15. June
June
I wake up at nine, which never happens, in my own bed, which took everything I had.
For one warm second I’m nobody with no history. Then the whole thing arrives at once — the pantry, the counter, the step stool on its side, his mouth, his hands, my own voice with nothing held back. I pull the blanket over my face and lie there with my heartbeat in my ears.
Here’s where things stand, in the light of day.
I used to have one secret in this house.
Now I have two. The old one is who I was.
The new one is what we did. And the part that scares me isn’t either of them — it’s that only the old one feels like a secret.
The new one feels like the first fully true thing I’ve done under this roof.
And that’s the danger. Secrets are built to stay hidden. True things aren’t.
He was FOURTEEN. I’m JUNO. Last night the man who used to pay for my company had me on his kitchen counter for free. He thinks that’s the whole story. It’s not even half of it.
I can’t lie still with all of that, so I get up. Shower. Clean clothes. I put on the good sweater, catch myself in the mirror, take it off, and put it back on anyway. So that’s how I feel about seeing him this morning. Noted.
He’s at the stove when I come down, and something is burning.
“Don’t look at the pan,” he says, without turning around. “The pan and I are working through some things.”
“Are those pancakes?”
“The plan was pancakes. Whether they arrive as pancakes is a different question.” He flips one. It lands badly. He gives it the look he gives Brenda, and I laugh before I’ve decided anything about how this morning is going to go. He turns around at the sound of it.
Saturday-morning Gus, barefoot, T-shirt, spatula. We look at each other across the kitchen where everything in this house happens, and the air goes thick enough to butter.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“There’s coffee. I made it in your machine. I want points for that.”
“Did you rinse the filter first?”
A pause. “I want points for the attempt.”
We eat burnt pancakes at the counter. I take a stool — not the one from last night.
We both notice, and neither of us says so.
He watches me pick the blackened edge off and eat the middle.
Neither of us says any of the sentences stacked up between us like planes over an airport.
We should talk about it. One of us should start.
What we do instead is eat pancakes, knees almost touching, while the morning sun comes across the counter he wiped down twice, apparently, before I woke up.
“June,” he says finally, into his coffee. “We should probably—”
“Yes.”
“There are things we’d want to—”
“Absolutely.”
Neither of us says a sensible word. He puts down the coffee.
I put down the fork. And I could not tell you which of us moves first. His hands are in my hair, my hands are under his shirt.
The stool scrapes back. He says, against my mouth, “Not the counter. It’s daylight.
I want a bed and a door and no timeline. ”
“The kids—”
“Sunday dinner. We have the whole—” He stops himself, forehead against mine, and does me the courtesy of not saying how many hours. “We have today.”
I take his hand. I walk him up his own stairs — me first, him following, his thumb moving over my knuckles like he’s making sure I’m still there. At the top I turn left, to my room. He follows me in under the slanted ceiling and shuts the door with a click that sounds louder than it is.
My room. My quilt, my two used drawers, my window with the crack of Saturday light. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it in the one room in this house that’s mine.
“Good call,” he says quietly, looking around like it matters to him. “I used to wonder whether you’d ever really move into this room. Whether you’d stay.”
“I moved in in September.”
“I know,” he says. “The suitcase went up on the shelf. I noticed.”
He noticed. Of course he noticed. I pull my sweater over my head — the good one, worn for four total minutes — and watch it land on the chair, and watch him watch me.
Last night was all speed and flour and no chance to think.
This is the opposite of that, and being seen in full daylight by Augustus Vaughn, unhurried, is almost more than my nervous system can take.
“Come here,” I say, before I lose the nerve, “and take your time.”
He takes his time.
The sweater goes first, then the jeans, then everything, and he undresses me slowly, carefully, one thing at a time.
He pauses at each stage to look, until I’m flushed everywhere it shows.
The scar crosses his knuckles when he draws the backs of his fingers down my sternum.
I watch that hand travel over me — the exact hand from the photograph — and something in my chest pulls tight and sweet and terrible all at once.
He lays me back on my own quilt in a rectangle of sun.
He kisses my throat, my collarbone, the underside of my breast. Then his mouth finds the mole on my hip, and my heart holds still for one beat.
That mole is the thing Juno cropped out of every frame for two years.
It was never on the page. Now it’s the first place he lingers.
His mouth keeps going after that, slow, in the wandering order of a man with no destination.
I end up pulling at his shirt, because being the only naked one in daylight is a lot.
His shirt comes off. The forearms — rolled sleeves in my head for two months, and now not even a shirt.
I put both palms flat on him and take my own tour.
Ribs. Shoulders. The gray scattered across his chest, and the softness at his middle that hockey left behind when it went.
He holds still and lets me look, and looking at him looking at me is its own plain, ordinary miracle.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“You’re worth staring at. I don’t think anyone’s told you that enough for it to stick.”
His breath does something at that. Then his mouth is back on me and the morning goes slow and golden and quiet — breath, the quilt shifting, the small sounds neither of us can help.
He works his way down my body and settles in, hands under my hips.
He takes me apart with a patience that borders on rude — long, lazy, stopping every time I get close.
By the end I’m whispering threats into the sunlight, and he’s laughing quietly against me.
When he finally lets me finish, I come with my hand pressed over my own mouth, two months of habit.
He climbs back up and pulls my hand away from my face, gently, and pins it to the pillow, fingers laced through mine.
“None of that,” he says, low. “Nobody’s home. I want every one of those.”
Then he slides into me, slow, watching my face the whole way, and the sound I make is small and true and entirely new to me.
His eyes close for a second like he’s keeping it.
And then we move together, easy, no rush — my heel sliding down the back of his leg, sun across his shoulders.
His mouth stays at my ear, saying my name and then things that are not my name, quiet and specific and filthy in the most courteous possible way.
It builds the way slow things build, from underneath.
When I come it takes me by surprise — a long, rolling one, his name buried in his shoulder.
He comes moments later with a shudder, my face held in both his hands like something that might tip.
The sun has moved a whole floorboard by the time either of us speaks.
“So,” he says, to the slanted ceiling. My head is on his chest. His heart is still going. “We were going to talk.”
“We were.”
“We should be careful.” He says it stiffly, like he rehearsed it in the car. “The kids. Carol. Deanna. Your job. My — everything. Until we know what this is, nobody should know there’s a this.”
“Careful,” I agree, into his chest. “Extremely careful. Beyond careful.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re saying it,” I say, “with my hair wrapped around your fingers.”
He looks at his hand. It stays right where it is. “I’m told I’m very disciplined,” he says. “It’s in articles.”
Neither of us asks the question that matters — careful until what, careful of what, what happens when careful runs out. The talk we should be having sits in the doorway of my room all morning, patient, and we just don’t look at it.
* * *
Sunday at six, Carol’s car pulls in, and the house gets loud in the best way.
Teddy comes through the door already telling three stories at once — there was a dog, the dog’s name was also Gus, this is the greatest fact he has ever owned.
Margot comes in reading, coat still on, and detours past the windowsill where her volcano sits before she goes up, which she thinks nobody notices.
Everybody notices. Nobody says anything.
Dinner is normal. That’s the astonishing thing — how normal it is.
Pot roast, Teddy’s dog saga in seven installments, Margot deciding “also-Gus” is an acceptable name for a dog, which for her is a rave.
Gus carves. I pass plates. Our hands don’t touch once, because we’re being careful, and every time they don’t touch, the not-touching is the loudest thing at the table.
He catches my eye exactly once, over Teddy’s head, the same way he did two months ago across a plate of wall-ball rules. Two months ago I got up for the water pitcher so nobody would see my face.
This time I look away first.
Four people at this table. Two secrets. Both of them mine, and one of them is his too, and he doesn’t know they’re related.
Someday, some way, something is going to come out.
I clear the plates. Teddy hands me his fork handle first, the way his father taught him.
Two months ago, a secret this size would have had me half-packed by morning.
Instead I stand at the sink and decide, again, to stay.
Someday isn’t tonight.