Chapter Nineteen
JUNIE
Exiling Hazel took a negotiation that would have impressed the league office.
I’d like to say I was subtle. I was not subtle.
I came home Tuesday after the Merrit interview had spent forty-eight hours rearranging the internet, and I stood in our kitchen and said, “Hypothetically, if a person wanted the apartment to herself on Friday night,” and Hazel, who was elbow-deep in a pharmacology flashcard deck, said, without looking up, “Fifty dollars, the good taco run Saturday morning, and you do my laundry through finals,” and I said, “That’s extortion,” and she said, “That’s market rate.
I’ve seen the man, Junie. I’d charge double if I didn’t like you. ”
We settled at forty, tacos, and one load of whites, and she booked herself a study sleepover at her friend Priya’s, and on her way out Friday evening, overnight bag on her shoulder, she paused at the door and looked back at me, and I braced for a joke, and instead she said, “Hey. No cameras this time, right? No documents, no clauses, no sunset anything?” and I said, “None,” and she nodded like a clinician signing off on a chart and said, “Good. Then don’t perform,” and left before I could do my face.
So. The record of Friday night, kept by me, because he keeps his ledger behind his sternum and somebody in this operation writes things down.
He arrived at seven with a bag from Bandido’s, the 9.
5, because the man does not arrive anywhere empty-handed, it’s against his religion, and a paperback in his jacket pocket about a ferry disaster in 1904, “for later, in case you fall asleep first,” which is the most confident thing a man has ever said to me.
He’d never been in the apartment. I watched him take it in the way he takes in a new rink: exits, sight lines, the fruit bowl, Hazel’s anatomy posters, Solange folded in her case in the corner like a retired athlete, the couch, me.
He looked at me last and longest, and I felt it land the way his looks land, low and slow, like weather coming.
“No cameras,” he said.
“Not one. Solange is unplugged. My phone’s in the kitchen drawer.
Hazel is at Priya’s until eleven a.m. and has been compensated at market rate for her silence.
” I spread my hands. “There is no content here, Lindell. There’s no angle, no caption, no engagement.
Nobody will ever know this evening happened.
It’s the least productive night of my professional life. ”
“Good,” he said, and set the tacos down, and crossed my little living room in three steps, and kissed me.
We didn’t get to the tacos for a while, and I want to say for the record that this constituted, between the two of us, a major religious event.
Because here’s the thing about the storm hotel, about 617, which I’ve had weeks to review: it was wonderful and it was clocked.
There was a document over the door the whole time, twelve hours, sunset at noon, and even with the rollover clause struck, some part of both of us had been playing against a timer.
This was the other thing. Friday had no clock in it.
He kissed me like a man with no bus to catch and no clause to honor, unhurried, one hand coming up to my face the way it did on a kiss cam in front of eleven million people, except there was no one, there was NO ONE, and that fact did something to me that eleven million witnesses never had.
“Hi,” I said, when we came up for air.
“Hi.”
“We should eat the tacos while they’re,”
“No,” he said, thoughtfully, and kissed me again, and that was the correct ruling and I withdrew my motion.
We were laughing when we got to my room.
That’s the part I’d never had before, with anyone, and I need it in the file: we were laughing.
He hit his head on my hanging plant and addressed it in Swedish like a fourth official.
I got my elbow stuck in my own sleeve and he watched me fight it with the expression he saves for a shooter who’s dekeing himself into the corner, and said, “Take your time, I have a book,” and I got the sleeve free and shoved him, and he caught my hand and pulled me down onto the bed with him mid-laugh, and then his mouth was on my neck and the laugh changed registers, and then, over the next unhurried while, it stopped entirely.
He undressed me slowly, and he asked, the way he asks, everything spoken, everything answered.
“This?” against my shoulder, and my yes.
My shirt, gone, and his hands taking their time about the fact of me, and “this?” at the clasp, and “yes, and I’d like to note for the record you’re the only man alive who could make a hostage negotiation this good,” and I felt him smile against my sternum, felt it, that’s a thing I get to know now, the shape of his rare smile learned by skin instead of camera.
“You’re keeping records tonight?” he said, working down.
“Somebody has to, you keep yours in your, oh,” because his mouth had reached the low of my stomach, and he glanced up, deadpan, absolutely merciless, and said, “In my what,” and I said, “sternum,” on maybe half my available voice, and he said, “Mm,” and went lower, and hooked his fingers in the last of my clothes and asked one more time, “Yes?”, and I said yes, and then my record-keeping degraded severely and I’ll reconstruct what I can.
He was slow, because slow is his native register there, established precedent, room 617, but 617 had a filibuster in it and Friday did not.
Friday I let him. That’s the true entry: I lay in my own bed in my own unphotographed apartment and let a careful man be careful with me at whatever speed he chose, his mouth patient and exact, both my hands in his hair, no commentary, no bit, no narration for an audience of any size, and when I finished the first time I said his name, the real one, “Lars,” into my own ceiling, which has no deposition to give, and heard him say something in Swedish against my thigh that I logged phonetically for later research and have since declined to research, because some entries you leave in the original.
I pulled him back up the length of me and undressed him with a focus he narrated exactly once (“thorough,”) before I bit his shoulder and he stopped narrating.
And when there was nothing left between us he settled over me and paused, forehead to mine, both of us breathing, his weight braced on his forearms like the most disciplined man in professional sports, and he asked, an inch from my mouth, quiet, “Junie. Yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “No clauses. No clock. Just yes.”
And he came into me slow, and both of us went still, the way we had in the storm, except this time no storm, nothing but the neighbor’s distant bass line and Hazel’s wind chime on the balcony and us, and he stayed still for one long breath with his eyes open on mine, and I understood, with the last fully sentenced part of my mind, that we were both taking a reading.
Confirming it held without the paperwork under it. It held.
Then we moved, and it was unhurried and then it was urgent and then it was both at once, which I didn’t know was on the menu, hips learning a rhythm no committee approved, his mouth at my ear saying my name like a call sign, my heels at the backs of his thighs, one of his hands finding both of mine and pinning them, gently, above my head against the pillow, a question in the pressure, and my “yes” half wrecked, and after that I was loud with no Pickle on the other side of any wall, gloriously, jurisdictionally loud, and he pulled back once to watch my face come apart, watched it like film he’d waited months for, and the second time I went over I took him with me, felt the whole disciplined architecture of him give at once, my name in his mouth breaking in the middle, and he came undone the way he does everything, completely, and quietly, and only for me.
After, we lay tangled in my ordinary sheets in the lamplight, and nobody said “off the books.”
I noticed the not-saying. That’s my profession, noticing what’s absent from a caption.
In the storm hotel there had been a whole legislative session, whereas clauses, sunset provisions, both of us holding the paper between us like a chaperone.
Friday there was nothing. Nobody invoked, nobody amended, nobody so much as gestured at the document sleeping in the cloud, and it took me a while, running my fingers over the old skate-blade scar on his forearm, to name why, and then I had it and lay very still with it:
Nobody says “off the books” when nobody is keeping books anymore.
We ate the tacos at ten, in bed, a crime he permitted after inspecting my sheet-washing protocols like a customs officer.
Bandido’s held its 9.5 even cold, “the tortilla forgives you,” he said, solemn, handing me the last one, and I told him about Waco, more of it than I’d ever handed anyone, my mother’s queso theology, the year Hazel and I shared a bed and a paper route, and he listened the way he listens, with his whole stillness, adding nothing, missing nothing.
And he told me, unprompted, about the week after Olle died, the part that hadn’t made the Merrit interview: that he’d driven to the backyard rink in July, grass growing where the ice went, and stood there for an hour, and that the lawn chair was still out, and that he’d left it, and as far as he knew it was out there still, holding the shape of a man, and I put the taco down and got my arms around as much of him as they’d reach, and neither of us performed one single thing.
We fell asleep somewhere past one, the ferry-disaster book unopened on my nightstand, his loss, my win.
I surfaced once in the small hours, the way you do in a bed that has one more person in it than usual, and found the lamp still on low and him behind me, wrapped around me, most of the way asleep, breathing slow against my hair.
And his hand moved.
Not a caress, though it started as one. His hand came up off my hip and his fingers formed something against the bare curve of my shoulder, deliberate even at the edge of sleep, a shape, held, then a small motion, slow, careful, like a word set down gently so as not to wake it.
Then his hand flattened back over the place like a signature over a seal, and his breathing went all the way under.
He’d signed something. Onto my skin, in the dark, to a woman he believed was asleep, in the language he keeps for the people he’d move to a desert for.
I didn’t know the sign yet. Three lessons a week at a library carrel does not make a reader of shoulders.
I lay in the lamplight with the shape of it fading warm on my skin like a stamp, and I did not wake him to ask, and I did not reach for my phone in the kitchen drawer to look it up, because some entries you leave in the original.
But Monday, at the library, camera off, headphones on, I was going to find that sign if it took the whole lunch hour.