34. Sacha #3
I put myself against her first and stopped there. Then I rocked once, so she could feel where I was and what was coming. She got a hand back onto my hip and pulled.
Then I pushed into her.
She was so wet by then that the first of it went easily, and even so it took a while, because she is small and I am not, and at that angle she feels every inch of it arriving.
I went in slowly and in stages. I would give her a little and stop, and feel her open around it, and then give her more.
Halfway in she made a sound that I felt in the middle of my own chest, and I stopped there and held still and put my mouth on the back of her shoulder until her breathing came back.
"Keep going," she said. "Give me all of it."
So I gave her the rest, one slow press until my hips were flush against her and there was nothing left of me outside her, and I held it there. I could feel her heartbeat around me. She got one hand back into my hair and held on, and then she said something into the pillow that I have kept.
"You are all the way in."
"Am I hurting you?"
"Not even slightly. Do not stop."
It was not the first time and it was not the taking.
It was something else that I have no name for.
She closed around me the way she has since the first night, tight and hot and known to me now.
I stayed still with the whole of her against me and felt her adjust in small movements.
She got her fingers laced into mine and held on.
"Like that," she said. "Go slowly, and don't be clever about it, and don't stop."
So I was slow.
I want to say what that hour was, and there is no vocabulary for it in either of my languages.
There was a radiator coming on and off under a window.
There was a bathroom light making a long stripe across the wall.
There was her hair in my face, and the smell of her scalp, and her hand over the back of mine.
Every time I went into her she made the same small sound out of the bottom of her throat, and every time I drew almost all the way out she made a different one.
I had both of them learned inside four minutes.
Then I spent the rest of that hour playing them like a man with all the time in the world, which is exactly what I did not have.
There is a mirror over the dresser in those rooms. I found it by accident, over the top of her head.
After that I could see the two of us in it in that dim orange light, her body and my arm across it and my hand moving on her.
She followed my eyes and found it as well, and neither of us looked away from that glass for a long time.
"You're watching," she said.
"I am."
"Then put your hand where I can see it."
So I put my hand where she could see it.
I was unhurried about it, and she got louder than those paper walls could really support.
She reached back over her own shoulder, got a fistful of my hair, and held me down against her neck while I worked.
I felt the whole of her tighten around me and let go and tighten again.
Somewhere in the middle of it my other hand ended up flat on her stomach.
I did not put it there on purpose. It was low, below her navel, spread out, the whole of my hand, and I felt her go completely still around me when she understood where it was.
She did not say anything. She put her hand down over mine and held it there and would not let me take it away.
We stayed like that, joined, both of my hands full of everything I was about to lose.
She started to cry without making any noise about it, and she did not stop moving.
That is the closest I came to saying it.
She never asked me to say it. She could have.
She could have turned her head on that pillow and got the whole thing out of me in one sentence, I was about four inches from broken open and she knew where to push.
She has known where to push since the third day.
She did not push. She let me keep my hand where it was, and she kept hers over it, and she let a coward have that.
We finished like that, or nearly. Near the end she turned in my arms and made me face her.
"We're not finishing like this," she said. "Not with you behind me where I can't see your face. Look at me."
So I looked at her. I got her leg up over my hip and went back into her, face to face, on a bad mattress in a motel off a county junction.
I got in as deep as that angle allows and held it there, barely moving, and she wrapped her leg around the back of mine and pulled me in harder than I would have gone on my own.
I looked at her the entire time and she looked at me. Nobody blinked and nobody spoke.
She got there first. I felt it come up through her, and I felt her go around me in that long clenching pull, and I watched it cross her face.
She kept her eyes on me from one end of it to the other, the way she has since the storm.
Then she pulled me down against her and said my name once, low, into my throat.
I went straight after her, and it went out of me like something breaking loose, and I stayed inside her afterward until the last of it had gone out of both of us.
I put my forehead down into the pillow beside her head and let her hold the back of my neck.
There was a second in there where my mouth was open against her throat and the words were sitting in it, all three of them, and the fourth one as well, which was stay.
This is the exact shape of what I did not say. I have carried that shape around for a long time.
I did not say, do not go.
I did not say, get in the truck and we will run tonight. I did not say that I would spend the rest of my life on back roads with the two of you and never sleep again and be happier than I have any right to be.
I did not say, I want it, I want all of it, I want the tree and the room with the red bulb and a child that gets to be bored in a warm kitchen.
I did not say, I love you. She has never once said it to me either, and it was in that room all night wearing other clothes.
What I said was nothing at all. I held on to her and let her think it was the aftermath.
Afterward she got up, drank a glass of water in the bathroom, and came back and got under my arm as though nothing had been decided.
We lay like that in the dark with the radiator doing its work and the light on the wall, and she talked.
It was the ordinary talk, the kind people have in beds, and it was the last of it and both of us knew.
"Rhinelander has a hospital and a lake and eight thousand people," she said. "Marge's niece says the clinic is a converted dentist's office and the coffee is a war crime."
"Don't use your own name."
"I am using it, and we had this conversation once already, and you lost." Her thumb moved on my chest, back and forth. "I looked at the map for houses with a south slope. That is all I am telling you."
"That puts your name into a computer."
"Do not argue it with me now. You have three days of things to do and not one of them is in this room." She waited a while. Then it came, very quietly, from under my arm. "Are you going to live?"
There it was. The one question I had no work-around for, and she had the decency to ask it into my ribs where she did not have to watch my face.
"I intend to."
"That is not the same as yes."
"It is what I have."
"Then I will take it, because I am too tired to fight you and you carried my feet inside your coat like an idiot.
" She got her arm across me and settled.
"Do not die on that lake. If you die out there I will have to explain you to a child one day, and I will not be able to do it without swearing, and then I will have to explain the swearing. "
I put my mouth on the top of her head and did not answer, and about four minutes later she was asleep, all at once, the way she goes, in the middle of a sentence about a hardware store.
I did not sleep for a long time.