CHAPTER 6 #2
I let the taste sit in my mouth one more breath and I named what it was — fear, present, mine, the present tense of it — and I put my back against the warmer because the warmer is warm and the warmer is a thing I chose to lean against. I counted six rails on the gurney. Six on the other side.
Alexei was looking at me from the door.
"Krasivaya," he said.
"Yes."
"That was the policy. I am going to say it out loud now."
"Say what out loud."
"I want to put my hands on you so badly I have stopped pretending I am not going to. I have been pretending since the day you walked into my bay and ordered me to put my goddamn ring down. I put it down. I have not picked it back up for anyone since. I am going to put my hands on you. Color."
The bay's hum. The hiss of the regulator.
The medallion at my sternum. The gurney's six rails behind me.
The chlorhexidine on the cotton of my cuffs.
The kid two floors up with his heart now sutured.
The brother in the family room. The chaplain's kind eyes.
The rain on the windowless wing I had only heard through the freight elevator at four o'clock.
My right hand on my side. My left hand on my side.
My left wrist with the small white crescent of the appendix scar at fourteen. My pulse at my carotid. My breath.
"Green," I said.
"Say it again."
"Green."
"Good. Get on the gurney."
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He waited for me to do it.
That is what I remember first. He held himself still — empty hands, both arms at his sides, his weight on his heels.
He waited at the foot of the gurney with the ring on his right thumb catching the bay's white light at the second knuckle, and I unlatched the rails on the side nearest him and I sat on the edge and I swung my legs up and I lay back.
The sheet from the warmer was at my shoulder blades. The gurney sat at the height it had been at for the kid: chest-level for a man six-foot-two.
I looked at the ceiling tile above the bed.
It was the second one over from the centered HVAC vent. There was a faint water mark at the corner the maintenance team had not painted out. I counted it. One ceiling tile. The number was one.
"Stay with my face."
I looked at him.
"I am going to pull your scrub bottoms off.
I am not going to ask you again because you have said yes.
I will ask if I escalate. Your top stays on.
The medallion remains exactly there. You will tell me if I do anything you do not want, with the word green or yellow or red or no, and I will hear you the first time. "
"Yes."
He hooked his thumbs in the waistband and pulled them in one motion.
My underwear came with the bottoms because his hand had taken everything at once.
The bay air was cool at the inside of my thighs.
He folded the scrub bottoms once and set them on the warmer behind him and that small act of folding was what he had said about me earlier in the night, that he was the man at my shoulder when I opened the book.
He stepped between my thighs. He was still in his black trauma scrubs, the gown peeled off, the gloves stripped, the bay's chlorhexidine on him. He put his right hand on the warmer's edge and his left palm settled against the inside of my left thigh.
"I am on the pill," I said.
"I know."
"How."
"Beatriz told me on Wednesday because she likes you."
"You're clean?"
"Tested two months ago. Clean. No condom in the trauma room is a choice. Tell me if it is not yours."
"It's mine."
"Good. " He lifted my left ankle. He set it on his shoulder.
He lifted my right ankle. He set it on his right shoulder.
The angle was exact and physical and I felt it in the long muscle of my left hamstring and in the iliac wing of my pelvis.
He had done this without asking and I had said yes to him doing it without asking.
"There," he said. "There is the shape I have been thinking about since Wednesday. "
His left hand came up the inside of my thigh.
His right hand was at the warmer. The ring caught the bay's light. He turned the ring once on his thumb and stopped.
"I am going to use this hand," he said. He raised the right hand. He brought it up. "I am going to put the ring against you. The knurling is not smooth. You will feel the pattern. If you want it off I take it off."
"Leave it."
"Krasivaya."
"Leave it on."
He brought the ring to my clit and held it there.
The cold of the steel was a small shock for half a breath; then it was the small bright friction of the knurled pattern at the place I was already wet.
He moved the pad of his thumb under the ring.
The pattern translated into a kind of pressure I had not had before.
My hand had reached the gurney rail without my asking it to.
The metal of the rail was cold under my palm.
Six rails on each side. I counted them again. Six and six.
He held there at the edge of me.
He freed his hands. He undid the drawstring of his scrubs with his left hand. He pulled his cock out. The scrubs stayed on his hips. He looked at me.
"Color."
"Green."
"You take what I give you. Yellow if you want me to slow. Red if you want me to stop. Green if you want more."
"Green."
He pulled a glove from his coat pocket. He held it up.
He snapped it once at the wrist, the loud sharp pop of nitrile on his own skin, and the sound was the rhythm marker — he had told me without telling me what the cue was going to be.
He set the glove on the warmer. He took my left ankle higher on his shoulder.
He held my right hip with his left hand.
He entered me in one stroke.
I made a sound. Three years had passed since the last time a man pulled one out of me.
The sound was small and present and it was the sound of a body acknowledging that the geometry of the night had moved into a different room.
He held still inside me for a breath. His left hand on my hip.
His right hand on the gurney rail beside my own.
"You are so wet I could fucking weep. I am going to fuck you on this gurney. I am going to fuck you fast and I am going to last about as long as I have wanted to put my hands on you, which is a week. Color."
"Green."
He moved.
He fucked me as he had told me he would.
Fast. The gurney did not roll because the wheels were locked.
The rails were cold under my palm; six on the right; six on the left; I counted them once and stopped.
The ring on his right thumb had been moved to my clit again — his thumb between us, the knurling at the place he had already made bright — and the snap of the glove on his right wrist had become a rhythm I felt in my belly without hearing him snap it again because I had heard the pattern once and the pattern had taken up residence in my body.
The bay was warm at my shoulders. The fluorescents above us were honey at the edges where the diffuser had yellowed.
The leaking O-two regulator at the rack hissed faintly under the rest of the sound.
Alexei's left hand was at my hip and his right was at my clit and the angle of my ankles on his shoulders had become the angle of my body and every withheld breath came forward, all of it, because he had asked me to bring it.
He bent forward.
The medallion at my sternum went flat against my skin where his weight pressed down through his chest into mine.
He had left it on. He would leave it on.
He kissed me. His mouth tasted of copper-iron and of the warm clean salt of a man who has been in a corridor of blood for an hour, and the metal taste was in his mouth too, and the shared metal at our tongues was the second time the night told me what it was telling me, which was that this room is real and I am in it.
"Krasivaya," he said into my mouth. "Still green?"
"Green."
"Good. You are going to come in a minute. I am going to come thirty seconds after. I am not going to last and I am not going to pretend to. Tell me when."
I came.
I came on the third stroke after he asked.
I came around him with my eyes open and my left hand on the gurney rail and my right hand on the back of his neck and the small short sound I made was the sound of a vow being made by a body.
I counted the rail's six segments without meaning to.
I counted my own breath. I came. The orgasm went up the spine and back down — a small bright bell rung at the sternum, the medallion the bell-clapper, Alexei the hand on the rope.
He held inside me for one beat. He pulled back. He pushed in. He pushed in. He pushed in.
"Krasivaya. Krasivaya. Suka."
He came.
He came inside me and he said it as he came, the line he had been saving for the moment a body had asked him to give it: "Such a fucking gift."
He said it once. He said it as he had said there is the heart.
Then he was still.
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