34. Sacha #2
She got the rest of it off me, and I kicked it away somewhere and did not look to see where. Then I put her on that bed on her back and got over her. For a moment I did nothing at all except hold myself up on my forearms and look at the whole length of her underneath me in that light.
Then I talked.
That is the thing I did that night instead of the thing I should have done. I have wondered ever after whether she asked for it because she knew I could not say the three words, and wanted to give me somewhere else to put them.
So there we were on cheap sheets in a room that smelled of chlorine and other people, and I put my mouth on her, and I said all of it. I did not say the words. I said everything else.
I told her about the eighth of an inch her left eyebrow sits higher than her right, which nobody has ever mentioned to her, and how it makes her look permanently unconvinced.
I told her about her hands, square and strong and never still, and about the second knuckle on her right hand that is bigger than the others from a door she has never explained.
I said that she counts in tens under her breath when she is frightened and that I heard her do it in a gunfight.
I told her that she hums four words of a song and abandons them, always the same four, and that I have never once been able to name the song and have decided not to ask.
"Keep going."
"You put your feet on me in your sleep. You have done it every night since the storm and you have never once done it awake without asking."
"That's not true."
"It is entirely true, and I have never moved them, and you have never known."
She made a sound then that was half a laugh and about to be something else, and I put my mouth lower and stopped it turning into the other thing.
I took my time. There was nothing left of the man who used to count minutes in that room.
I put my mouth on the inside of her wrist and the crook of her elbow, the two places nobody bothers with, and then under her jaw where the pulse sits.
Then I told her what her pulse was doing.
It turns out that is a thing you can do to a nurse, and it works about as well as anything I have ever tried.
"Your pulse is ninety-four," I said.
"That's the walk you did. Don't flatter yourself."
"Now it is one hundred and four."
"Shut up."
My hands were still cold from eleven miles and she would not let me apologize for it.
She caught my wrist when I tried to hold off.
She put my palm against her breast and held it there until the cold had gone out of it and into her.
She shivered the whole way through and would not let go.
That is who she is. She takes the cold on purpose so that nobody has to feel bad about having brought it in.
I went down her slowly after that. Her collarbone first, and the hollow under it, and then the small brown mole below her right breast that she does not know I have counted.
Then the breast itself, and there I slowed.
She was tender there, and I knew why now, and neither of us said it.
I used my mouth without any weight in it at all, and her breath came apart anyway, and her hand came up into my hair and closed.
"That is not fair either."
"You told me not to stop."
"I did tell you that." She got her fingers tighter. "Do not stop."
I went on down her ribs and the line under them.
I spent a while at the soft place at her waist that she is self-conscious about and has twice been informed is the best square inch of skin in that county.
Then her hip, and then the inside of her knee, which does something to her that I discovered on the second night and have never once mentioned out loud.
Then the inside of her thigh, high up, where the skin goes so fine you can feel the blood moving under it. I waited there a long time and let her feel me breathing, and I did not touch her anywhere that would have helped.
"Sacha, you are killing me."
"That is the idea."
"You are being very cruel to a woman with a bus to catch."
"You have a car."
"Then you are being cruel to a woman with a car." Her voice had gone rough at the edges. "Please put your mouth on me."
She was not shy that night and she was not careful with me.
She got her hands into my hair and moved me where she wanted me, and she said please twice, and she had never once said that to me before.
So I put my mouth on her properly, and after that neither of us had anything else to say for a while.
She was wet before I got there and wetter with my mouth on her, and she was hot, and the taste of her landed in me like a swallow of something strong.
I went slowly at first, because slow was the only thing I had left to give her.
I used the flat of my tongue and then the point of it.
Then I put two fingers into her and curled them forward and held them there, and she came up off that mattress hard enough to put the headboard into the wall.
"That is it. Do not move. Keep your hand right where it is."
I did not move. I held that spot and did that one thing. She got her heels into the mattress and one hand clamped over her own mouth, because the walls in those places are made of paper and she knew it and did not entirely care.
I have turned the next part over many times looking for a way to set it down without cheapening it. In the end I am simply going to write what occurred.
She got very close, and I felt her start to climb, and then I felt her hold herself back from it.
She was doing it on purpose. When it was finished it would be one more thing that was over.
So I let her hang there. So I let her hang there at the same speed and the same pressure, exactly what she had asked for, for as long as she could stand it.
She made a sound I had never had out of her before, high and thin and furious, and her thighs began to shake against my ears.
"I can't," she said. "I don't want to be finished."
"You are not going to be finished. Look down here at me."
She got up on one elbow and looked down her own body at me in that stripe of bathroom light. I put my eyes on hers and did not take them away. Then I gave her the last of it with my mouth and my hand together, and she went over while she was still looking at me.
When it went through her it took a long time about it.
It arrived in long pulls instead of one drop and it kept coming.
I felt every one of them under my tongue and around my fingers.
I stayed with her the whole way and slowed only when she made the noise that means enough.
She came up off the sheets and came down again.
In the middle of it she said my name in a way I am going to hear in every quiet room for the rest of my life.
Afterward she lay there with her arm over her eyes and her chest going. Then she started to laugh, and it was not a good laugh, and she got it under control.
"This is the worst breakup I have ever had," she said.
"I want that on the record. And it's also the single best night of my life, and those two facts are sitting in the same room, and you have ruined ordinary breakups for me forever.
Do you understand what you have done? Some poor man in about four years is going to end things with me in a coffee shop and I'm going to sit there thinking, well, this is disappointing. "
I made a sound. It came out of me sideways, half laugh and half the other thing, and it was neither, and it was the closest I have come to weeping in front of another person since I was nine years old.
She heard it. She took her arm off her eyes and looked at me and did not say one word about it, and that was the kindest thing available in that room.
Then she sat up and pushed me over onto my back with one hand. It took nothing at all. There was no resistance left in me anywhere.
She went down my body the way I had gone down hers, and she was not quick about it, and she did not let me hurry her.
She put her mouth on the scar under my ribs.
She put it on the seam of scar across the top of my shoulder.
She spent a while on the strip of hair under my navel.
Then she got her hand around me, and then her mouth, and I put my head back into a motel pillow and stopped being a functioning man.
I am not going to write much about that part, and the reason is not modesty. It is that she was crying while she did it, silently, in the dark, and doing it anyway, and doing it well, and there is no way to set that down that is not either too much or not enough.
I let it go on until I could not let it go on.
"Lily, stop."
She came up off me with her hair everywhere and her mouth wet and looked at me with real fury in her face, the first honest fury of the whole night. "Why?"
"Because I am not spending the last of it in your mouth. Come here."
"Say it properly."
"I want to be inside you."
She came up my body and kissed me hard, and I could taste myself on her mouth. She took hold of me in her fist and held me where she wanted me. Then she stopped and put her forehead against mine and breathed.
"I don't want to be looking at you," she said, and her voice broke on it, and she fixed it. "Not at the start. If I look at you at the start I'm going to say something I can't take back before the morning."
"Then turn over."
There is a way of doing this that I had never done with her, and I did it that night for one reason, which is that it was the only position in that room where neither of us had to be brave.
I got in behind her. She turned onto her side facing away from me and put her back against my chest. Then she reached behind her and set her hand on my hip to bring me in.
I got one arm under her head and the other over her and put my mouth on the back of her neck.
Then I went into her slowly from behind, with her shoulder blades against me and her breath going out in one long line.