8. The Twenty-First of March
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF MARCH
He came in at ten past eleven with his coat still zipped and he stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the notebook on the table under the overhead light, and I watched a person understand something in real time.
He didn't run. That's the first thing. Seven months of leaving rooms and he stood in the door and took his hands out of his pockets and said, "Okay."
I said, "Sit down."
He sat down across from me. He put his keys on the table. His face had gone the color of the wall behind him.
He said, "You went in my desk."
"I did."
"That's mine."
"It's mostly me, Aaron."
And he opened his mouth and shut it again, because that was true and he was a precise person.
Then he said, "You need to know I never did anything. I never touched you, I never came into a room to look at you, I never" and he stopped, and started again, "everything in there is a thing I did to keep out of your way."
I said, "I know. I read it. That's the only reason we're having this conversation at a table instead of me packing."
He put both hands flat on the wood. He said, "Then I'd like it back and I'd like to move out at the end of the lease and not talk about it again."
"No," I said.
I turned the notebook around and pushed it across to him so it was facing him, and I put my finger on the entry from the previous Sunday.
I said, "Read that one."
He didn't look down at it. He said, "I know what it says."
"Say it out loud."
"Angie."
"Aaron. I've been asking three men for one specific thing since September and I've been laughed at, and voted down, and lifted off a bed, and I have got so used to not being taken seriously in my own house that I genuinely thought I was the only person in it who was ever going to say what they wanted.
And now I find out you've been sitting up in that oven of a bedroom for seven months, doing math, about me, in a spiral notebook.
So no. You don't get to be the last one who won't say it. Read it out loud."
And he looked at the page and he read, in a level voice, "Peak window, March twenty-first to March twenty-fourth."
"And what's today?"
A pause you could have parked a car in.
"The twenty-first."
I stood up. I want to be exact about what I said next, because I'd had four hours to build it and because it's the only genuinely decent thing I did that entire year.
I said, "Here's where we are. I know what you want, because you wrote it down.
I want it too, and I've wanted it since about January, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to be polite.
But you're the only one in this house who never signed up for anything, and you've spent seven months making sure you didn't. So this is the one time in my life I'm going to ask instead of joke.
"You can take that notebook, and go upstairs, and I'll never say a word about it to Todd or Scott or anybody, and in May you'll graduate and this will be a thing that didn't happen. That's a real option and I'll hold to it and I won't think less of you and I won't bring it up again in June.
"Or you can put it down."
And I stood there in the kitchen at one-fourteen Tallow Street with my heart going and did not say anything else, which was the hardest part.
Aaron Petry looked at the notebook for about four seconds.
Then he closed it, and set it on the table, and stood up so fast the chair went over backward, exactly like the chair in December, and he came around the table and got a fist in my hair at the back of my head and kissed me so hard I went back into the edge of the counter.
Seven months. You could taste seven months in it. There was nothing careful about that man anywhere.
He said against my mouth, "Upstairs."
"No," I said, "here," because I am who I am.
He said, "Upstairs, because it's going to take all night and I'm not doing it on a floor."
Reader, I went upstairs.
His room was eighty degrees and the lamp was on and he shut the door behind us and then just stood there for a second with his back against it, breathing, and I understood that he was having a hard time believing the room he was in.
I pulled the shirt off over my head. The dealership shirt, the same gray one, six months into being a uniform.
He got his coat off and his sweater and then he had to sit down on the bed to get his shoes, and he laughed, one syllable, at himself, and it was the first sound of pleasure I'd ever heard out of him.
Then he stood up and put a hand between my shoulder blades and put me face-down over the desk.
The desk. Not the bed. He cleared it with one forearm, the mug of pens and the index cards going over the far side onto the floor, and bent me over it with my cheek on the wood and the lamp about eight inches from my face, and I got my forearms up under my head and my feet apart on the floorboards and I heard his belt come out of the loops in one pull.
He got two fingers into me from behind and made a sound at what he got.
I was drenched. I'd been drenched since the second-to-last entry.
He worked them in me twice and said, in the flat voice, "Okay," and then his hand was gone and the head of his cock was against me instead and there was no foil, no coffee can, no little tearing noise, nothing at all between the two of us, and he pushed the whole thing into me in one go.
I got a noise out that I'm not proud of.
He was thicker than I'd let myself expect from a man that size and he went in deep enough that the first stroke put my hipbones hard into the edge of the desk, and every stroke after that did it again, and there was going to be a bruise across both of them for a week and I did not care even slightly.
And then, about ninety seconds in, Aaron Petry made a sound like he'd been shot and came.
Ninety seconds. Maybe less.
I felt every part of it. That's the thing about not having a layer of plastic in the way, and I hadn't known, I'd had five months of a man's orgasm arriving as a rumor through rubber.
This was not a rumor. His cock went rigid and swelled thick inside me and then the first jet of it hit the inside of me high up, and I felt the wet of it spread, actually spread, warm and fast and further in than anything had been in my life, and then the second one and the third, and his fingers went white on my hips and he was making a low sound with his teeth shut.
Seven months of a man who had walked to Zeb's and not wanted a sub, going off inside me over a desk in ninety seconds.
He kept pumping it into me long after there was any dignity in it, small helpless shoves, and when he finally stopped he stayed in and put his forehead down on my back and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that was, I couldn't."
And I lay there with my cheek on the desk and my eyes shut and the lamp on my face, full, and said, "Don't you dare apologize."
He pulled out. I felt it start to come out of me immediately and run down the inside of my thigh, hot, thick, more of it than I'd have guessed, and I got a hand down between my legs to feel it and my fingers came away strung.
I looked at my own hand in the lamplight.
Seven months, three men, one house, twenty-two ledger entries, one rule in block capitals on the fridge.
There it was on my fingers.
He said, from somewhere behind me, "Don't stand up."
I said, "What?"
And Aaron went and got the pillow off his made bed and said, "Get on the bed and put this under your hips and don't stand up for twenty minutes."
I turned around and looked at him. He was bare, and flushed to the collarbones, and still mostly hard, and he was holding a pillow and giving me instructions in the flat declarative voice with all the hedges gone.
I said, "Aaron. Is this the part you've been thinking about since September?"
And he said, "Yes."
I got on the bed. He put the pillow under my hips. He put two fingers into me, not to fuck me, just in, and pushed what was running out back up, matter-of-fact, the way you'd tuck in a sheet, and I made a noise into the mattress.
He said, "It's the twenty-first. It's the first day of the window. That's the best one."
And then he went over to the desk, bare-assed, with me lying on his bed with a pillow under my hips and his come inside me, and he picked up the notebook off the floor and uncapped a pen and wrote in it.
Standing up. Naked. Writing the entry.
I have never in my life been as turned on as I was watching a man make a note.
That was the tomorrow. That's the picture I still have. Not the fucking. The stationery.
He came back to the bed and got on it and he was hard again, properly, and I said, "Again?"
He said, "I told you. All night."
He fucked me three more times before it got light and every one of them was different.
The second one was face to face and slow and it took nearly an hour, and it was the only one where he looked at me the whole way, and he talked.
God, he talked. All the hedges off. He told me what he'd been doing on the twelfth of February, which was sitting in the science library with a textbook he wasn't reading, working out how many days were left in the window and whether he could make it to Friday.
He told me he'd written the rule out four times before the meeting to get the wording right.
He told me the exact date in September, the twenty-ninth, when he'd started, and what I'd been doing, which was reaching into the low cabinet, and I laughed with him inside me and he told me not to laugh because it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
I came twice in that hour and he came in me at the end of it with my ankles crossed behind his back, and this time nobody lifted me off.
The third one was at about three in the morning and I was half asleep and he took me from behind on his side without either of us really waking up, and it was so slow and domestic and easy that I cried a bit, which I've never admitted to anybody.
The fourth one was at first light and it was rough and short and he held my wrists over my head, and afterward he said "sorry" and I said "if you apologize one more time I'm going to sleep in Todd's room," and he laughed properly for the first time since I'd known him.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I said, "How much of this was about the breeding thing and how much was it about me."
And he thought about it, actually thought, for long enough that I knew the answer was going to be true.
He said, "I don't think you can separate them. It's not that I want to get somebody pregnant. It's that I've wanted to get you pregnant since September and I've had to live in a house with you."
Which is the most romantic sentence any man has ever said to me and I'm aware of what that says about me.
At six in the morning we were lying in the wreck of that made bed with the index cards all over the floor, and I was sore in about nine places, and there was a wet patch under both of us I had no intention of doing anything about.
He was on his back looking at the ceiling.
He said, "The window's open until the twenty-fourth."
I said, "I'm aware. I read the book."
He said, "So what are you doing on Saturday."
And I lay there in a hot little room over the kitchen and thought about the four hours I'd sat downstairs at that table with a notebook and no idea whether he'd take it and go upstairs.
I said, "Nothing. I'm not doing anything on Saturday."