22. June
June
Both of you.
He says it holding my hands in his kitchen, and my knees nearly give out. We end up at the table — our table, the confession table, twelve hours old in its new job. He sits me down and pulls his chair around to my side of it. Close. Knees touching mine. Hands staying.
“Now,” he says. “Go ahead and ask me. You’ve been wanting to ask all day.”
“This morning you said you couldn’t hear the answer yet.”
“That was this morning. I’ve had my day to think.” His thumbs move over my knuckles, slow, steady. “Ask me.”
My voice comes out smaller than I’ve ever heard it. “Do you think you bought me?”
“No.” No pause, no air in front of it. “I spent the whole day taking that question apart, and here’s where it ended.
I tried for fourteen months to get that woman to accept something.
Anything. She wouldn’t take a tip without turning it into a joke.
She wouldn’t name one thing she wanted. The single thing she ever let me give her was a typed-out description of a hotel breakfast.” He shakes his head.
“I know what being a customer feels like, June. This never felt like that. It felt like luck.”
“You couldn’t have bought it, because I never sold it,” I say, and I need him to hear every word.
“The site sold photos and videos. That was work, and I’m not sorry about it.
But the conversations were never part of the product.
In two years, out of hundreds of subscribers, you’re the only person I ever talked with that way.
The only one. It happened because you asked about my day and actually wanted the answer. ”
“And I didn’t know you,” he says. “You didn’t know me.
Whatever we were to each other back then, we were it without names, without faces, without money mattering.
Nobody was rich. Nobody was famous.” He turns my hands over in his, palms up, and holds them.
“So here’s where I’ve landed: you were never for sale, and I never bought you.
I’m not going to wonder about it again. I wanted to say that in this kitchen, where the big things get said. ”
“One question back,” I say, because tonight is for all of it.
“August. When I turned the page back on, Velvet sent a notice to every old subscriber. JUNO is back. That’s how the site works — I knew it the second I hit restore.
And then I spent nine days down the hall from your phone, waiting to find out whether you’d seen it. ”
He huffs — half a laugh, at himself. “The account lived under an email I made in an airport eight years ago, built so nothing about it could ever touch my real life. No phone, no alerts. I checked the page by typing the address, every time, like I told you. I never once opened that inbox.” He shakes his head slowly at the table.
“It’s probably still sitting there. JUNO is back, in a mailbox nobody will ever open again. ”
“Nine days,” I say. “The site emailed every old subscriber the night I restored that page. If you’d opened that inbox even once, you’d have known who I was back in August.”
“Then I’m glad I have discipline,” he says, “and a terrible relationship with email.”
The clock over the stove hums. Upstairs, two kids sleep in a house whose air weighs half what it did yesterday.
“I don’t know what happens next,” I say.
“Nothing happens next. Not tonight. Tonight there’s no next.” He stands, and doesn’t let go of my hands, so I come up with him. “Tonight I’d like to take you to bed, if you’d like that. My bed. And I’d like the lights on.”
I’ve never once been in his room at night. Months of hallway goodnights, of the furnace rule, of my narrow bed under the slanted ceiling — his door was the one door in this house I never touched. “Gus—”
“I’ve been two people in the dark for years,” he says. “So have you. I’m done. Lights on. Come see where I live.”
* * *
His room is plain, which I knew it would be. Good bed, old dresser, a chair with a sweater over it, a stack of books one deep. He turns on the small lamp, then, deliberately, the second one, and stands there in all that light looking at me like the looking is the point.
We undress each other slowly, and for once neither of us is performing patience.
We just have it. There’s nowhere to be. There’s nothing left to guard.
When my shirt comes off he traces the line of my shoulder like he’s never seen one.
When his comes off I put my palm flat over his heart, the old habit, and he covers my hand with his and keeps it there.
“Hello,” he says quietly, ridiculous, perfect.
“Hello.”
We lie down face to face on top of the covers, in the light.
For a while we don’t do anything but look and touch and say true things — small ones we never let ourselves say before.
That I love the gray at his temples. That he noticed my laugh got louder and easier around Halloween, and wondered what had changed, and didn’t let himself hope it was about him.
It was — that’s about when I stopped planning my exit from this house.
And that his habit of pushing his shirtsleeves up his forearms had been a genuine problem for me since my second week on the job.
That the night I fixed his tie at the gala, he drove home planning the next time he’d need a tie.
“I have one,” he says, against my collarbone.
“One I’ve been keeping.” His mouth moves lower as he talks, unhurried.
“The morning after the wine. You stood at my stove in the daylight, and I looked at you and decided: whatever trouble this turns into, I want it anyway. I knew it could go wrong. I chose it with my eyes open. I just didn’t know yet how good it was going to be. ”
“That’s the difference,” I say. “Choosing something isn’t buying it.”
“Choosing isn’t buying,” he repeats, slowly, like he’s filing it away somewhere permanent. “There she is. Three a.m. in person.”
Then the talking thins out into something better.
He kisses his way down my body with no destination and no clock, and where his mouth goes his hands follow, and where his hands go I light up.
He spends whole minutes in places that never earned minutes before — the inside of my elbow, the crease of my hip, the mole. Especially the mole.
“You’re thinking something,” I say to the ceiling. “I can feel it. Say it.”
“Fourteen months.” His mouth moves to the inside of my thigh between words. “Fourteen months I talked to a woman I’d have crossed the country for, and the whole time she was going to end up here. Under this exact lamp.” A slow kiss, higher. “I’m taking my time with the ending.”
When I’m past ready — shifting under him, pulling at his shoulders — he settles between my legs.
He takes me apart with his mouth so slowly it should be illegal in this county.
No teasing, no stopping. Just patience with a purpose, his tongue soft and certain on my clit, two fingers curling exactly where I taught him without ever saying a word.
The first one rolls through me long and low, and he stays with me through every second of it.
When I come down he’s watching me over the length of my own body, chin still resting on my hip.
“Lights on was the right call,” he says, hoarse.
“Come here.”
He takes the long way. Back up my body, mouth on everything he passes — hip, ribs, the underside of my breast, the base of my throat. By the end I’m restless and laughing and pulling at his shoulders with both hands.
“Gus.”
“You had a whole day of my patience,” he says, into my sternum. “You can survive two more minutes of mine.”
“I want it noted that I survived it badly.”
He comes up over me and I take him in hand and guide him, and we both watch that too, because tonight nothing gets hidden, not even this. He pushes into me slowly, so I feel all of it, and when he’s all the way there we just stop, perfectly still, breathing each other’s air.
“Hi,” I whisper. It’s all I have.
“Hi.” His eyes are wet at the edges, and he doesn’t hide that either. “I talked to you every night for over a year. I never once knew what you looked like. Look at you.”
We move the way you’d read something you never want to end.
Long, deep, unhurried, my leg wrapped over his, his hand under my jaw, his thumb at my cheekbone.
Every time it starts to build too fast, one of us slows it — him with a stilled breath, me with a hand flat on his chest. Getting there isn’t the point, and we both know it.
In between there are words, whispered right against skin.
My name, over and over, like he’s making up for fourteen months of Juno.
His, from me, because I can finally say it with everything attached.
At some point I roll him under me and sit up in the lamplight and let him look.
All of me. No crop, no frame, no angle. The sound he makes is half wonder and half grief for the time we lost. I ride him slowly with his hands laced through mine.
Deep, rolling, no hurry left anywhere in the world.
The lamplight is on all of it — on me, on his face, on the place where we’re joined — and neither of us looks away from any of it.
“Talk to me,” I say, moving on him. “Tell me something true.”
“There’s nothing left to tell,” he says, wrecked. “You know all of it now. You’re the only person alive who knows all of it.”
The build comes up from so deep it scares me a little, and I say so.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “Both of you. Go.”
I break looking straight at him, long and rolling and complete, and it pulls him with me. His hands hard on my hips. My name breaking in half in his mouth — June, the real one — like it’s the answer to something he’d been asked all his life.
After, we lie tangled in the light neither of us moves to turn off. His heart under my ear finds its slow gear. Sleep is available. I don’t want this to be over yet.
“I can hear you being awake,” he says, eyes shut.
“I’m hungry.”
He opens one eye. “It’s almost three.”
“I know what time it is.” I’m already reaching for his shirt, which is how his shirts get lost. “Come downstairs. I want to show you something.”
The kitchen at three in the morning has always been mine alone — my hour, my place, in every house I’ve ever worked in.
Tonight, for the first time, I’m sharing it.
He sits at the counter in his flannel pants while I do it properly.
Rice from the good pot, day-old and fried hot.
One egg each on top, edges crisp, yolk soft, soy sauce in a thread.
Two plates. I have made this exact meal a hundred times, in four cities, in every bad year I’ve had, and I have never once made it for another human being.
I put his plate down in front of him. “Rice and a fried egg. This is what I eat when the night is too big. I ate it the night my mother died. I ate it the night I paid off the last of the debt, and the night before my first shift on Velvet. And in November — the night you told me about her — I ate it three feet from where you’re sitting.
” He goes still, fork down, listening with everything.
“Every bad night of my life, this meal has gotten me to morning. It has never once let me down. And I have never made it for another person. So.”
“So,” he says, quietly. “You’re introducing me to something important.”
“The most important meal I know. Don’t let the egg get cold.”
He eats it the way he heard the Winnipeg breakfast — like it’s the nicest thing anyone has given him all week.
The yolk gets broken with the ceremony of a man cutting a ribbon.
He has seconds. In the freezer, right on schedule, the ice maker grinds, and produces, and Brenda’s cubes rattle down into the bin like applause from the cheap seats.
“She approves,” he says.
“She’s known longer than anyone.”
We wash the two plates together, him washing, me drying, three-fifteen in the morning, and the thought arrives without drama, the way the true ones do.
The man I love knows exactly who I am now — the window, the debt, the site, all of it.
I can’t remember the last time one person knew the whole of me.
Not since before the layoff. Maybe not since my mother got sick.
There’s no hidden version of me left, no part folded away where nobody can see it.
All of me is standing in one warm kitchen, in a man’s shirt, drying a plate.
“Bed,” Gus says, hanging the towel on its hook, tidy as ever. “Both of you.”
I laugh so suddenly it echoes, and take his hand, and go up.
On the way up he steps square on the loud fourth stair and lets it creak through the house, and neither of us minds at all.