Chapter Thirty-One
Sloane
?
The first time we were together after the steps, it was the middle of the afternoon.
I want to put that next to the other times, the secret ones, so you understand what had changed.
Before, it had always been the dark—stolen, careful, the lamp the only light we allowed ourselves, a closed door and a held breath and one ear always half-listening for the world to find us.
We'd made a whole love out of hours that had to end, out of departures planned before arrivals, out of the particular intensity of a thing that might not survive being seen.
This was a Tuesday afternoon with the sun coming in sideways through my window and nowhere either of us had to be and no one we had to hide from, and that turned out to change everything about it.
He came up behind me while I was at my desk pretending to work—I was not working, I'd read the same sentence eleven times—and he put his hands on my shoulders, the hands that were built to break things and had spent two months learning they could do this instead, and he didn't say anything, just stood there a moment with his thumbs at the base of my neck, and I leaned back into him and gave up the pretense of the sentence entirely.
"It's the middle of the day," I said.
"I know." His mouth was at my ear. "Nobody's coming. Nobody's watching. We don't have to be anywhere. I keep waiting to feel the thing—the listening, the clock—and it's just not there. I don't know what to do with all this time."
"I have some ideas," I said, and turned in the chair, and looked up at him in the sideways afternoon light, the wall nowhere, the kid all the way out, this enormous gentle terrified man who'd set his whole life on fire so I could keep mine, and I took his hand, in the light, with the curtains open, on purpose, because I was done with the dark, I was done with a love that had to live where no one could see it.
?
We spent the whole afternoon in the light.
That was the thing the daylight did. In the dark there'd always been an urgency, a sense of a thing being seized before it could be taken away.
But this was unhurried in a way we'd never been allowed, two people with a whole afternoon and nothing to flinch at, and there was nowhere to rush toward and nothing to brace against, so there was nothing to do but be entirely, openly present, in the light, with each other.
He looked at me. That was the part that undid me.
In the dark he'd always kept some last reserve ready for safety.
In the light he looked—at all of me, with an openness that had no wall behind it, no part of him held back—and I understood that being looked at like that, completely, with the curtains open, was a kind of nakedness I'd never actually let anyone have.
Not my body. The other thing. The self I keep behind the sunshine, the armored core nobody gets to see.
And I let him see it, in the afternoon light, the way he'd let me see his on a set of steps in the rain—I gave him the soft underneath, the unsharp thing, the girl who didn't have to be a knife to be safe—and he received it the way he received everything precious, like a man who couldn't believe it was being handed to him and was terrified of dropping it.
There were no rules now. That was the whole sentence of it, the thing underneath everything.
No contact, he'd said once, against my wall, a lifetime ago.
No names, no traceable anything, behind closed doors or it doesn't exist. And here we were with the door we didn't have to close and the names we didn't have to hide and the daylight we didn't have to flinch at, breaking every rule we'd ever made, slowly, on purpose, the flagrant kind, the kind that costs a penalty—and there was no penalty, that was the miracle, we kept waiting for the flag and it never came, there was only this, only us, only the light and the looking and his voice when he said my name like it was the only word he'd kept from a fire and didn't have to whisper it anymore.
I said I love you with my eyes open, in the light, and watched it land on his face, and watched him say it back the same way, unhidden, unguarded, a man who'd been told his whole life that being seen was the most dangerous thing in the world, being seen completely, in the daylight, and finding nothing on the other side of it but love.
We lay there in the light, the sun gone gold and low, and he traced slow lines on my back the way I'd once traced his, and neither of us moved to leave, because for the first time there was nowhere to leave to, no clock, no careful exit, no memorizing the time.
We had the afternoon. We had the evening. We had all of it.
"This is the thing they take," he said quietly, into my hair, an echo of something he'd said once in the dark, except the dread was gone out of it now.
"I used to think— every time I had something good, I'd think, this is the thing they come for.
The soft thing. I spent my whole life never building anything I couldn't afford to lose.
" His arm tightened. "And now I've got the softest thing there is, completely out in the open, the most takeable thing I've ever had, and nobody's coming for it.
They already came for everything else. The draft, my dad, the program.
They took all of it. And the one thing I was most afraid to want is the one thing that's still here.
" He laughed, low, wondering. "I had it backwards my whole life.
The wall didn't protect the soft thing. The wall was the thing keeping me from it. "
"You don't need the wall anymore," I said, into his chest.
"No," he agreed. "Turns out I just needed a witness."
We stayed in the light until it went out on its own, which is, I've decided, the only acceptable way to end a thing—not because the clock made you, not because the world found you, but because the sun simply set, the ordinary way, on two people who were finally allowed to watch it do it together.
?