Chapter 6 #3
We find the rhythm together. It's not careful anymore; we're past careful.
She wraps her legs around my hips and meets every thrust, taking me deeper, her nails dragging down my back, her breath hot against my throat, and she's saying my name like punctuation, like a thing she's deciding to keep, Kieran, Kieran.
I've got one hand braced on the window frame and the other under her hips, angling her up into me, and I can feel every slick clench of her around me, the slide of skin on skin, the lamp light swimming and the salt air cold on my back and the heat where we're joined the only thing in the world.
I feel her start to climb again — the tightening of her thighs, the catch in her breath — and I work a hand between us and find her clit with my thumb, circling it in time with each thrust, and she gasps and her head goes back and her body locks around me, and she comes a second time, harder, clenching tight around my cock, her cry breaking against my shoulder.
The grip of her pulsing around me is what finishes me.
I drive deep one last time and let go inside her, my whole body shuddering, her name on my mouth like the only word I ever learned, the heat of it cresting and breaking and finally, finally going still.
We stay tangled for a long time, breathing. The lamp hums. The tide moves below.
She traces my arm in the gold light, fingertip following the lines of the ink there — the bad ones, the prison ones, the crude work that never healed right.
"Who did these?" she asks. Her voice is wrecked and soft.
"Some were prison work. Guy named Hollow, did them with a guitar string and a motor off a Walkman. Some were street artists, back home, paid in beer." I watch her trace them. "None as good as yours. Obviously. I didn't have a teacher who left the right things out."
She props herself up on one elbow, studying my arm with the cataloguing eyes, the artist's eyes, and there's something fierce in her face.
"I'll fix them," she says. "All of them.
I'll cover the worst and rework the rest and I'll make them beautiful.
I'll turn the whole arm into something that means you survived instead of something that just proves it.
" She presses her lips to the ugliest scar, the guitar-string one. "I'll make them beautiful."
She doesn't answer right away. She goes back to tracing — the bad lines, the scars, the whole crude history of a body that got used hard and patched cheap — and her touch is so careful, so unhurried, that I feel the years coming loose under it, one by one, like old stitches.
"Tell me about them," she says. "The real ones. Not the cover story you give people."
So I do. I lie there in the gold light with her head on my chest and I tell her things I've never told anyone — not the public defender, not the social workers, not Theo.
I tell her about Hollow, who did half my arm in a holding block and taught me that a guitar string heated right will hold ink long enough to outlast a sentence.
I tell her about the anchor on my shoulder I let a street guy do at fifteen because the crew said you weren't anybody till you'd been marked, and how it's crooked and infected-scarred and I've hated it for nine years.
I tell her about the one I did to myself at seventeen, the night before the arrest, a single line on the inside of my wrist that doesn't mean anything, that I put there because I needed to feel like I had a say over one square inch of my own skin when everything else was being decided for me.
She finds that one. The meaningless line on my wrist. She presses her thumb to it.
"This is the most important one," she says quietly.
"It doesn't mean anything. That's the whole point of it."
"That is the meaning." She lifts my wrist and kisses the line.
"You were seventeen and the whole world was deciding what happened to you, and you took back one inch.
That's not nothing, Kieran. That's the most you, of all of them.
I'm not covering this one. I'm building the whole arm out from it.
The harbor at dawn, growing out of the one mark you made when nobody let you make anything.
" She settles back down, satisfied, the artist who's solved the piece.
"Light coming up out of the place you said you had a say.
That's the design. That's been the design since the day I saw your sketchbook, I just didn't have the wrist yet. "
I can't speak for a second. The salt air comes in cold and her body is warm against mine and she's just told me she's been designing the map of my own survival in her head for months without telling me, the way she does everything — patient, certain, planning in permanent ink.
"You're going to ruin me," I tell her. "You know that. There's no going back to before you. I tried to imagine it last week and I couldn't."
"Good," she says. "Reversibility was never my thing.
" She tips her head up, and the gold light catches the freckles, and the fierce artist softens into just a woman in the dark with a man she's decided to keep.
"Stay till morning. I know it's careless.
I don't care. I want to wake up and have you be the first thing I see instead of the thing that already left. "
"Theo runs me at seven."
"Then leave at six. Give me till six." Her hand flattens over my heart, the way it did at the cove. "Give me one morning before we have to be smart again."
I pull her down against my chest and hold her there, the woman who picked up the bottle, the teacher who found the kid on the cell wall, the secret that's the best thing in my life and the lie that's the worst, and I look up at the cracked window where the salt air comes in and the dark water moves, and I tell her the truest thing I've got, the thing the whole season has been building to, the thing no needle could make more permanent.
"You already have," I say.
And I stay till six.