27. Lily #3
I straddled him and took him in my hand and held him where I wanted him, and then I sank down onto him slowly, an inch and then a stop and then more, because at that angle he is a great deal to take and I wanted every part of the taking.
It hurt in the good way, that deep spread ache of being opened up more than you are used to, and I stayed there halfway with my hands braced on his chest and made myself breathe.
"You do not have to."
"Be quiet." I got another inch. "I want all of it."
He swore in his own language, which he only does when he has lost hold of something, and his hands came to my hips and gripped and did not push, and I got the rest of the way down and sat there fully seated on him with my thighs shaking and my hands spread flat over his ribs, and neither of us moved for a long moment.
I sat up straight so I could see him. That was the whole point. I could have folded down onto his chest and hidden my face in his throat like every other time, and instead I stayed upright in the lamplight with my hands on him and looked at his face while I moved, and made myself keep looking.
Here is what I banked. I took the gray at his temples with the light behind it.
I took the vein standing up along the inside of his forearm where his hand was clamped on my hip.
I took the exact color his eyes go when he stops guarding them, which is not cold at all and never was.
I took the two lines between his eyebrows that he gets when he is concentrating, which are precisely the same when he is doing this as when he is cleaning a rifle.
And I took the whole of him, laid out under me, letting me do it.
"Say my name."
"Lily."
"Say it again."
"Lily." He got a hand up into my hair at the back and pulled me down half an inch, not to move me, just to have me. "Look at me and stop counting."
"I'm not counting."
"You are counting something. You have been counting all day."
I moved on him harder to shut him up and it worked on both of us.
There was one very bad moment. He put a hand flat and warm across my stomach, low, the way a man does without meaning anything by it at all, and the words came up my throat so fast I had to stop moving.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing is wrong. Don't stop."
"Lily, what is it?"
"It's good. It's too good. Give me a second." Which was true, and was also the cheapest thing I have ever done with the truth.
He took his hand away from my stomach and put it on my back instead, and I do not know to this day whether he did that because he understood something or because he simply felt me lock up under it.
Then he sat up under me with his arms all the way around me and his mouth against my collarbone, and after that neither of us was setting any pace at all.
We went the rest of the way like that, chest to chest, close enough that there was no distance left to hide anything in except the one place I was still hiding it.
I got there first, with my face in his neck and my whole body clenched around him and his name coming out of me in pieces.
He held on through it and let me finish and then he went, and the sound he makes is not much of a sound and I would not trade it for anything I own.
I felt it happen. I felt him let go of every last piece of himself inside a woman who was lying to him, and I held the back of his head with both hands and cried while it was still happening, and he thought he knew why.
Afterward we lay in the wreck of the blankets with the lamp still burning, and he pulled me in under his arm and put his hand on the back of my head and did not say anything.
The words were sitting on the roof of my mouth. There were three of them, small and boring and everyday, the kind of words that people say to each other in kitchens all over the world every day of the year.
I got as far as opening my mouth.
Here is what stopped me, and it was not the war and it was not his face.
It was that as long as I did not say it out loud, it was still only a chemical suggestion on a cheap strip in a paper towel, and I could carry it alone, and nothing had to be decided by anybody.
The second I said it, it would be a fact standing in the middle of the room, and a man with six days on his clock would have to make a decision about it, and I already knew what he would decide.
I had known since the yard. He would put me in a car.
So I did what I have done my whole life and found the exit before the feeling could arrive, only this time the exit was silence.
My mother had a word for me on the days I did this. She would sit at the kitchen table with a cigarette she had promised to quit and watch me pack for somewhere and she would say it, not unkindly, the way you name a weather system.
The words were right there. I think I'm pregnant. I could feel them behind my teeth. Instead I kissed him again and let the secret sink back down into the dark. Coward, my mother would have said. She'd have been right.