20. Karlie #2
He’s by the door, jacket already gone, sleeves already turned back over the bandages, and the look on his face is not agreement and never was, it’s the look from my father’s kitchen, three years of it, aimed and steady.
“One night,” I say to his face. “To burn you out of my system. Then you sign.”
“I’ll take the night,” he says, and crosses the room.
The first kiss lands like the crash. All at once, no warning, his hand in my hair and my back against the cold window glass, four months of famine breaking open at the same instant for both of us, and I hear the sound I make and don’t recognize it.
There’s nothing careful in it. Careful died at a guardrail.
“The ribs,” he breathes, once, the only pause he takes, his hand spread across my side over the place where I was broken.
“Healed.”
“Tell me if…”
“William.” I pull his mouth back down. “Burn.”
He burns.
He gets the gown open with one hand while he kisses me, the zipper giving fast, and peels it down my body until it pools at my feet and I’m standing against the glass in nothing but heels and the strapless lace I wore under it.
He doesn’t say anything. He looks at me for one second with the city lights moving over his face, and then he takes the lace off me too and drops to his knees.
He pulls my thigh over his shoulder and puts his mouth between my legs with the whole glittering city behind my back, and he is patient in a way he is never patient, long slow licks first, learning me again, then his lips closing around my clit and sucking, nothing but his mouth, no hands, just that.
I brace one hand on the window frame and the other in his hair.
The gauze on his knuckles is rough against the inside of my thigh where he holds me open, and I don’t know why that’s the detail that undoes me, but it is, his wrecked hands and his mouth and the way he groans against me when I pull his hair.
He doesn’t stop and he doesn’t speed up, he just keeps at it with that terrible focus until I’m shaking against the glass and saying his name into the dark and coming on his tongue with my leg locked over his shoulder.
He stands and lifts me before my knees can give, carries me to the bed and lays me down and strips the rest of his clothes off without taking his eyes off me.
He comes down over me and takes me apart again, slower, with his mouth at my throat and his hands remembering everything, every place, every pressure, three years of knowledge deployed without mercy, and the whole time neither of us says a word, because the terms are the terms and words would count.
Then he does say one thing.
“Say you’re mine tonight,” he says against my skin, hoarse. “Just tonight. I know the terms. Say it anyway.”
“Tonight.” My nails are in his back. “Tonight I’m yours.”
When he finally pushes inside me it’s face to face, and we both go still for a second, forehead to forehead, breathing each other, and it’s too much, it was always going to be too much, one night was never a real number.
Then he moves and I stop doing math of any kind.
He fucks me slow and deep, his hips grinding into mine at the bottom of every stroke, his weight pressing me into the mattress and his mouth open against my jaw, and it’s desperate and it’s grieving and it’s furious, and somewhere in the middle of it, it stops being any of those things and becomes just us, the old us, the kitchen-counter us, his hand finding mine on the sheets and gripping, our fingers weaving.
I come with my face in his neck, clenching around him, and he follows a few strokes later with my name, the only other word he says all night, as deep inside me as he can get.
We don’t sleep. Later, when the windows have gone gray at the edges, he takes me again from behind, on my knees with his chest against my back and his bandaged hands spread over my stomach and his mouth in my hair, and it isn’t any slower than the first time and neither of us pretends it should be.
After, he holds me like drowning. Both arms, full weight, my back to his chest and his mouth in my hair, and neither of us says anything, because the terms were the terms, and everything either of us wants to say would count.
I lie awake in the dark and feel his breathing go long and deep against my spine.
I gave the terms. I set the fire.
It didn’t burn him out. It burned the last of my armor instead, and I lie in the ash of it, wide awake, in the arms of the man I am supposed to divorce in the morning.
Gray dawn.
I slide out from under his arm one inch at a time.
He sleeps on, wrecked, one hand splayed across the warm place I’ve left, his face unguarded in a way I’ve seen maybe five times in three years, and I stand beside the bed in the cold light and let myself look at him for exactly ten seconds, and then I stop, because ten was already too many.
I dress in silence. The gown goes on wrong without help and I don’t care.
The papers are in my clutch, folded small.
My lawyer’s third printing. I smooth them flat on my pillow, in the dent where my head was, where he’ll reach when he wakes, because I am my mother’s daughter and my father’s too, and apparently what we do in this family is leave the truth where the other person sleeps.
I make it to the doorway.
And I stop dead, one hand on the frame, because my feet won’t go.
My heart is standing in the middle of the floor behind me refusing to come, and I stand in that doorway for one minute, two, in the gray light, with my husband asleep behind me and my freedom folded on a pillow, and every morning he ever left me first stacked up in my chest like stones.
Then I make my feet move, and I go.