14. Gus
Gus
I spend Friday finding reasons not to be home, which takes some doing when your kids are at their grandmother’s and your calendar is empty.
I drive to the facility and sit through a practice nobody needs me at.
Lunch is with Mitch, who watches me chew for most of it and finally says, “You’re chewing very thoughtfully,” which from Mitch is an interrogation.
There’s a haircut involved, two weeks after my last one, and the barber has the sense not to mention it.
By the time I run out of city, it’s dark, and I’ve admitted the thing I’ve been driving around all day.
I told her everything last night, and it was the easiest three hours of my life.
It should have been hard. The fact that it was easy — that everything with her is easy — scares me more than the secret ever did.
The kitchen is lit up like a control tower when I come in.
Every cabinet is open. The counters are covered in everything we own — cans, flour, the good pot, the bad pots, a shoebox of loose birthday candles I could not have told you we had.
June is on the step stool with her back to me, unloading the highest shelf with more force than shelving requires.
“We got burgled,” I say. “They took nothing and alphabetized us.”
“Your pantry was a crime scene.” She doesn’t turn around. “There were three open bags of the same rice. Three, Gus.”
It’s nine o’clock on her Friday night. The kids are gone, the house is empty, and she’s on a step stool sorting my rice. I know her by now — I know what busy hands mean, and I know what this much busy means. I put my keys in the bowl.
“Leave it,” I say. “It’s your weekend too. I’ll order something. Go call Bex, watch a movie, be a person.”
“This is me being a person.”
“June. Off duty. The shelf will still be a crime scene tomorrow.”
“I’m almost done.”
“You’re nowhere near done, there’s a whole wall left—”
“Then I’m nowhere near done.” She comes down off the stool with a can in each hand and finally looks at me. There’s a flush up her neck that has nothing to do with shelving. “Why does it bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“You’ve been gone eleven hours on a day with nothing in it. Now you’re home four minutes and managing my Friday.” She sets the cans down harder than cans need. “Something’s bothering you.”
And there it is — the argument, and of course it arrives over nothing. We stand on opposite sides of my own counter and have it.
“I’m not managing your Friday. I’m saying you don’t have to earn the roof when the kids aren’t even in the house—”
“Earn the roof.” Her voice goes very level, which I should recognize as the last flat stretch of road before a cliff, and I don’t. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Working off my room and board?”
“That is not what I said.”
“Then say what you actually mean, Gus. You avoided me all day, all over this city, and now you’re four feet away being polite about it.
I’d rather have the plain version. You told me something real last night.
Today you can’t be in a room with me. If it’s regret, that’s fine.
I’ve got a system for other people’s regret. But name it.”
“It’s not regret.”
“Then what is it?”
“Being in a room with you is the problem.”
It comes out plain, the way true things do when you stop guarding the door. She goes still. Not the carrying-something stillness — a different one, one I’ve never seen. It occurs to me far too late that I’ve been wrong about what we’re fighting about. Both of us have been, the whole time.
“Say that again,” she says, quietly.
“June.”
“Say it again.”
“Being in a room with you has been the problem for weeks.” My heart is going like I’m twenty-five again.
“It’s not the roof, and it’s not regret.
I told you the worst thing I know about myself last night, and you handed me a glass of wine and stayed.
And today I drove around this city like an idiot.
I knew that the next time I stood in this kitchen with you, I was going to do something I’ve decided — repeatedly, in writing, in my head — not to do. ”
She looks at me for exactly as long as it takes to put the last can down.
“Do it anyway,” she says.
I’m around the counter before she finishes the sentence.
One hand in her hair and one at her jaw, and I kiss her the way I’ve wanted to kiss her since that night in the parking lot after the gala.
She comes up onto her toes and kisses me back like she got there first and has been waiting for me to catch up.
She grabs the front of my shirt in both fists.
The step stool goes over. Neither of us looks at it.
“This is a terrible idea,” she says against my mouth.
“The worst.” I walk her two steps back until she’s against the counter. “You should tell me to stop.”
“Noted,” she says, and pulls me closer, and that’s the end of the meeting.
There’s flour on the counter and it gets on everything — her shirt, my hands, her cheek where I hold her face.
I kiss her jaw, the corner under her ear, the line of her throat.
She makes a sound I have never heard from her — low, surprised, escaped before she could stop it.
I want to hear every sound she has ever held back.
The house is empty, and I want her to know it.
“Nobody’s home,” I tell her collarbone. “Empty all the way to Sunday. You don’t have to be quiet in this house tonight.”
“Gus.” My name, just that, and her hands are already working my shirt buttons wrong.
She gives up at three and pulls it over my head instead.
Then her palms are flat on my chest and traveling, and she exhales like she’s been waiting months to.
“Okay. Two things, fast, while I still have a working brain.”
“Go.”
“There’s been nobody in over two years, and I have an IUD, and my last physical was clean.” She says it in her reporting voice, and God help me, the reporting voice works on me now too. “Your turn.”
“Nobody since Nora. Yearly physicals, all clean. That’s four years, if you’re counting.”
“I’m not counting anything tonight,” she says. “Then we’re covered. Kiss me again, and mean it.”
So I do. I get her shirt over her head and her bra off with two fingers. Then I stop for a second — one second — because I want to look. She lets me, chin up, flushed to her sternum, gorgeous and unhidden in a bright kitchen. “You have no idea,” I tell her, “how you look right now.”
“Show me.”
I put my mouth on her breast and she arches into it, fingers in my hair.
The sound she makes now isn’t surprised at all.
I take my time — one breast, the other, the soft underside — until her nails dig in, her breath goes ragged, and my name stops sounding like a name.
Then her jeans come open under my hands.
She kicks them somewhere. My hand slides into her underwear and she is soaked, and the noise I make about it is not dignified.
“That’s for you,” she says, unsteady. “Been an ongoing situation—”
She stops being able to talk, because I’ve dropped to my knees on my own kitchen floor and pulled her underwear down and put her leg over my shoulder. “Gus—”
“Hold the counter.”
She holds the counter. I take her apart with my mouth like I’ve got all night, because I do.
Long, slow passes over her clit until her thighs shake.
Two fingers curled inside her, her hips riding my hand with less and less patience.
She’s loud now. She’s finally, gloriously loud — my name, half-sentences, one full profanity I have never once heard her use in this house.
I work her through it, slower when she tenses, deeper when she pulls my hair, learning her in real time.
When she comes, her head goes back and her whole hand white-knuckles against my scalp.
I hold her up through every second of it, mouth on her until she pushes my forehead away.
Then she slides down the cabinet to my level, flushed and wrecked and grinning like a thief.
“Okay,” she breathes. “Okay. Your kitchen has one redeeming feature.”
“Floor’s clean, too. I have staff.”
“She’s excellent.” She kisses me, tastes herself, hums like it’s information worth having. Then she plants a hand on my chest, pushes me back onto my heels, and goes for my belt.
“June—”
“My turn. Sit still.” She gets the belt open, then the fly, then her hand around my cock, and it’s my turn to lose language. She strokes me slow, watching my face like she’s learning the controls, and whatever she finds there makes her mouth curve. “There he is.”
Then her mouth is on me, and I stop being a person with plans.
She takes me in slow, one hand wrapped where her mouth isn’t, no hurry anywhere in her.
I sit on my own kitchen floor with my head back against the island, her name coming out of me in pieces.
She hums around me and I feel it everywhere.
When my hand finds her hair, she pulls off just long enough to say, “You can hold on. You can’t steer,” and goes back down.
I hold on and do not steer, and somewhere in the next two minutes I hit the edge of what a man can watch.
“June.” I catch her jaw, gently, thumb at the corner of her mouth. “Come here. Come up here.”
“I wasn’t done.”
“First time I’m inside you is not going to be with my pants at my ankles on this floor.”
“Strong disagree,” she says. “First time is going to be right here, in this kitchen, where everything in this house happens. Look at me.” I look at her. Flour on her cheek, hair a mess, eyes absolutely certain. “Right here, Gus.”
I kick the pants off. I lift her onto the counter, and she wraps her legs around me and lines me up herself, and we both watch.
Then I push into her, slow, and she takes me with a long exhale that ends in a laugh — one note of it, disbelieving, delighted.
I know exactly how she feels. I hold still, buried in her, her forehead against mine, both of us breathing like the end of a shift.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Move, or I’m calling Deanna to report you.”
So I move. Slow first, long strokes that pull the breath out of her, her heels digging into my back, the counter edge in my hands.
She’s tight and hot and already fluttering.
Every time I bottom out she makes a small punched-out sound I would trade the rest of my hearing to keep.
I keep it slow until slow stops being enough for her — until her heels dig in harder and her hips chase me and she growls, actually growls, “Gus. I swear—”
“You swear what?” I stop moving entirely, seated deep, and watch her eyes come open. “Use your words, June. You’re so good at reports.”
“I will reorganize your sock drawer by resentment.”
“There she is,” I say, and give her what she’s asking for.
Not slow. She meets me stroke for stroke, both arms around my neck, and the kitchen fills up with us.
Skin and breath and her voice climbing, the cabinet doors knocking time like the world’s worst metronome.
Neither of us laughs at it. We’re past laughing.
“Harder,” she says against my ear, so I give her harder, and she stops making sentences entirely, and I’m not far behind her on that.
“Touch yourself,” I tell her. “I want to feel it when you go.”
Her hand slides between us. It doesn’t take long — she’s close, and I can feel her tightening around me, hear it in the pitch of her.
When she breaks, she takes me with her. I empty into her with her name in my teeth, one hand fisted in her hair, the other holding her like something I have no intention of putting down.
The kitchen goes quiet a piece at a time. Her heartbeat against my chest. My face in her neck. Somewhere on the floor, a can of tomatoes rolls to a stop.
“So,” she says finally, breathless, into my shoulder. “The pantry’s still not done.”
I start laughing and can’t stop, and she’s laughing too, wrapped around me on the counter where we eat breakfast. Both of us a mess. The step stool on its side like a casualty. I pull back enough to see her face and push the hair out of it.
“We’re in trouble,” I say. It’s not a question and it’s not a joke, and she doesn’t take it as either.
“So much trouble,” she agrees, softly. “He says, in the middle of the crime scene.”
We clean up the kitchen the way you’d expect two sensible adults to — badly, in stages, interrupted twice by kissing that starts as a joke and stops being one. At the bottom of the stairs she puts her hand flat on my chest.
“I need a minute where I’m not looking at you,” she says, “or I’ll never make it to my own room, and I think — for tonight — I should.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay like that.”
“It’s the only okay I have.”
She goes up. I do the doors, the stove, the lights, and stand at the bottom of the stairs with my hand on the newel post. Two weeks ago I stood in this exact spot and decided nothing was going to happen. I remember being very sure.
Up in my room, I close the door, turn off the light, and lie there thinking about a woman I swore I’d never touch, while she lies awake at the end of the hall.
I’ll fix this in the morning.
That’s what I tell myself, lying in the dark. Even I don’t believe it.