Chapter 6 #2
I want to record that I went slowly. I went as slowly as I have ever gone at anything in my life.
The dress fell off her shoulders in stages — first the collarbone, then the small constellation of freckles, then the slope of her chest, then the simple white slip she wore underneath — and at each stage I stopped and looked at her in the amber work-lamp light, and at each stage she did not look away.
She let me look. She held still, with a kind of trembling courage I had not earned and would spend the rest of my life trying to, and when the dress was at her waist she lifted my hand and put it where she wanted it, and I cupped her breast through the thin white cotton of the slip and felt the small hardening of her under my palm, and she made a sound I had never heard a woman make before, and I knew, with the small clean certainty of a man whose ears were finally tuned, that the sound was for me alone.
I kissed her there.
I kissed her through the slip first, the soft cotton damp under my mouth, and then I slid the strap of the slip down her shoulder and kissed her bare, and her hands went into my hair, and she gasped once — a small sharp involuntary sound — and her thighs tightened against my hips, and I felt her pulse against my lips and against my chest and against the line of my body where she'd pulled me close.
I lifted the slip over her head. The dress went with it.
She sat on the counter in nothing but the small white cotton of her underwear, and I stepped back for a single breath to see her, all of her, in the amber light — the long line of her ribs, the small slope of her belly, the high color in her cheeks, the dark fall of her hair across one shoulder — and she did not cover herself.
She looked at me with the small steady look she had used on the doorstep in the rain, and she said my name once, and the saying of my name in that voice in that room in that hour was a thing I will hear in my head until I am dead.
I went to my knees in front of her.
I did it without planning to. I did it because there was no other appropriate place for a man to be in that moment than at the feet of a woman who had walked into his shop with her bare feet on the concrete and said I want all of it.
I put my hands on her thighs. I parted her knees.
I kissed the soft skin above one knee, and then above the other, and I worked my way up slowly, with the same patient attention I gave a wet edge of paint, until her hand had threaded into my hair and her breath had become short and unsteady and her hips had begun to do a small involuntary thing that told me I was close to the place she had been waiting twenty-five years to be touched.
I slid the cotton down her legs.
She lifted her hips for me without being asked.
She wasn't shy about it. That was the part I had not expected — that the woman who had been raised inside a fence had, on the other side of the fence, no shyness at all.
She let me see her. She let me look. And when I put my mouth on her, when I parted her with my tongue and tasted her for the first time, she made a sound that started low and rose into something that wasn't language, and her hands went tight in my hair, and I felt the small involuntary lift of her hips against my mouth and the soft urgent press of her against me and I thought, with the small fierce clarity of a man who has finally been given the thing he was supposed to be doing all along, This. This is what hands are for.
I worked her there until she was trembling.
I learned what she liked the way I learned a new surface — by touch, by patience, by paying attention.
I learned that she liked it slow. I learned that she liked the flat of my tongue better than the point.
I learned that when I slid one finger into her, slowly, while my mouth kept its rhythm, she made a small high sound and her thighs came up against my temples and her hand at the back of my head said yes, that, don't stop, and so I did not stop.
I held her open with my other hand and I worked her with my mouth and my fingers and the patient deliberate skill I had spent ten years putting into paint and only now, on my knees on the concrete floor of my own shop, understood I had been refining for this.
She came against my mouth.
She came with a long broken cry that she did not try to muffle, and her thighs shook, and her hand pulled my hair hard enough that I felt it the next morning, and when the wave had passed she sagged forward against me and I caught her with both hands and pressed my face against the soft skin of her belly while she breathed.
She said, Oh.
She said it twice. The second time was almost a laugh.
I stood up. I lifted her off the counter. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck, and I carried her into the back room.
I carried her past the candle on the small table by the cot, and I set her down on the white cotton sheets, and the sheets smelled like cedar from the drawer they had been folded in and the candle smelled like linseed oil because it was the kind I burned in my shop, and the small warm room smelled like a place where two people were about to make something that would last.
She undid my belt while I was bent over her.
Her hands were not steady. I helped her.
I shed the rest of what I was wearing and stood for a half-breath in the candlelight at the foot of the cot, and she looked at me — all of me — with the small open want I had been hoping for since she'd said I want all of it at the workbench, and the look was the second thing she had ever done that night that I will remember on my deathbed.
I came down to her on the cot.
The cot was narrow. We didn't mind. I covered her with my body and felt the long warm line of her under me, and her thighs opened around my hips, and the candlelight did its slow work on her shoulder and her hair and the small flushed skin at the base of her throat.
I kissed her there. I kissed her mouth. I kissed her until she was breathing hard again and her hands had come up against the back of my neck and her hips had started to rock against mine in a small instinctive plea that was the only language we needed in that hour.
I said, against her mouth, Tell me.
She said, Please.
I slid into her.
I went slow. I went slow because she had not done this often, and I had figured out, on the third Tuesday of August, that she was a careful learner, and I wanted her to have the time to learn what we were and not what she had been afraid we would be.
I went slow until I was as deep as I could go, and she made a small sound under me — not pain, the small sound a person makes when a thing they have been waiting for has, at last, arrived — and her hand at my back tightened, and she said, Move.
I moved.
I moved slowly at first. I held myself up on my forearms above her, and I watched her face, and I learned, the way I learned everything, by paying attention.
I learned that when I went slow she breathed slow.
I learned that when I bent my head and kissed her throat and held myself still inside her she made a soft pleading sound that nearly undid me.
I learned that when I sped up she gasped, and when I rolled my hips she gasped harder, and when I lowered my chest against hers and took her weight against the cot and started to move in her in earnest she said my name three times in a row in a voice I had never been called by before.
Her legs came around my waist. Her hand went into my hair.
Her other hand went flat against my lower back, pulling me deeper.
I shifted, and she shifted with me, and the cot was old and we did not care, and the candle on the table did its small bright work, and the shop around us was full of finished bikes that I had spent the year painting, and I had a thought, somewhere in the middle of the long hour, that the bikes were watching, in the small way work watches you when you have given it your hands for long enough, and that the bikes approved.
She came a second time under me. I felt her tighten and release around me, and her teeth set against the muscle of my shoulder, and the small sharp pleasure of that was what finished me.
I followed her over with my face against her hair, and I said something into her shoulder that I do not remember, and she pulled me down hard against her and held me through it, and for a long minute afterwards neither of us moved.
The candle was burning low. The shop was quiet. Her heartbeat against my chest had begun to slow.
I lifted my head. I looked at her.
She was smiling. The small slow smile of a woman who has, finally, been let into the room she had been writing about her whole life.
She said, That.
I said, Yeah.
She said, That was what I was missing.
I laughed. The laugh was a small undone thing, the laugh of a man who had been trying for a decade to think of himself as untouchable and had been disabused of the notion by a woman with paint on her palm.
I rolled off her. I pulled her against my chest. I traced the line of her spine with my fingers — slowly, the way I would have traced a fresh line of paint — and she made a small contented sound and shifted against me, and her cheek came to rest in the place where my shoulder met my collarbone, and her hand came to lie flat on my sternum.
Her finger started to move.
I realized, after a minute, that the patterns were letters.
I said, What are you writing.
She said, A poem.
I said, About what.
She lifted her head. She propped her chin on the back of her hand. She looked at me in the candlelight with the small slow private smile of a woman who had just learned a secret she had no intention of telling.
She said, About a man who paints phoenixes.
She said, And doesn't realize he is one.
I was quiet for a long time.
I kissed the top of her head. I held her against me.
I looked up at the corrugated steel ceiling of the back room of my shop, the ceiling I had been looking up at, alone, for seven years, and I felt — for the first time in a long time — like a man who had come home to a house he had built without knowing he was building it.
I said, Write it down.
She said, I will.
I said, I want to read it every day.
She smiled against my chest. The candle did its slow work. The shop was dark and warm and smelled like paint and possibility, and neither of us moved until the moonlight shifted through the high windows like a benediction we had not asked for but had been given anyway.
We did not sleep for a long time.
I will say one more thing and then I will stop.
Around three in the morning, when the candle had burned out and the only light in the back room was the soft yellow spill from the work-lamps in the bay, she woke me with her mouth at my throat.
She did not say anything. She climbed on top of me in the dark, and she put my hands on her hips, and she set her own pace this time — slow, then less slow, then with a small fierce determination that was a new sound in her body and a new sound in mine — and I watched her in the dim amber light, her hair loose around her shoulders, her hands flat against my chest, her head tipped back and the small slope of her throat catching the light, and I thought, with the small clear last waking thought of a man whose life had finally arrived where it had been trying to go, I am not the painter anymore. She is.
She finished us both that time. She came down against me at the end with her face in the crook of my neck and her breath hot against my skin, and I held her there for a long time, and the shop held us, and the night held us, and somewhere outside on the gravel road a single car went by and was gone, and the silence after the car was the cleanest silence I had ever heard in my life.
She slept against me until dawn.
I did not sleep. I lay there and watched the high windows turn from black to gray to the soft first blue of morning, and I watched her sleep with her hand still flat on my chest where she had been writing the poem, and I made, somewhere around five-thirty, the only vow I have ever made in my life.
I made it silently. I made it without telling her.
I made it with my hand in her hair and the morning light coming through the windows of the shop I had built alone and would now, for as long as she let me, share.
The vow was simple. I will not write it down here.
She would learn it later, in the small ways a woman learns the vows a man makes without telling her — in the dinners, in the rides, in the four months of cot-and-candle nights still ahead of us.
She would learn it the way she had learned everything else about me.
She would learn it the way I had learned her — slowly, with attention, by paying the patient deliberate price of staying long enough to be known.
The candle was out. The shop was warm. She slept.
I held her until the sun came up.