Chapter 8
EVANGELINE
Ido not get out of the bed for forty minutes after she leaves.
I hear her boots on the porch and then the porch and then the gravel and then the cough of the truck and the truck moving down the drive and then the truck gone.
I hear the house settle into the quiet it has when she is not in it.
I lie on my side with the quilt pulled up to my collarbone and the henley still on the floor where I left it last night, and I stare at the armchair.
She sat in that armchair.
She sat in that armchair and watched me sleep naked. How long for, I do not know. Her eyes were looking at my body as though she wanted to devour me.
And I want her to.
She said not today.
Not today has a tomorrow in it.
I sit up in the bed.
The cabin is cold in the places Max's body is not standing in.
I get up. I pick the henley off the floor.
I do not put it on. I walk to the bathroom naked in a cabin that belongs to a woman I met four days ago, and I look at myself in the small mirror over the sink, which I have not done in a mirror longer than three seconds in a decade.
I look at my face.
I look at my collarbone and the little scrape on it.
I look at my breasts, which are my mother's breasts, shape-wise, smaller than a decade of magazines would have liked, nipples up in the cold.
I look at my stomach, which is soft like a woman's stomach is soft when she has not been made to apologize for it for twenty-four hours.
I look at my hips. I look at the pale band on my ring finger that is already beginning to fade.
I look at the cut on my palm. I look at my mouth.
I think, she saw all of this.
I think, she looked at all of this, all of me.
A heat comes up from low in me, under my sternum, and climbs into my throat.
---
I take a bath.
I run it hot. I use her soap because her soap is the only soap here.
It smells like cedar and like something green, rosemary maybe.
I sit in the water with my knees up and my forearms on my knees and my hair in a loose knot on top of my head, and I do not read.
I do not think in sentences. I let what happened in the bedroom at sunrise stay in my body where it sat.
It sat low.
It sat the way a woman's body sometimes answers a look without asking the woman's head what she thinks.
I know this answer. I have had this answer before, twice in eleven years, both times at benefit dinners, both times about men I did not know, and both times I put the answer away in the drawer I put other answers I was not going to act on.
I am not going to act on them, I said to the drawer, and the drawer closed.
I can't put it away this time.
I lean my head against the back of the tub and I close my eyes and I see her eyes.
I see the blue of them from this morning.
I don't have a word for that blue yet. I see her hand flat on the arm of the chair.
I see the way her jaw sat when I asked her are you going to say something?
I see her not getting out of the chair. The not-getting-out-of-the-chair was the thing that did it to me.
If she had gotten out of the chair I would have known what to do.
She did not get out of the chair. She sat. She sat and she looked at me.
I sit up in the tub.
I get out. I dry off. I put on the sweats and the flannel shirt and no underthings because I do not have underthings, because my underthings burned in a fire four nights ago. I go into the living room.
Her laptop is on the coffee table.
I saw it yesterday and I did not touch it.
I sit on the sofa this morning and I touch it.
I open the lid. The screen comes up. It is locked.
A password field, a small gray box. I put my hands in my lap.
I do not guess. I do not try her birthday, which I do not know, or her department, which I do know.
I do not want to be a woman who guesses her password. I close the lid.
There is a bookshelf to my right. Forestry. Structure fire. Biographies. Three books on trauma. I pull one of the trauma books out. I do not know why. It is a book by a woman I have heard of at benefit dinners without reading. I open the front cover. There is a handwritten inscription in blue pen.
Max, 2017. You're going to want this one. D.
D? A friend? A lover?
I put the book back.
I walk back to the bedroom. I stand at the foot of the bed.
I look at the armchair where she was looking at me and I can’t stop thinking about the desire I saw in her eyes.
I have never made love to a woman before, but god, I want to now.
This one. This woman with the muscular forearms and strong hands. This woman who says so little.
Then I take off the flannel shirt.
I take off the sweats.
I lie down on the bed in the middle of the unmade quilt and I look up at the pine ceiling and I put one hand on my stomach, because I have not touched my own stomach in the morning in my skin in a lot of years, and I feel the rise and fall of it.
My breath is a little fast. My breath has been a little fast since I opened my eyes at sunrise.
I had two theories about Max, and I had set them both down this morning. Today I was only going to be in my body.
I put the hand lower.
---
I touch myself slow.
I touch myself slow because I am out of practice and because I want to feel each thing I am feeling and because I have not touched myself for me in complete relaxation, in many years.
When I touched myself in Daniel's house, I touched myself in the bath with the water loud enough to cover the sound, and I was half-listening for the door, and I came fast and then I was done and then I got out. This is not that.
I put two fingers at the top of my slit and slide them down.
I am already wet.
I am wetter than I have been in a long time.
The wet is on my fingers and I slide it up to my clit.
The wet answers a question I have been carrying since six in the morning, which is the question of whether this thing I am feeling is a thing that lives above my collarbone or below it, and the answer is, both.
My body has been writing checks above my neck for three hours that my body below my neck has been cashing.
I put a finger on my clit and press.
My breath goes out of me.
I close my eyes.
I see her.
I see her in the armchair, not the doorway.
I see her in the chair with her hand flat on the arm.
I see her blue eyes on me. I put two fingers on my clit and I circle, slow.
I picture her crossing the room. I picture her coming to the bed.
I picture her kneeling at the side of the bed and putting a hand on my hip.
I picture her hand. Her hand is broad and scarred and quick.
I picture her hand on my hip. I arch a little into my own fingers.
Her mouth.
I have not pictured a woman's mouth at my body before.
I do not have a template for it. I build one on the spot, which is her mouth, the bow of it, the way she eats with a fork.
I picture her mouth at my throat. I picture her mouth at my collarbone.
I picture her mouth sliding down. I picture her mouth between my legs.
I moan.
The sound is small and real, and I have not moaned like that in quite some time and hearing it makes me make it again.
I circle my clit faster. My other hand slides up to my breast. I pinch the nipple.
I picture her hand on the same breast and I pinch harder.
I picture her mouth on the nipple. I picture her hand between my legs where my hand is.
I put a finger inside myself, slow, then two.
I am slick. I am more slick than I knew I could be in the middle of a morning without touching anyone.
I picture her watching.
That is the image that takes me.
Not her mouth. Not her hand. Her eyes. Her eyes like they were in the chair.
Her eyes on me the way they were at sunrise, blue, steady, not going anywhere, the part of her that sat when she wanted to stand.
I picture her sitting in the chair this morning and I am the one on the bed, and I am a woman moving for her, because she is watching, because she asked me without asking, because she did not get up.
I work my clit and I fuck myself with my fingers and I picture her seeing me do it, and my hips lift off the bed, and the sound out of my mouth gets louder, and I come.
I come in waves.
I come harder than I have come in years. I come with my hand on my breast and my fingers inside me and her hungry eyes in my head, and it goes through me, and I shake, and my heel slides up the sheet, and I say a word out loud that is her name.
"Max."
I hear myself say it.
I keep my fingers on my clit while I come down. I keep them there slow. I let the last pulses come through. Then I take the hand away and I lie on the quilt and I put both arms across my face and I breathe.
---
I lie there a long time.
The sun has moved on the wall. The woodstove in the next room ticks. I can hear a jay in the pines.
I do not cry. I thought I might. I don't.
I think, my husband died four nights ago.
I think, and I just came harder than I have come in my life, to the thought of a stranger in a chair.
A woman.
I wait for shame.
The shame does not come the way I expect. What comes instead is a small hard clear thought.
I did not love him. Daniel.
I have known that sentence for years. I have known it in pieces, in hallways, in the car between parties, in the rose garden.
I have never said it to the ceiling of a bedroom in the full light of a morning after making myself come to another person.
I say it now. I say it out loud in the empty cabin.
"I did not love him."
The pines keep doing what pines do.
"I did not love him," I say again.
Nothing in the cabin disagrees with me.
I also think: this should not be happening this fast.