34. Sacha #4
She surfaced again at about three, the way people do in strange rooms, and she did not entirely wake up. She turned over into me, got one leg across both of mine, and put her mouth on my shoulder. Her hand went down between us and found me already hard, which took no finding at all.
"Again," she said, into my collarbone, half asleep and entirely serious. "Slower than that."
There is not much to say about the second time except that it was the best hour of my life and I did not know it at the time, which is the standard arrangement.
We stayed on our sides, facing, with her leg hooked over my hip and my hand spread on the small of her back to keep her exactly where she was.
I went into her from there, and there is nowhere to go at that angle except deep and slow, and neither of us wanted anywhere else.
We hardly moved. She would push once and I would answer once.
Then we would stop and simply stay there joined, breathing at each other in the dark, and that would go on for a minute or more before one of us started it again.
Her eyes were open. I could see the shine of them in the light from that bathroom door and nothing else of her face. Every so often she put her hand up and touched my mouth, my jaw, the bone under my eye, the way a person reads something in the dark with her fingers.
"Don't close your eyes," she said once, and I had not been going to.
It went on a long time like that. Twice she got close and slowed us both down on purpose to keep it from ending, and the second time she did it she laughed at herself, one breath of it, wet.
"I'm rationing you," she said. "Do you understand how pathetic that is?"
"It is the only sensible thing either of us has done all night."
"I am aware that it is." She kissed me and did not take her mouth away. "Do it harder now. I want to feel it tomorrow."
So I did it harder. I got my hand under her thigh and held her open and worked her at that angle until the bed was making a noise about it.
She had her face pressed into my throat and her teeth on the muscle there.
Then she went over without any warning at all and took me straight with her.
I felt her go and could not have stopped for anything on this earth.
I went into her with her name in my mouth, her arms locked around my back and the whole of her shaking.
We lay there afterward, joined and wrecked. She cried and I did not remark on it, and I found my own face doing something I have no name for either.
Then she said, into my chest, so quietly I very nearly did not catch it, "This was the good part. This whole month was the good part, and I want you to know that I know it."
I put my mouth into her hair and said the only true thing available to me.
"So do I."
I lay in that room with her breathing on my chest and did the only useful thing left to me, which was to fix the picture in place.
There were the two inches of open curtain and the stripe of light on the wall.
There was the pencil on the nightstand and her hand curled shut under her chin the way it always is.
There was the bad moose and the radiator and the smell of that room. And there was the exact weight of her.
Then I made the mistake of going to sleep, and I have thought since that she waited for it.
The light was gray when I woke. The bed was empty, and the sheet on her side had gone cold.
She had done it perfectly, and that is the detail I cannot put down.
She had got dressed, packed a duffel, and carried it out past a man who has woken at the sound of a floorboard in another building for fifteen years.
She had done all of it without waking me.
There is only one way to manage that, and it is to move very slowly and with enormous care for a long time.
The gray car was gone out of that lot. My truck was where she had left it with the keys under the seat, the way I had told her to.
The room key was on the pillow beside my head.
She had turned the radiator up to the top of its dial before she went, so that the room would still be warm when I woke in it.
There was no note. She is not a note. She had said all of it in that room while I was awake, and had the discipline not to spoil it on a piece of motel stationery.
I sat on the edge of that bed for some time with the key in my hand.
Then I drove back up to a tar paper shack. Tank came out to meet the truck, went straight past me, and put his nose into the empty passenger side. He stood there a while with his tail down. Then he went and lay across the doorway facing the road.
The stove had gone out. The two prints were on the table where she had put them back, and the plastic stick was beside them, and her cup was in the sink upside down where she had washed it.
We did not say goodbye with words. We said it with everything else, all night, as though we could store it up against the winter. When I woke, she was gone, the way I had told her to be. The silence she left behind is the loudest thing I have ever heard.