19. June #2
Tomorrow, then. Friday. After drop-off, before lunch, at the kitchen table, where everything in this house happens. Both hands on the table where he can see them.
I practice opening lines while I make dinner.
None of them are good. Every version is wrong in its own way — the slow ones, like there’s something I should have told you months ago, drag it out and make it worse, and the fast ones sound like an attack.
By the time the sauce is done I’ve settled on the plainest version there is. Four words, then the rest of my life.
That’s tomorrow. Tonight — Thursday night, my last night on this side of the truth — he gets home at nine from a sponsor event, jacket over his shoulder, and finds me sitting in the middle of the stairs like a teenager, waiting.
“Well,” he says, stopping at the bottom, hand on the newel. “Either the kids finally broke something expensive, or you missed me.”
“The kids are asleep and nothing’s broken.”
“So the second thing.” He climbs to my stair and holds out his hand. “Come on. It’s late, and you’ve got that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’ve been thinking all day and won’t say about what.
” He pulls me up, and I go up the stairs ahead of him holding his hand, and I let myself notice everything.
The exact weight of his hand. The creak of the loud fourth stair under his foot — the stair he used to step over when we were hiding, and now steps on without a thought, because he’s done sneaking around his own house.
Tomorrow, after he knows everything, I find out whether he still walks through his house that way — or whether I’ve put us back to tiptoeing.
In my room I turn to him before the door has finished clicking. I take his face in both hands and kiss him hard, memorizing it, in case it’s the last one I get before he knows.
“Hey,” he says softly, against my mouth, half a laugh in it. “What’s tonight about?”
I give him a piece of the truth — true as far as it goes: “I want to know you by heart.”
“June.” His hands settle on my waist, and his voice drops into the register that undoes me. “You already do.”
You have no idea, I don’t say. What I say is, “Lie down. I’m going to learn you by heart.”
He lies down. He watches me undress in the lamplight, unhurried. Then he reaches for me, and I catch his wrists and put them back against the pillow. Something shifts in his face — surprise, then interest, then a stillness that’s all attention.
“Like that?” he asks.
“Like that. Tonight you let me.”
So he lets me. I start at his hands — the first part of him I ever recognized, that day in the kitchen.
The scarred knuckle, the wide palms, each finger, my mouth moving over the hand I recognized before I recognized anything else.
Then up his forearms, the ones that began all this trouble in a rolled shirtsleeve, across his shoulders, down the chest with its gray scatter.
The soft middle he apologized for once, and I bit him for it.
Everything goes in: the line of his jaw at his ear, the heartbeat quicker than he’d admit, the sound when I drag my nails down his ribs — low, caught, mine.
“You’re killing me,” he manages.
“You’re fine. Breathe.”
By the time I take him in my mouth he’s wrecked and cursing softly at my ceiling, hands obediently where I put them, hips fighting to stay polite.
I go slow. I learn the weight of him, the salt, the exact catch in his breathing when I hum.
Deeper, then — one hand working where my mouth isn’t, eyes open the whole time, memorizing him.
The sounds he makes get shorter. The polite ones go first. What’s left underneath is low and rough and honest, and I’d trade everything polished I own for it.
When his control starts fraying — I can tell, his heels dig hard into my mattress — I climb up and sink onto him in one slow slide. We both stop breathing entirely.
“June.” The syllable barely survives. His hands come off the pillow and land on my hips, and I let him have that much. “You’re going to have to move eventually.”
“Don’t rush me.” I flatten my palms on his chest, over his heart, and I move the way you’d read something twice — slow, then slower.
The pull and drag of him inside me. The flush climbing his throat, the set of his jaw when he’s holding back, the color of his eyes in lamplight at close range.
He watches me the whole time. I let him see everything I feel about him — everything except the secret itself.
Two years on camera taught me how to keep exactly one thing off my face.
I ride him in long slow pulls — lifting almost off, sinking back down, feeling every inch of the return. When he can’t stand it he plants his feet and drives up into me, once, twice, asking. I press him flat with both hands.
“No,” I say, gently. “Mine tonight.”
He exhales, long and slow, and gives me the rest of himself to learn. The sounds now. The swearing now. The please in it he’d deny in daylight. I take all of it in. Every last sound.
We build together, patient, almost silent, his thumb finding me where we’re joined and circling until my rhythm stops being a decision.
When I break it’s slow-motion, rolling, endless, my hands still flat on his chest, his name coming out of me in pieces.
He follows seconds later, pulling my mouth down to his, groaning into the kiss, fighting to stay quiet.
He holds me down onto him with both hands, like I’m going somewhere.
I’m going somewhere.
After, I lie on top of him, ear over his heart, and he draws one slow line up my spine and back down, already half asleep, wholly happy. It comes off him like heat off a road. A man with no idea what tomorrow is. I did that. Both halves — the happy, and the not knowing.
“Stay till the furnace,” he mumbles. Our shorthand: five a.m., the click and whoosh, his cue to go be respectable.
“Till the furnace,” I agree.
He’s asleep in four breaths. I stay awake a long time with my ear on his heart, listening.
Steady, a little slow — the heartbeat of a man who believes nothing is wrong in his house.
I do not let myself cry, because if he woke to that, he’d ask, and I’d end up telling him everything at two a.m. in the dark.
He deserves better than that. He deserves morning light, both my hands on the table, and a woman telling him because she chose to — not because she broke down.
Four words, then the rest of my life.
I know them by heart. And now I know all of him by heart too. That’s what tonight was for — one full night of him, memorized, before everything changes tomorrow.
The furnace clicks at five. He kisses my shoulder, gathers his clothes, and steps over the loud stair out of habit. Then he steps back onto it, quietly laughing at himself, and lets it announce him all the way down.
I lie in the warm spot he left and watch my ceiling arrive out of the dark.
Drop-off is at eight.