us sat at the kitchen table in the half-dark with our mugs.
We talked about the frost on the slope and nothing much else.
Easy conversation. The kind that doesn't need to go anywhere.
At some point I said you must love living here and he said I do, and there was something in the way he said it—so settled, so certain, like it had never once occurred to him to want something different—that got into me and stayed.
I told him Ryan doesn't feel that way. Just put it down on the table between us like I was finally saying something out loud.
He didn't answer. We sat there until Killian's door opened upstairs and the morning got going.
I thought about that conversation for weeks afterward. About the fact that he was the person I'd said it to.
I thought about him in his kitchen at six in the morning. I thought about it lying in Ryan's bed with my hand between my thighs. I am done being embarrassed about that.
The hand is back where it was. I have not let it move.
My phone says quarter past one. I've been lying here for almost two hours.
He set a place for me before I arrived. He replaced the linens—these are softer than they used to be, and that's not an accident. He started the braise the moment he saw the text on Ryan's phone. He opened the front door before I knocked.
He decided.
So did Killian. The brush of his knuckles when he held the bread basket out to me.
The look across the table after Ryan went to the dishes—green darker than I had seen it, his mouth parted, the full lower lip catching the lamp.
The way he stood in the hall an hour ago with his shirt damp and didn't step aside.
I have not stopped feeling any of it. He has been deciding for two years from the other side of his father's kitchen, and tonight he stopped pretending. So did I.
My boxes are in the corner. I'll open them in the morning. Cereal bowls. Novel. The practical thing.
I turn on my side. I close my eyes. I think about warm skin. I think about oak. I think about the backs of his hands on a wine bottle.
My nipples are hard. I am wet enough to feel it against my thighs. I have not touched myself once tonight. I am saving it for the man who decided about me before I decided about him.
I have been wanting him bare for hours. I have been wanting him to put me on my back.
I have been wanting him to finish where Ryan never did.
I have been wanting Killian too. His hands.
His mouth. The way he looked at me across the table tonight like he was done being patient.
The way he didn't move when I came past him in the hall.
I have been not letting myself say any of this out loud about either of them, and I am too tired to keep not saying it.
I have not been wanted right in eight months.
I have not felt a man finish in two years.
Tonight one of them is two doors down the hall and the other is somewhere on this floor.
I know it. I am going to think about both of them until I fall asleep.
My thighs are pressed together. I leave them.
I fall asleep eventually. It takes a while.