CHAPTER 17 #2
Every inch, and then he held, buried. He did not move. He put his forehead between my shoulder blades. His breath on my back.
“Am I hurting you,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Move.”
He moved.
Slow at first, then reading me: the shift of my weight, the sound I made when he angled a fraction differently, the way my hips sought him without permission. He adjusted. He was careful and deep and watching me. He never went faster than I wanted, and it turned out what I wanted was.
I pushed back against him.
Once. Hard. Meeting him.
He made a low sound in his chest new to me.
He said, once, low, into the back of my neck: “There you are.”
The words went through me like a hand set at the base of my skull. They went everywhere in me. My arms locked straighter on the mattress. He did it again, one thrust to my one, and my forehead dropped to the quilt.
A beat later, buried deep, one hand splayed across my belly holding me back against him, he said one word for himself.
“Mine.”
He stated it once into the room, without asking or offering.
The third orgasm went off of me from a place I had not known I had.
I did not warn him. I clamped around him with no vocabulary in my mouth, and he followed me a heartbeat later, and he did not withdraw.
He lowered me to my side on the mattress with him still inside me, curled around my back, splayed that hand across my belly again, and breathed into my hair until we were one breath.
The rain deepened.
Sleep never came. I lay in the middle of the bed damp between my legs and along my back where his chest was, listening to the drum become a wave and the wave become a drum again as the front cell moved.
His hand was flat on my belly. His breath was slower than mine but slowing to meet mine.
He kissed my shoulder. Not once. Three times, spaced. He was not asking for anything.
I turned to him.
The second time differed from the first the way a good letter changes on rereading.
I knew the sentence now, so I read it slowly.
I rolled him onto his back, put a knee on either side of his hips, sat above him, and took him inside me from that height.
His hands came to my hips, thumbs resting at the crest of bone. He watched my face.
I rode him slow.
The rain, my slow rise and slow settle, the pulse in the vein at the side of his throat, all kept the same time.
I leaned forward and I kissed the thin white line across his jaw.
I had wanted to for six weeks. He let me.
I leaned over his shoulder and I looked at the back of him from this position for the first time, and there, on the right shoulder blade, the starburst puckered scar I had seen from a distance in the mornings.
I kissed that too. He turned his face into my throat.
I said his name once.
“Luke.”
Just that.
His breath broke.
“Yours,” he said. One word, low, given up into the space between our two mouths.
He was close. I was close. The place I needed was exactly against his hip bone as I rocked, and I did not have to move his hand or my own; I just had to keep the rhythm. The rain and I kept the rhythm.
Just as he came, the moment his back arched under me and his hands tightened on my hips, he said, into the space between our two mouths, three words that had not been in the room a second before.
“I love you.”
I kissed the word out of the air.
I came on top of him a heartbeat later, my forehead against his, his hands still on my hips, his mouth still half open around what he had said.
The words stopped behind my teeth.
The answer could wait.
I lowered myself to his chest. His heart was under my ear. It was faster than the rain, and slowing.
He stood me up at five thirty-five and steadied me at the elbow and walked behind me with his palm at the small of my back like an easement he had never asked me to grant, and when I caught my hip on the door frame he lifted me the last two steps into the bathroom and set me down on the mat.
(One planning slip. My allowance for the night, and I had taken it.)
He ran the water hot in the clawfoot tub. He got in first. He put his hand out to me.
I took it.
I got in between his knees with my back against his chest, and he pulled me back against him and reached for the enamel pitcher on the corner and started to wash my hair with the same care he had undressed me with.
His hands were big and slow. His fingers worked at my scalp behind my ears the way a person works at bread dough, patient, no wasted motion, and I closed my eyes and I counted the pressed-tin tiles on the bathroom ceiling because if I did not count something I would start to cry, and I did not want to cry in this bath.
Sixty-four in the visible pattern.
Four more hidden by the door frame.
Sixty-eight total. I knew this because I had counted them at 3 a.m. on Day Nine when I could not sleep and pretended I was thinking about setback codes.
His hand came flat against my sternum under the water. Not pushing. Placed.
“There was a day,” he said quietly against the wet of my hair. “There was a day my mother did not wear her crucifix. She had worn it every day of my life. I was in another country. I did not know she had taken it off. By the time I got back, she was — ”
He stopped.
I took his hand out of the water and held it against my own sternum where his palm had been, my fingers over his knuckles, the signet cool against my breastbone.
I let the unfinished sentence rest.
“I do not know where the crucifix is now,” he said, which was not the truth and which I would find out later was not the truth, but he needed to give me something at 5:45 a.m. under six years of running and this was what he had to give.
“It's okay,” I said.
I held his hand there against my sternum and I counted from sixty-four down. Sixty-three. Sixty-two. Sixty-one. The rain had slowed to a hush over our heads. My back was warm against his chest. His breath was on top of my ear.
Those three words remained mine for now.
I did put his palm flat over my heart in the hot water and I kept it there.
He knew what that was.
We came back to the bed wrapped in one towel between us at six thirty.
Sixty-two degrees on the glass thermometer at the window, the first sub-eighty morning of the summer.
The tin above us had slowed to a soft sizzle, a hush.
Somewhere out past the barn a robin had started its rain-morning cadence.
He pulled the gray wool blanket up to my collarbone and the Marta-hexagon quilt over it, and I fit into his side the way a memo fits into a filed folder, and I put one hand flat on his chest at his ribs, and the signet ring on his pinky was cool against my hip.
I said the thing I could say.
“You said the thing,” I said.
“I did,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
Because good was not I love you back. But good was do not take it back. And good was say it again when I can hold it in my two hands.
He did not take it back.
He listened to my breath. His breath went with mine within a slow minute. Real sleep, not the wrong even of four couch nights but the deep uninterrupted breath of two people who had unloaded a thing they had been carrying separately in the dark, came for both of us at the same time.
The last thing I felt was the first cool morning of the summer on my damp shoulder, Luke's breath going with mine, the rain reduced to a hush over our heads and his “I love you” still on my mouth like a taste I was refusing to swallow.