Everything Except #2
She lay against him and did an inventory she had been avoiding, which was of the things she would not have after tomorrow.
The grinder at four minutes past nine. Two plates out of the cupboard without being asked. A man taking a bag off her shoulder on Ninth Avenue without narrating it. The quiet of this apartment, which she had spent a year learning to hear.
She stopped, because the list was going to go on for a long time and because she recognized what she was doing. She was pricing it. She was doing the one thing she had promised herself all day she would not do tonight, in his bed, with his arm across her, twenty-seven hours out.
She made herself stop and lie there and simply have it instead, which was harder than any of it.
“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Not the thing. One thing.”
“Anything.”
“Why Sunday?”
“Because you fell asleep at four in the afternoon on my sofa with your shoes on,” he said, “and you don’t do that.
You have never once done that. So I sat there and looked at you for about an hour and worked out that whatever it was had got heavy enough to take your legs out at four in the afternoon, and I thought: right. Do the work now. Have it ready.”
Jo lay against him.
“You’ve had it ready for five days.”
“Six. It’s Thursday.” A small movement that might have been a shrug. “I wasn’t going to tell you I had it ready. That felt like pressure. Then tonight happened and I decided you should know it exists.”
“When you say you’ve decided how you’re going to be about it. What did you decide.”
He thought about it. She felt him think about it, the whole length of him against her.
“That I’d rather have it than not have it,” he said.
“Whatever it is. That’s not noble, it’s arithmetic — I’ve done twelve days of not knowing where you were and I’ve done three weeks of you being right here and somewhere else, and the first one was worse.
I want the information. Even the bad information.
I’d rather stand in the room with the bad information than keep standing in this one. ”
Jo did not say anything for a while.
Then she got up on one elbow and looked down at him in the dark and said, “Turn the lamp on.”
“Why.”
“Because I want to see you and I want you to see me and I don’t want to do the rest of this in the dark.”
He turned the lamp on.
She got on top of him and took him inside her and did not move for a moment, just sat there with him in her and her hands flat on his chest and the lamp throwing everything into ordinary yellow light.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Jo.”
“It’s not that.” Which was true and was the most dishonest sentence of the entire three weeks. “Don’t stop. Don’t say anything else.”
She moved. He got his hands on her hips and let her set it, and for a while it was slow and total and she watched his face the entire time, and he watched hers, and neither of them looked away once.
It went on longer than either of them expected it to.
There was no urgency in it and neither of them put any in.
She kept her palms where they were and could feel the slow work of his ribs under them, and she found that if she kept her palms exactly where they were she could hold both things at once — what was happening to her and what she was doing to him — without either one getting away from her.
He was not quiet. He said her name at intervals, low, the way you repeat a word to be sure of it.
She kept her eyes open. She had not, on Friday, or on the Saturday before, or most other times in five months, and tonight she did it on purpose, and made herself look at what she was about to spend.
This was the part she would keep.
Not the first two. Not the noise or the wrists or her hand over her own mouth.
This: a lamp on, a man looking up at her with everything he had in his face, and Jo above him giving him absolutely all of it, every part of herself she had any right to give, every part she had ever been able to give anybody —
— everything except the one thing.
“Slower,” he said, at one point, and she slowed, and he put a hand flat on her stomach and held her there, seated on him, not moving at all.
“Why.”
“Because in about nine seconds this is over and I don’t want it to be.”
So they stayed like that.
It was harder than anything else they had done that night.
Holding still was work — her thighs took it first, then the small of her back, and there was a point about thirty seconds in where her whole body made the case for moving and she overruled it.
He was not helping. He had not moved either, and she could feel exactly what that was costing him, and he was doing it anyway, on nothing but a preference for a minute continuing.
His hand stayed flat on her stomach. Not holding her down. Holding her there, which was a different thing, and which she would have found funny at any other moment of her life.
“You can move,” he said. “I want the record to show I’m not stopping you.”
“I know.”
“I’d just rather you didn’t yet.”
“I know that too.”
His thumb moved once. She could feel her own pulse where they were joined and could not tell whose it was.
The lamp was doing nothing flattering to either of them.
It was the middle of a Thursday night in a bedroom she had spent a year in, and a radiator was ticking somewhere behind the wall, and a car went past under the window doing something illegal with its engine, and none of it mattered and all of it was going in.
She was memorizing. She knew she was doing it and could not make herself stop, and she understood, with the lamp on and him inside her and her hands going numb where they were braced, that you only memorize a thing while you are still inside it when you have already decided you are going to lose it.
She looked down at him and he was already looking at her, and for about four seconds the sentence was in her mouth. There’s a job. I’ve had it for three weeks. Fully formed, entirely sayable.
“What,” he said.
“Nothing.” Jo bent down and kissed him instead, slow, with a hand either side of his head, and did not move her hips even then, and felt him make a sound into her mouth that he had not chosen to make.
That was the highest point. Not the noise and not the third one and not anything that came after. That: a lamp on, a man asking her to stop moving so that it would not end, and Jo above him for one held minute with nothing in the world happening except this.
Then she moved again, because she wanted to, and because there were twenty-six hours left and she was not going to spend one of them being still.
She rode him until he stopped being able to hold his end of it, and when he broke he said her name and then said, “I love you,” which he had said before but never like that, never with nothing left over.
She said it back. She meant it entirely.
Then she put her face into his neck so that he could not see it, and held on, and did not let him move for a long time.
His hand came up into her hair.
“Stay there,” he said.
“Say something,” she said, into his neck.
“I can’t. Give me a minute.”
“You’ve had four.”
“I’ve had four and I’m telling you I need more.” His hand was still in her hair. “You’ve broken something. I’ll have it working by morning.”
Jo laughed and it came out damp, and he felt it and did not comment on it, and tightened his arm instead.
Twenty-six hours.
She stayed there.