31. Dulcie #2
My heels dig into the mattress. The sound in my throat is one I wouldn’t let anyone else hear. It builds and keeps building and I grab the sheet with both hands and come against his mouth with my thighs shaking on either side of his head.
I say his name. He keeps going, gentler, until I push at his shoulder because I can’t stand any more of it, and then he stops, and rests his cheek against the inside of my thigh, and breathes.
I look at the ceiling until it holds still.
“Come here.”
He comes up over me. His hand lifts toward the back of my neck.
It stops, as it did on the sofa. The fingers open beside my cheek and he looks at me, and this time I don’t take his wrist and put his hand somewhere safer.
I put it where it was going. I press his palm to the back of my neck and tip my own face up into his and kiss him with my taste in his mouth.
“Here,” I say. “Now.”
His breath leaves him.
I reach past him for the drawer. The box is where I put it.
“I bought these on Tuesday,” I say.
“Tuesday.”
“I wasn’t sure I’d ask you.”
He takes one from me. His hands aren’t steady, and I like that his hands aren’t steady. He gets his trousers off and deals with it and comes back to me, and his weight comes down along mine, hip to hip, and he waits.
“Slow,” I say.
“Yes.”
He comes into me slowly. It’s been months. It doesn’t hurt. It’s full and new and I say so, out loud, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“Not that slow.”
He laughs against my throat, once, wrecked, and moves.
I tell him what I want. Deeper. My leg over his hip. His weight on me, all of it, and he gives me his weight and I take it. My teeth find his shoulder. His breath is in my ear, uneven, and the sound he makes when I say his name is low and ruined and I want to hear it again, so I say it again.
“Dulcie.”
“Yes. Like that. Don’t.”
He doesn’t.
It comes up through me from where he is.
My hands are on his back and they can’t hold on.
My head goes back into his palm. I say his name and then I say nothing that is a word, and I come around him with my whole body pulling him in, and he follows me over, saying my name broken in half against my neck.
Then quiet. His weight. His breath slowing against my skin.
I don’t move his hand.
Later, I lie beside him with the sheet drawn over us and listen to the house settle.
“Your elbow,” I say.
He moves it immediately. “Sorry.”
“Come back. Just not on my hair.”
He comes back. I laugh against his shoulder.
For a while neither of us says anything. I can see the corner of my book on the table, the cardigan over the chair, the narrow path to the door. Nothing in the room has become less mine because he is here.
He asks if I want water. I do. He gets the glass from beside the lamp and waits while I drink, then puts it back where I can reach it.
I tell him I nearly canceled dinner that afternoon.
“Why?”
“I thought I might want too much from it.”
“What did you want?”
I consider the question instead of giving him the easiest answer.
“To enjoy you without needing to decide whether that made me foolish.”
He is quiet long enough that I turn my head toward him.
“I liked being certain of you,” he says. “I know that made it harder for you to be certain of yourself.”
There is grief in the room for a moment, close enough to touch. I don’t push it out with reassurance.
“I wish you had loved me then.”
“I wish I had understood what I was refusing to give you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
He doesn’t offer me a revised courtship. I lie beside the man he is now and let the beginning stay sad.
After a little while I move my hand across his, and he looks at me.
“Tonight was good,” I say.
The change in his face is worth having said it plainly.
“Yes.”
I smile. “You can use more than one word.”
“I was trying not to make an argument out of being happy.”
That makes me laugh again. He laughs too, then kisses my forehead. I let the warmth of it remain an ordinary thing between us.
The bedside clock has moved farther into the night than I realized.
I am tired. I am also aware of how easy it would be to leave the next decision unspoken until morning had made it for us.
“It’s time for you to go home,” I say.
His hand stills beneath mine.
For a moment I feel the old instinct to add a reason, a kindness large enough to hide what I am asking.
I wait.
“I want to stay,” he says.
“I know. I want tonight to end here.”
He looks at me. Then he nods and sits up.
“All right.”
While he dresses, I put on my robe. We move around each other in the small room without hurry. He finds one sock beside the chair and holds it up. I point at the other one, under the dresser, and he gets down on one knee for it in his shirt and nothing else. I look for as long as I want to.
Downstairs, he picks up his coat. We agree on the next parenting visit, which was already planned and remains planned. He doesn’t ask whether he should leave anything here.
At the door, I kiss him goodnight.
He waits for me to open it, then steps out onto the path.
I watch until he reaches the car. He turns once. I lift my hand and close the door.
The key moves beneath my fingers.
Upstairs, I turn back the sheet and get into my own bed. The pillow beside me still holds the shape of his head. I put my palm there, feeling a sadness that doesn’t cancel the pleasure of the night.