Chapter 16 #2
"You've got to be careful what you ask for. I'm liable to get addicted to a thing real quick, given the right reason."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a public service announcement."
She laughed. It was the morning version of the laugh, lower and rougher, a laugh that hadn't quite woken up all the way.
We ate in bed.
I had not eaten in bed with a woman in—I genuinely could not remember.
I'd had women bring me food in beds that weren't mine, and I'd brought food to women in beds that weren't theirs, but I had not sat against someone's pillows in someone's actual apartment and that someone's actual buttered toast on her actual plate, with my legs stretched out under her actual blanket, drinking coffee she'd actually made from her actual coffee maker.
I hadn't done this. I hadn't known you could do this.
The men I worked with didn't do this. The men I'd grown up with might have done this, if their wives had let them, and I'd come up out of a generation of brothers who'd pictured this and never said it out loud.
The toast was good.
The jelly was raspberry, which her mama had made and sent down in mason jars.
She told me that without making a thing of it, the way she told me everything, and I tasted it and tasted it again and decided that my mama was going to want this woman's mama's recipe, which was a thought I noted and put in a folder for later, alongside the I would have to take her there.
I wondered, with a clarity that felt new in my body, Is this what happiness looks like?
I thought, Maybe. I would not know.
She finished her coffee before I finished mine and glanced at the bathroom door.
She didn't say anything.
She just glanced.
I was so far gone for her by then that the glance hit me like a hand on my chest.
"Go on," I said.
She slid off the bed and held out her hand for me.
I took it.
The bathroom was small the way old Charleston bathrooms were small—black-and-white tile so old it had its own character, a clawfoot tub with a curtain rod that ran full circle, a cast-iron sink that had probably been installed when her grandmother was a girl.
She turned the water on. The pipes coughed once and then ran clean.
She pulled my t-shirt off over her head.
She stepped out of her panties.
She climbed into the tub and held the curtain back for me, and I followed her in, and the water came down hot and the small space filled with steam.
She got the soap.
Then she did a thing I was not prepared for.
She started to clean me.
Slowly. Carefully. With both hands and the kind of attention that did not match anything I'd been given by another human being since maybe my mother on the back porch with a washcloth after I'd come in from the pasture covered in something I couldn't be allowed to bring into the house.
Her hands moved over my shoulders. Down my chest. Slow circles over the parts of me that had been used hard. The flat of her palm on my sternum where her ear had slept all night. Her fingertips at the base of my throat. Her thumb tracing the seam of an old scar without asking me about it.
Every place she touched, I got a kick of current up under the skin.
I'd been fucked in showers. Plenty.
I had not been bathed.
I stood there with my eyes closed and let her have me.
She washed my arms. The insides of my elbows. The rough place on my left palm that had a callus. She turned each of my hands over in hers and washed them like they were something that had come in dirty from work and needed to be made clean again.
She washed my stomach. My hips. The line of my back, slow, fingers spread, pressing in just enough to remind me I had a body.
She knelt down in the tub.
She washed my legs, one and then the other. Calves. Knees. Thighs. She did this without looking up at me, which was a kindness I felt in my throat.
She stood back up. Rinsed her hands. Rinsed me.
She looked at me.
"There," she said.
I had to take a breath before I could speak.
"My turn."
I took the soap from her.
I'd had her, by then, in the dark, numerous times. I had not had her in the light.
She was small in a way I hadn't fully clocked—the curves of her were the careful, sturdy curves of a woman built to last, not the showy ones of a woman built to be looked at, and what struck me as I started to wash her was that I'd already been in love with the built to last of her without knowing what I was looking at.
Strong shoulders from years of carrying trays.
A long line of back that came down into a waist a man's hands could span.
Hips that flared just enough to remind you what hips were for, on her body, which was for hauling babies and groceries and her own life, in that order or any other.
I started at her shoulders.
I worked the soap into a slow lather under my palms and ran them down the line of her arms, slow, careful, the way I'd watched her be careful with me. I thumbed over her collarbones. The sweet hollow at the base of her throat. The fine bones at her wrists.
I washed her chest. Her breasts. Without rushing. Without making it the point. I wanted her to feel cared for, not seduced, and the difference between those two intentions was entirely in the speed of a man's hands.
Her breath had gone uneven.
I took my time, anyway.
Her belly was soft and her skin was warm and slick under the water and a small mole sat just to the right of her navel, an asymmetry I was going to think about for a long time.
I knelt down in the tub the way she had.
I washed her hips. The flare of them. The dimples at the small of her back when I turned her gently to do the line of her spine.
I washed her thighs—the inside of them, slow, which was not the point and was somehow exactly the point.
I washed her calves and her ankles.
I picked up one foot and washed it, and then the other, and she made a small sound when I did that I was going to put away and play back to myself for a long time.
I stood back up.
I rinsed the soap from her with my hands. The water came down warm between us. Her hair was wet and dark down her back. Her lashes were spiked together. Her skin was pink everywhere it had been touched.
She lifted her face up to mine.
She looked at me with her eyes wet and her mouth a little open and the most uncomplicated honesty I'd ever seen in a face.
She didn't say anything.
She reached down and took my cock in her hand.
"Now," she said.
It was the only word I needed.
I lifted her like I'd lifted her last night, easy, one hand under her thighs and the other flat on her back. Her legs came around my waist. She slid down onto me, slick and warm and ready, and we both went still.
I leaned my forehead against hers. The water ran down the both of us.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Hi."
"Hi."
I pressed up into her, slow. She made a sound that wasn't a moan and wasn't a gasp and was somewhere in between, a small private yes.
I felt it then—the thing I'd been holding off all night without naming.
It dropped through me clean.
I was falling for her.
Not a little. Not in the manageable way a man my age was supposed to fall for women who were too young and too kind and too poor and too hopeful.
Falling the whole way. With my eyes open.
In a bathtub in Charleston in the gray morning light, with raspberry jelly still on my tongue, and a federal investigation aimed at my family two miles away, and my mother forgetting another word in a care home outside Marfa, and the rest of my life suddenly arranging itself around the body of a girl whose ninety-four dollars I was going to figure out without her ever knowing it.
She moved on me, slow.
I let her.
Outside the curtain, somewhere past the window, Charleston was continuing its slow, dreaming process of becoming morning.
Inside the curtain, I held the woman I had no business loving, and loved her, anyway.