Chapter Seventeen
The first picture is me, and it takes me a second to know it.
Graham has the tablet propped against his knee, turned so I can see it, and there I am.
The old me, from before any of it. Standing in this kitchen in a work shirt with a beer in my hand, caught mid-laugh at something off to the side.
I don't know the night. I don't remember him taking it.
My hair's still damp where he pushed it off my face a few minutes ago.
He milked it out of me first, how it happens now, hands-free, the cage doing nothing while the deep pull came up on its own and spilled quiet into his palm, and then he fed it back to me off his fingers and told me good girl while I took it.
Then he reached for the tablet. So I'm down on the floor by his leg, wrung-out and warm and tasting myself, looking at a man I could still do a pretty good impression of if somebody asked me to.
"Look at that," he says. Low. Pleased. "Day one, near enough."
He swipes.
The next one's me too, a while on. No beer.
Something already gone quiet in the face.
Then another, and I'm in the first camisole, the black one, standing where he put me, my hands not knowing what to do with themselves yet.
He goes slow through them. He isn't hurrying me past anything.
Each one he lets sit a beat, his thumb resting on the glass, and over some of them he says a small thing, not much, like you'd talk over an album with somebody you love.
"You were so nervous there." "That's the week you stopped fighting the plug. " "There's the first good one."
I watch myself change on his knee. It's all there, in order, months of it.
The shirt guy with the beer. Then the shoulders coming down.
The cage printing faint through fabric, then not printing at all once the seamless ones came in.
The camisole going from a thing draped on me to a thing I'm wearing.
Somewhere in the middle my face starts doing what it does now, the settled thing, the looking-out-from-further-back thing that Dev waved his hand at across a bar.
He stops on one I don't know, a night I'm turned half away with something wet on my face catching the lamp.
"You cried after, that one," he says, softer.
"Not a bad cry. You didn't have the words for it yet.
I held you till it passed." I don't remember it and I believe him all the way down.
He's got nights of me I lost. The record holds me better than I hold myself, and when he tells me who I was on a night I can't find, I take it like water.
If he says I cried, I cried. He'd have known it before I did.
I can look at any one of these nights and tell you I wanted it.
That part stays easy. I wanted the plug in and it's in now.
I went down on him in every one of these and I'd go down on him again the second he stood up.
None of that turns over wrong in me. What turns is the tablet itself.
The order of it. That on every one of these nights, while I was down in it thinking it was just us, just the warm private thing between him and me, he was also up above it somewhere with a steady hand, framing it.
Keeping it. Setting it in a row with the others so it would hold.
I wasn't only inside those nights. I was being kept out of them at the same time, one at a time, and set on a shelf.
"There's my girl," he says, at one where I'm kneeling, and the word for the small locked thing in the picture comes up in me before he can put anything on it.
Clitty. It comes easier than the last time I reached for it.
Still leaves a drag going down, a shade of one, but nothing like the snag it used to leave.
I look at the useless pink shell in the photo, tucked and small and not the point of one single thing happening in that frame, and the word fits it like a word fits a thing you've stopped arguing with.
That's just what that is. I don't know when arguing with it turned into work I could set down.
He swipes back to the first one for a second, the shirt, the beer, and I can't get my face to go where that guy's is.
He's laughing at something and he means it, a whole night around him I can't see the edges of, a bar full of it, a Dev off-camera talking him into a profile.
I knew that guy. But he's gone the way a roommate from years back is gone, a face you'd have to stop and work to place.
The one on the floor, damp-haired, plug seated, leaning on Graham's leg to see the screen, that one I don't have to reach for. That one's just where I am.
He lifts the tablet then and turns it, and the screen's not the album anymore.
It's me. Right now, live in the little frame, on the floor by his knee with my hair damp and my mouth still tasting like him.
He doesn't tell me to do anything. He just looks at me over the top of it, easy, patient, and I know what the look is asking and I hold still and let it ask.
The shutter makes its small fake sound. He turns the screen back around to check it, and I lean in without deciding to, and there I am at the end of the row now, tonight's, dropped into place behind all the others.
A few months from now this is the one his thumb will rest on and let sit.
I watch it land in the line and the thought comes up plain and quiet, so that's what tonight was.
Not a night I had. A night he kept. The cold sits longer than it used to.
His hand comes to my neck, warm, where it goes, and I wait for it to pull the cold back under the way it always does, and it does, but slower tonight, and not all the way.
A thin edge of it stays up where I can feel it while I lean into his hand.
"I've got everything," Graham says. He says it soft, like a gift, and turns the tablet dark and sets it face down on the arm of the couch.
His hand comes to the back of my neck, warm, where it goes.
"Every step. So you can look whenever you forget how far you came.
People forget. They get somewhere good and they can't remember the climb, and they start telling themselves it was always easy.
" His thumb moves once. "It wasn't easy.
You did all of it. I just made sure none of it got lost."
It lands like being held, like the kindest account anyone ever kept of me, a whole record of my own life that somebody decided was worth keeping when I never did.
I lean my head back into his hand and I let it.
And way down under the warm there's a small cold thing I don't pick up, a thing about being a row of pictures on a man's tablet, in order, complete, that I set down without looking at because his hand is on my neck and the lamps are low and I know how to not pick things up now. I'm good at it. It's most of what I do.
* * *
Dev texts me on Sunday.
Not about anything. A picture of a squat rack with a paper towel taped to it, OUT OF ORDER in marker, and under it, this place is falling apart without you here to complain about it. Then a minute later the real one. serious tho. lunch this week. you pick the spot.
I look at it a long time. I can see the whole lunch.
The place I'd pick, the booth in the back, Dev already three sentences into some app girl before I've sat down, phone out, showing me her pictures, running the play he's run since we were twenty-three.
Rate her. Fix the profile. Better photos, one with a dog I don't own.
Somewhere in the second half he'd work around to the real thing like he does, the question wrapped in six smaller ones, you good, real question, watching my face while I answered.
That booth used to be the warmest room I had.
Now I read the text and it's a postcard from a country I used to live in.
I know the streets. I couldn't tell you how to get back.
Dev still thinks I'm a settings problem, a guy one good profile away from fixed, and he's not wrong about the guy he's picturing, he just doesn't know that guy moved out.
The whole lunch runs on him, the shirt guy, the one who could sit across from Dev and want what Dev wants and mean it clean through.
When I go looking for how to be him for an hour it's like reaching for a tool that isn't on the wall anymore.
There's the clean spot where it hung. I'd have to build him from nothing and hold him together the whole time, and he wouldn't make it to the coffee.
I don't answer it. I set the phone face down on the counter, like Graham sets his down, and go back to what I was doing.
Sunday used to be Claire's meme and Dev's plans and a whole day of people leaning on it.
Now it's quiet and mine and the quiet doesn't ask me for a thing.
Dev's across town taping a sign to a squat rack, waiting on a lunch I'm not going to pick, and I'm here, and the thing I couldn't tell him or Claire or anybody is that I'm not sorry about the trade.
The record's on the tablet on the arm of the couch.
I keep not thinking about it all day, which turns out to be its own way of thinking about it.
* * *
It's past two when I get up.
Graham's asleep, flat out, the deep even breathing that never changes.
I lie next to him a while listening to it and not sleeping, and the thing I'm not thinking about gets louder like things do at two in the morning, and then I'm up, quiet, out to the front room where the tablet is face down on the arm of the couch exactly where he left it.