Chapter 10 — Cold50 #2
She was the one from the dais at the Turning, the one who hadn’t glowed. Up close she was younger than the gray of her suggested, composed in a way that made the air around her feel rehearsed. Coral appeared at her elbow and dimmed a full watt, which I had never once seen her do.
“The Keeper likes to meet the new pairs herself,” Coral said, reverent, and withdrew.
“You’re Solena’s Sean,” the Keeper said. Not a question. “Walk with me a moment.”
We walked. She didn’t make small talk the way Coral did. She let the quiet stretch until it was uncomfortable, and then she said, “You and Solena interest me.”
“Yeah?”
“The pairs here perform, all of them. They can’t help it. They hold hands for the room and say the words loud so everyone can hear how in love they are. You two don’t. You’re quiet about it. Careful.” She let the word sit. “I keep trying to decide what careful means.”
“We’re private,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Mm.” She didn’t argue, which was worse than arguing. “It’s only that I watch you watch her. You don’t look at her the way a man looks at his partner. You look at her like a man checking whether he’s allowed to.”
The path kept going. I kept my face exactly where it was, which took everything I had.
“That’s a strange thing to say,” I said.
“Is it?” She smiled, not unkindly, and let me off the hook, or appeared to. “Forgive me. I read faces for a living. You’re good for her, whatever the two of you are. The tide knows its own.”
She patted my arm the way Coral did and turned back toward the buildings.
I stood there a while after she’d gone, trying to work out which of the things I was hiding she had just put her finger on, and coming up with all of them.
That night we went to bed the way the Turning had left us, two duvets, the demilitarized foot of sheet down the middle, each of us a sovereign nation with the lamp off.
It was, by now, an absurd arrangement, and we both knew it was absurd.
We had spent the afternoon being thrown naked between ice and fire, and the morning before that her hand had been around me under a foot of clay, and here we were observing borders like the duvets had been to law school.
Neither of us said so. She wished me goodnight in the door-closed voice.
I lay on my cold scrap of sheet and listened to her breathe and did not sleep for a long time, and then I did.
I woke because we had moved.
The wall was gone, abandoned in the dark by both governments the way it always was, except this time only one duvet had traveled with us and we were under it together, and she was tucked back against my front with her spine to my chest, and she was not still.
That was what my sleeping brain drifted up into, my waking brain still somewhere behind it, not yet arrived to do anything about it.
She was moving. Small and slow and mostly asleep, or mostly, her hips working back against me in a low unhurried roll, pressing the curve of her against where I was already hard, because of course I was, I’d gone hard the second sleep thinned, the body miles out ahead of the rest of me.
I should have moved. Somewhere far down I filed the order to move, and the order never came.
I was warm and half under, and she was warm and half under, and the dark was total, and in the dark with our eyes shut and our names switched off it wasn’t anybody, it was just two bodies that had quit the argument while the rest of us slept.
She wasn’t waking up. I wasn’t either, not really.
We were doing it the way things get done in a dream, before the part of me that says no has its shoes on.
I put my hand on her hip. I don’t remember choosing to.
She went still under it. One held breath, some risen sliver of her snagging on the fact of us. It didn’t last. The wanting closed back over the both of us like water over a dropped stone, and she pushed back into my hand, and I pushed into her, and that was the end of still.
My hand went up under her shirt because her body kept arching it there, and I had the warm weight of her breast in my palm, the nipple tight, and a sound came out of her into the pillow that didn’t know it was being made.
Back down, slow, over her stomach, under the cotton, and she was already pushing up into my hand before I got there.
Neither of us said anything, because words would have woken us, and waking was the one thing we couldn’t afford.
She was wet, and it went through me the way the cold tank had, one clean drop all the way down.
I touched her and she rocked, caught between my hand and my cock, working herself on both, her fist twisting into the sheet and then into my thigh, dragging me harder against her.
The duvets, the borders, the cold foot of sheet, all of it gone, drowned, and she turned her face blind on the pillow and found my jaw with her open mouth, breathing, gone.
And something in me that had been holding still all week came loose, and it came loose mean.
I got her under me, or she turned, and I couldn’t have said which of us did it, and then I was over her and against her, grinding into her through the thin cotton with my hand still working her underneath, and the wanting had teeth in it now.
I wanted her to feel what I felt. Every morning I’d peeled myself off her and swallowed it and gone down and passed the honey like a professional.
A whole week of her drifting off somewhere I couldn’t reach, lighting up for a screen and a lawn and a dead man on a wall, and the one place she still came all the way back to me was here, in the dark, and some low ugly part of me wanted to pin her in it and make her stay.
Getting even, I called it, because it was the only word that let me keep going.
It wasn’t even. It wasn’t revenge, and I knew that while I was telling it to myself.
It was just that I couldn’t stop. I needed to come so badly it was in my teeth, needed to be further, deeper, past the last of the cotton and the last of the rules, and I ground against her harder with my whole body chasing the edge and felt my mother break apart under my hand in the same motion, her breath wrecked, my name on it and coming to pieces, the both of us racing the same cliff in the dark with nothing left to pretend with.
Her phone lit the ceiling.
White, sudden, a square of the surface world thrown straight across us, and we woke.
Both at once, hearts slamming, the trance torn off in one motion.
Even then her body twitched for the screen, a year of training, her hand going out half-blind before the rest of her could vote, and she had it, the cold light of it on both our faces, and that was the end of the dark.
Whatever had had us let go and was gone.
We came apart like the mattress had caught fire, two people surfacing from somewhere they couldn’t admit they’d been.
She sat up with the phone. I didn’t. Neither of us looked at the other, because the screen was on now, throwing its hard little square of daylight into the room, and there is nothing the warmth of a dark room survives less well than the sudden ability to see.
“I should,” she said, and didn’t finish it. The notification was nothing, a like, a number, the brand twitching in its sleep. She looked at it anyway, because it was somewhere to put her eyes that wasn’t me.
I lay back on my own cold scrap of sheet and stared at the patch of ceiling where the white square had been and I did the sums I’d spent all day not doing.
The app that ate my texts. The kind woman who’d asked, so warmly, who would miss me.
Fathom and Calla, who’d done their own sums and signed anyway.
The foot of cold sheet that didn’t mean anything now, because we had just proved to each other exactly how fast it closed.
Everything on this island ran one direction, down, deeper, and I was lying in a bed I could not stop reaching across, on a rock nobody knew I was standing on, getting pulled under rung by rung beside a woman who was starting to want the water.
Beside me she set the phone face down at last and lay back on her own side, and the cold foot of sheet was there between us again, except now it fooled nobody, and we both lay awake on either side of a border we had already proven we couldn’t hold.