25. Alessia #2
I’m kissing him again before either of us has finished smiling.
He turns us and puts my back against the wall and gets one hand under my knee and hitches it up over his hip, and the sound I make is not a laugh.
He swallows it. His body fits the way it always has, too much and exactly right, and I bite down on his shoulder through his shirt to keep quiet, the way I did in a shed on a hill on our first anniversary.
“That’s it,” he says, rough, into my hair. His hand is firm under my thigh, holding me there, not pushing for more. “Hold on to me. I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere you don’t tell me to go.”
His other hand finds the zip at the back of my dress.
He stops.
“Alessia.” Barely sound. “I want this off you. I want my hand on your skin. If that’s too far, say it now, because once I start I’m going to feel every inch of it and I don’t know how I’m supposed to let you go after.”
I don’t say it.
He draws it down slowly. I feel the air on my spine and his fingers following it, one vertebra at a time, and then his palm spreads flat between my shoulder blades, hot, shaking, and I open my eyes.
And I see his hand.
Not on me. Not now. I see it in a different light, curved around a page so I can’t read what he’s writing.
I see it on the back of a paper menu in a piazza with an accordion going.
I see the way he leans on a downstroke, the particular weight of it, and I see four words in that handwriting on the tab of a folder in a drawer that was hanging open the day my whole life ended.
Access to inner circle.
I shove him.
Hard, both palms flat on his chest, and he isn’t braced for it. He goes back into the rack and the entire stack of chairs comes down across the corridor with a crash that stops the band mid-song.
“Alessia.”
“Don’t.” I’m scrabbling for the zip and I can’t reach it and my hands won’t work. “Don’t say my name.”
He gets up off the floor. He doesn’t come toward me. His hands are open at his sides, empty, like he’s showing me he won’t use them.
“I can’t.” It comes out of me like something tearing loose. “I wanted to. I sat in a cab for twenty minutes telling myself I could. And then you put your hand on my back and I saw your handwriting.”
He stands there in a corridor full of fallen chairs with his shirt half out of his trousers and his face open in a way I’ve never seen it, and he says:
“Okay.”
“Okay?” I’m crying now, the furious kind, the kind that burns the whole way down. “That’s it? That’s everything you’ve got?”
“What do you want me to give you?” His voice cracks straight down the middle.
“That I understand? I do. That I’ll wait?
I’m going to. That I’d give ten years of my life to never have written access to inner circle on that folder?
I would do it tonight, standing here, and it wouldn’t buy me one single thing.
” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth.
He’s still breathing like I never shoved him.
“I can still taste you. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I don’t want you back against that wall.
But I am not going to use it. I am not going to talk you out of what you saw.
” His hands flex and stay down. “I can’t undo it.
All I can do is stand in this hallway and let you walk out of it as many times as you need to. ”
“That isn’t fair.”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
The band starts up again on the other side of the wall, uncertain, finding its place.
“Do my zip,” I tell him.
He crosses the corridor and does it up without once letting his fingers touch my skin, which is somehow worse than if he had. I hear him swallow. He doesn’t linger. He doesn’t let his mouth anywhere near my shoulder. When it’s done, he steps back like the floor burned him.
“Thank you.”
“Alessia.” Very quietly, behind me. “Our anniversary is next month.”
“I know when it is.”
“I know you do. I’m telling you I’m going to write the letter anyway.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not asking you to read it,” he says. Same quiet. No reach for me. “I’m telling you it will exist. You can burn it. You can never open it. I’m still going to write it, because I am not going to be a man who only wants you in a hallway and has nothing to give you when you walk out of it.”
I don’t answer him. I push back through the swinging door into the lobby, past the coat check and the bridesmaid on the stairs and the woman in the pavement-colored dress, who lifts her phone again the second she sees my face.
And the band, behind me, is playing my mother’s song.
The one she used to hum while she braided my hair. The one the quartet played while my father walked me up the aisle to a man with a folder in a locked drawer at home with my name typed on the tab.
I stand in the middle of a stranger’s wedding in a ruined dress and let it play all the way to the end.
Then I walk out through the front doors with my face wrecked and my mascara down to my jaw, straight into four cameras, and I don’t put my collar up and I don’t turn away.
Let them print it. Let every single person who whispered through my mother’s Mass see exactly what I look like when I try.
I can still feel his hand on my zip.
Not the handwriting. The heat of his palm coming down my spine one vertebra at a time, the way he hitched my knee over his hip like we were in the shed, like we were still allowed.
The way he put his mouth close and waited until I was the one who closed it.
I stopped him after. I was right to stop him.
I am lying in the dark with that dress on the floor and I am soaked anyway.
I roll onto my stomach and put a pillow between my thighs like a teenager and I despise myself.
In the version I have tonight I don’t shove him.
I let him get the dress the rest of the way down and I take him right there, fifteen feet from a boy carrying champagne coupes, and he has to put a hand over my mouth because he is too much, he has always been too much, and I have missed being stretched around him so badly I could scream about it.
He would say you came here for this. Not answers. This.
He would be right, and I would come anyway.
He would still make me be the one to kiss him.
He would still ask if I was sure, even then.
That is the part I cannot forgive and cannot stop hearing.
His mouth a breath from mine and still waiting.
His hands shaking and still waiting. I get there on a pillow like a girl of nineteen and the empty pulse afterwards is so specific I could draw it.
Tomorrow I’ll be cold. Tonight I miss my husband and I am not going to dress it up as poetry.