20. Jamie
JAMIE
The rule I had lived by for a long time was a simple one. I did not get to have this. It did not survive the first time she said my name in the dark like the name was worth the breath it took.
What I expected, if I had let myself expect anything, was that wanting her would feel like falling, like a thing that happened to me, a failure of footing.
It was the opposite of falling. It was the first time in years I had been all the way present in my own skin and not braced for the drop.
She reached for me and I let her, which sounds like a small thing and was the hardest thing I had done since the spring I stopped letting anyone reach for me at all.
It started with her mouth. She kissed me slow and certain, with all of her attention, the way she gives herself to anything worth doing, and the first press of her lips worked loose something I had bolted shut so long ago I had lost the key to it.
I kissed her back like a man surfacing for air.
Her hands came up into my hair and mine found the small of her back and brought her flush against me, and the kiss went deep and then deeper, the unhurried giving way to the hungry, her breath catching against my mouth, my name half-made and lost between us.
I had forgotten that a kiss could be a question.
I had forgotten that it could be one you answer with the whole of your body.
She undressed me of a great deal more than my clothes, though she saw to those too, taking her time, working the buttons of my shirt with her eyes holding mine the whole while, daring me to look away.
I did not look away. I had spent a long time making myself unreadable, and she read me anyway, read the want I had buried so long that I had stopped recognizing it as want.
Her mouth found the line of my jaw, then my throat, then the place where my pulse was going too hard to hide, and I felt every layer I had worn for years come loose under her hands, the competence, the quiet, the careful distance, until there was nothing left between her and the bare fact of me.
I kept bracing for the cold to find the exposed places.
It never came. What came was her, warm and certain and unhurried with me, the way she is with any frightened thing that does not yet understand it is safe.
Then it was my turn, and my hands did not shake, which surprised me, because everything else in me was shaking.
I learned her the way I have learned everything that ever mattered to me, by touch, in the dark.
The shirt easing over her head. The catch of her breath when my palms first found bare skin.
The warm give of her against me, and the small broken sound she made into my mouth when I pulled her closer, a sound I felt in my teeth, a sound I would have crossed the whole winter on my knees to hear again.
She arched into my hands as though she had been waiting every bit as long as I had, and the knowing of it, that the wanting ran both directions at once, nearly took my legs out from under me before we had begun.
We took our time, because we had it, and because slow was the only way either of us could stand a thing we had wanted this long.
I mapped her with my mouth and my hands, down the line of her throat, the curve of her breast, the soft plane of her stomach, learning what made her breath snag and what made her fingers fist in the sheets and what made her say my name like a word she could no longer keep her grip on.
I found the places that made her go still and the places that made her arch up off the bed after more, and I stayed there in the discovery of her, unraveling her by inches, until she was trembling and flushed and pulling me back up the length of her body, finished with patience and with waiting.
I rose over her, and for a moment we only looked at each other, both of us breathing hard, both of us at the edge of a thing there would be no walking back from.
Then she reached between us and took me in her hand and guided me to her, and I pressed into her slow, watching her face the whole way, feeling her open around me by degrees, the heat and the give and the exquisite unhurried inch of it, until I was seated all the way home and we were as close as two people are made to be.
The sound it pulled out of me was low and wrecked and past any control I had left, and she caught it with her mouth and kept it, and for a long moment neither of us moved at all, only breathed, only stayed, joined and still and barely holding on.
And then we were moving together, finding the rhythm the way you find anything worth keeping, by feel and by patience, until we had it, until there was no distance left between us anywhere.
It was not the flood through a broken dam I had feared, all force and aftermath.
It was slow and deep and devastating, and it asked nothing of me except that I stay.
She wound her legs around me and drew me deeper and said my name again, ragged now, and I pressed my face into her throat and let her feel exactly how far gone she had taken me.
She kept pausing to be sure, her forehead against mine, waiting until I had found my way back into my own eyes before she moved again, and that pausing undid me past anything the pleasure managed, because no one in years had thought to check whether I was still in the room. I was in the room. She kept me in it.
When she shattered it was with my name in her mouth and her nails set into my back and her whole body drawn tight as a bowstring, and feeling it, being the reason for it, was what took the last of me over the edge after her.
I followed her with a sound I muffled in her hair, shaking, holding on, spending five years of held breath into the space of a few seconds.
For once I did not tally what it would cost me, because there was no cost, there was only her and the dark and the plain astonishing animal fact of being alive and wanted and here.
For a man who has counted every breath of every loss he ever had, the not-counting was the whole of the miracle, and I do not know how a person repays a thing like that, except that for once the not-knowing did not make me want to give it back.
I had waited, somewhere in the back of myself, for the moment she would see all of it up close and change her mind, the way you wait on weather.
People do change their minds about me. It is the most reliable fact of my history.
But she regarded me like a woman who had already seen the whole of me and decided to stay anyway, and there was no flinch in her anywhere, and I understood that the thing I had taken for fragility in her was the opposite of fragile.
It takes more nerve to stay soft than it ever took me to go hard.
I have made a fortress of myself for years and called it strength.
She walked in with nothing but her open hands and was braver than I have ever been.
Here is the part nobody warns you about, the part I had braced against for years without ever knowing its shape.
The terror was never the wanting. I have wanted things.
Wanting I can survive, because wanting keeps you at arm’s length from the thing, leaves you the cold dignity of being the one who reaches and goes without.
The terror was the having. It was letting her want me back and not flinching from it, letting myself be looked at and chosen and not reaching, in the same breath, for the invoice.
Every good thing in my life I have paid for in the moment it arrived, the guilt counted out exact, so that nothing was ever fully mine and so nothing could ever be fully taken.
For one night I did not reach for the bill.
I let the thing be free. I let it be mine.
At some point she propped herself up on an elbow and looked at me, and I let her do that too.
“You’re thinking,” she said. “I can hear it. It’s deafening in here.”
“I’m just lying here.”
“You’re doing sums. I can feel you trying to make this cost something.”
She had me dead to rights, and instead of the old reflex, the quiet closing of a door, I told her the truth, because the truth was the only currency the night seemed to take.
“I don’t know how to have a good thing without standing watch for the bad one.”
“I know.” She laid her hand flat in the middle of my chest, over the place I keep the things I never say. “You don’t have to learn it tonight. Tonight you only have to not run. You’re doing beautifully, for the record. Gold star.”
And I laughed, which is apparently a thing I do now, in the dark, with my whole chest, and she smiled against my shoulder like a woman collecting on a bet.
I keep a whip, is the truth of it. Not the kind with leather and a buckle.
A man like me has no need of one of those, because he has a voice instead, and the voice has had a long time to learn the work.
Every other good hour of my life I have settled the instant it ended, paid the gladness back in penance with interest, because penance was the only way I ever found to feel I had earned the right to feel anything at all.
That night I heard it stir in the next room of me, patient, waiting its turn.
And I did a thing I had not done since before the spring that ended the man I used to be.
I told it to wait. I did not fight it and I did not obey it.
I let the good hour go on being good, unpaid for and unpunished, and I lay there in the dark and was simply glad, and let the being glad be enough.
We did not say much after that. There was little that needed saying that the quiet did not say better.
I want to be careful here, because I have spent years being careful about all the wrong things, and I would like, just once, to be careful about the right one.
It was tender. It was not a wound tearing open and it was not a man being rescued.
It was two tired people who had finally quit pretending, finding out that the thing they had braced against all this time was not a cliff at all but a lit room with someone in it.
Sometime in the deep middle of the night she surfaced, propped her chin on my sternum, and studied me through the dark with the frank attention of a woman appraising a purchase she had not yet had a good look at.
“Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“I have notes.”
“Of course you do.”
“One. You snore. Not much. Charmingly. Like a small, dignified engine winding down.” She held up a second finger. “Two. You make a face in your sleep like you’re losing an argument. I assume it’s with yourself. It looked close.”
“I do not snore.”
“Three, and this is the headline. You’re still here. You did not slip out at four in the morning and reorganize the supply closet to keep from looking at me. I checked. It’s a disaster, exactly the way I left it. I have decided to be deeply moved by that.”
“You checked the supply closet.”
“I am a woman who plans for disappointment. It’s a marketable skill.
I’m trying to retire it.” She said it light, but I caught the thing underneath it, the long history of waking to find the warm place beside her gone cold, and I understood that I had given her something just by being a body that stayed, and that the bar had been set criminally low by men I would have liked to drive a long way to go and have a word with.
“I’m still here,” I said.
“I noticed. It’s my favorite of your qualities so far. Edging out the snoring by a nose.”
“You’re enjoying this,” I said.
“Enormously. You’re terrible at being happy and even worse at hiding it once you are, which is the most hopeful thing I have seen in a year.
” She pressed her mouth to my collarbone, unhurried.
“Don’t fret. I won’t tell the town their grumpy vet has a soft underside. They would never get over the shock.”
“They suspect.”
“They more than suspect. Marge is running a pool. I have money on you.”
Somewhere down the hall a door opened, and a small pair of bare feet met the floor, and we both went rigid in the particular way of two adults who have not yet worked out the logistics of a child.
The feet padded to the bathroom, then back, and then surrendered to silence.
A reprieve. She muffled a laugh against my chest.
“We’re going to have to get a great deal better at this,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“I look forward to it,” she said, and there was a whole future folded into the four of those words, and then she went quiet against me again.
She put her head back down, into the spot she had claimed in the night, and inside a few minutes her breathing went long and slow, the unbothered sleep of a person who has decided she is safe.
I have heard that exact breathing before, down a hall, out of a child.
I had not known a grown woman could hand it to you on purpose, the whole undefended weight of her, as though my chest were a thing that could be trusted to hold.
And then it was dawn. The window grayed, the dogs rearranged themselves on the floor with enormous ceremony, and down the hall a boy slept the heavy, total sleep of a much-loved child, and a woman I had spent two months refusing to let myself have slept with her hand open over my heart.
For one minute, one whole weightless minute, I was happy.
Not relieved. Not braced for the cost. Not grateful in the cornered way I have taught myself to be grateful.
Happy, plainly and foolishly, the way I was happy before I ever learned the price of things.
I lay still and let the minute be only a minute.
Then the old voice cleared its throat.
It did not shout. It never shouts. It is the most patient thing I own.
It spoke the way it always speaks, gentle as a priest leaning over a deathbed, sorry for me and sure of itself in the same soft breath.
You know how this ends, it said. You always know how this ends.
You have held this exact minute before, and you know what the world does with the things you hold.
I did not answer it. There is no answering it.
You cannot argue a man out of the oldest weather in his own head.
But I did the one thing the minute still allowed me, which is not an argument and is the nearest thing to one I have.
I tightened my arm around her, slow, so I would not wake her.
I held on to the warm and unbearable weight of her as though holding on were a stance in a debate, as though a man could win against the surest voice he owns simply by refusing, this once, to let go of the thing it had already promised to take from him.
She slept on. I held on. Outside, the gray went slowly to gold over a mountain that did not care one way or the other, and I lay there holding what I had not been given leave to keep, happy and doomed and unwilling, for once, to choose between the two.