26. Josie
JOSIE
It’s a Tuesday when it almost happens, because of course it is—nothing day, nothing hour, nine-thirty at night and we’re on the couch watching a movie neither of us picked with a whole cushion of neutral ground between us, the way we’ve been doing it, church rules, hands visible.
And I’d testify the whole evening was innocent, except my body’s been keeping its own diary all week and the entries are getting incriminating.
Monday his forearm across the whole doorway while he said good night, and me noticing it like a billboard.
Tonight he reached past me for the remote and I got shop soap and warm cotton and him, and some assessment ran all the way down my body before I could file an objection.
Three weeks of fences, and the maddening truth nobody warns you about: the body doesn’t honor the terms. The body wasn’t at the negotiation.
The body’s been married to that smell for three years and it would like to speak to a manager.
I don’t even know who moves first. That’s the truth and I’d swear it anywhere: one minute I’m reaching for my tea and his arm’s along the couch back, and the next the space is just gone—closed, both of us, some slow tide that’s been coming in all week finally arriving—and his mouth is on my neck.
Right where he knows. Of course right where he knows.
And I go up like dry grass.
There’s no slow about it, no decorous warming trend—weeks of held breath ignite all at once, and I’m turning into him before I know I’ve moved, my fingers in his hair pulling him closer instead of pushing him off, his breath gone ragged against my throat, one big hand sliding up my back under my shirt and spanning half of it, and the little sound I make would embarrass me in any other lifetime.
His other hand finds my hip and grips, that grip, three years of that exact grip, and my whole body answers it like a phone ringing in an empty house—instant, loud, nobody home to stop it.
He pulls me half across his lap. I go. His mouth drags up to my jaw and I turn and catch it with mine and we’re kissing like the couch is on fire, graceless, starving, teeth clicking once, and my hands have found his belt out of pure body-memory, no vote taken, fingers working the buckle they’ve worked a thousand times—and God, the size of him around me, the smell of him, grease and soap and Levi, his mouth leaving mine to drag down to that spot under my ear?—
—and it’s another Tuesday, sudden and whole: second year, this same couch, some movie dying on the TV just like this, laughing into his mouth because we couldn’t get my sweater over my head, both of us easy, both of us sure—the want with no undertow to it, no weight, want like an open road, his hands under me and nothing anywhere in the world to check for.
That Tuesday flares up bright inside this one, one breath, perfectly aligned, same couch, same mouth, same spot under my ear?—
—and it’s the sameness that stops me. Because it isn’t the same. The want’s the same and underneath the want, where an open road used to be, there’s a drop.
And it’s not one clean stop, either—that’s the part that would shame me if there were room in here for shame.
I say it and keep kissing him through it, stop landing somewhere against his mouth, my hands finishing the buckle even as the word’s coming out, body and voice running two different governments—and it takes a second stop, louder, realer, my palms flattening against his chest, before both of me means it.
“Stop.” My own voice, cracked. My hands push off his chest even though they still have his belt in them, which about sums up the state of the union. “Stop—I can’t. We can’t.”
He stops.
Everything. His whole big frame goes still with his forehead against my shoulder, breathing like something run hard, hands flexing once against me and then—lifting. Off. Both of them, hovering, landing nowhere.
We sit there wrecked, a foot apart, both of us heaving, my shirt half up and the movie still talking to itself in the corner like an idiot.
My whole body is filing a formal complaint.
My skin’s roaring everywhere he just was, my heart’s going like I ran here from town, and there’s a want sitting low in me with actual gravity to it, planetary, pulling everything loose toward it—and eighteen inches away he’s doing the same math with worse numbers, I can hear his breathing trying to slow itself down and failing, and neither of us touches the remote and neither of us touches each other and the movie people keep having their little movie problems at us.
“Okay,” I say, to the room, to myself, to nobody. “Okay.” It is not okay. It’s triage.
And here’s the ugliest part, the part I’ll never say out loud to anyone: for one second, right after I stopped us, I hated her again.
Marley. Fresh, hot, brand new hate, like the drink table was an hour ago—because this was ours.
This couch, this body-memory, this easy falling-into-each-other that took three years to build, and she’s in it now.
She’s in my couch. There’s a woman I barely know standing in the middle of the most private room of my life, and stopping us wasn’t really about testing his hands at all, was it—it was that I reached for my own man and felt her watching.
That’s what he let into the house. Not just into the marriage-that-isn’t-one. Into the wanting itself.
I don’t say any of that. I say the truer, cleaner version instead, the one about guilt and his hands, because it’s also true and because it’s the one he can actually fix.
“I want to.” I make myself say it out loud, because he’s earned the accuracy and because it’s true and it’s costing me—my whole body is one long shout in the other direction, thighs shaking, skin roaring everywhere he just was.
“God, Levi, I want to, it’s not—that’s not what this is.
But I can’t tell yet what your hands are saying.
That’s the problem. I never could—it’s how you talk, and I let it stand in for everything, for three years, and I can’t—“ Breathe. Say it straight. “If we do this and it’s guilt—if it’s you paying me back, proving something, fucking the last month out of both of us—it’ll break something in me I don’t think gets fixed.
I need to know it’s just you wanting me.
Only that. And I can’t know that yet. So I need you to not touch me until I can. ”
The longest silence.
His jaw’s working. Hands fisted on his own knees now, knuckles white, this man built like a bay door sitting eighteen inches away vibrating with everything he isn’t doing—and I brace for it, the push, the c’mon Jo, the negotiation, and part of me wants him to push, God help me, part of me is begging him to take the choice off my hands?—
“Okay,” he says.
Quiet. Rough as a gravel road. Just that.
And he gets up off the couch—carefully, like a man moving something that might go off—and steps back, out of reach, puts himself all the way over by the cold fireplace with his back half to me, hands flexing once at his sides and then going still by force, and I watch what it costs him, every inch of it, and it costs him more than begging would have. Begging I could’ve held out against.
“For the record,” he says, to the fireplace, voice like it’s been dragged behind a truck, “it’s not guilt.
What my hands are saying.” He turns his head just enough that I get his profile, jaw working.
“I know you can’t take my word on that yet.
That’s fair. That’s mine to fix. But you asked what they’re saying, so—it’s not guilt, Jo.
It was never anything as complicated as guilt.
It’s just you. It’s been you since the Stockman parking lot, and it’s gonna keep being you, and I’ll wait as long as the waiting takes. ”
It’s been you since the Stockman parking lot.
Of every sentence this man has ever handed me, and he’s handed me some good ones with his hands over the years, that one goes in deepest—because I know what the Stockman parking lot cost him to say out loud.
He just told me he’s been all-in since month four.
Three years I’d have crawled over glass to hear the accounting, and he does it now, tonight, to a cold fireplace, with his back half turned, when it can’t buy him anything.
Which is exactly why it almost buys him everything.
I have to leave the room.
Right then, fast, tea abandoned, because another four seconds of looking at him standing there paying that price without a word and I’d have crossed the floor and undone every fence I own with my own two hands.