The coffee sputters into the pot. I have been standing here long enough to watch it twice.
She is asleep down the hall. I have made the bed she is in a hundred times. This morning it contains her, and so it is no longer the same bed. I am aware of being a person who thinks things like that now.
___
October was the soup.
She brought it over because I had a fever, and she sat on the edge of my bed with one knee on the mattress and pushed the hair back from my forehead with the flat of her knuckles.
Two seconds. Maybe three?
Then she made a joke about how I looked like a wet cat, and I laughed, and something in my chest moved an inch to the left and stayed there.
It has not moved back.
I have studied her hands the way I should have been studying for my licensure exam.
They are rarely still. She drums them on tabletops. She folds the paper sleeves of sugar packets into small accordions. But on a person — and she is a toucher; a shoulder-squeezer, a back-of-the-neck-grabber — her hands settle. It’s like they commit.
Whatever she puts her hand on, she means.
I have wondered for some time what it would be to be meant.
___
The kettle clicks off. I do not turn around.
In November she fell asleep on my couch with her boots still on. I sat on the floor and untied them. I took them off her feet and set them by the door and covered her with my green blanket and went to bed.
Then I lay in the dark thinking about her ankle. The small bone of it. The bunched sock.
I touched myself with my hand pressed flat over my own mouth, and was furious with myself the entire time, and came anyway. I have gotten good at cumming quietly.
It is not a skill I am proud of.
The thing about wanting someone for months without saying so is that you become a private scholar of them. You publish nothing. You attend no conferences. But the body of work accumulates.
I have notes on the way she says my name in two registers — one she uses in rooms with other people, and one she does not. I have a small unwritten essay on the half-second pause before she laughs at something I’ve said, and where her eyes go in it. I have a whole monograph on the green dress, and what happened, and what didn’t, and the difference between them.
___
The green dress was March.
She made me go dancing. The room had low ceilings and candles in jars, and she pulled me onto the floor with both hands.
Not one.
I made a note of it at the time.
And we were bad at it.
She stepped on me. I spun her under my arm because I wanted to feel her come back, and she did, into my chest, laughing.
A slower song. Her hand on my waist.
You’re staring, she said.
I know, I said.
I don’t mind.
A braver woman would have kissed her. Instead I looked at our shoes and said something about the band, and the moment closed like a clean book, and I have been reading it back to myself ever since.
___
Last night, walking home through the rain, she put her jacket over both our heads. At my door I said stay, it’s late. She said yeah? — quiet, like a real question — and I said yeah, and did not look away while I said it.
That was my small bravery. Holding her eyes for the length of a single yes.
She slept on top of the covers. I slept under them. There was an inch of quilt between us. I felt every fiber of it.
Nothing happened. I am still deciding whether that is a sad sentence or a hopeful one.
___
A floorboard, behind me.
I have decided I am going to be normal. I am going to pour two coffees and offer her one. I am going to behave like someone who did not lie awake last night listening to her breathe.
Her hand lands on my hip.
Not the side of it – the curve. Her whole palm, warm and settled… like it has been waiting in the hallway for a while and finally made up its mind.
I set the mug down. This is the last competent thing I do for some time.
“Mornin’,” she says, low, at the back of my ear.
I cannot remember the word for good.
Her thumb moves slowly, sweeping along the waistband of my shorts, where my shirt has ridden up, where she has never touched me before.
I would know.
Her hand slides lower. Down the curve of me, slow enough to be a question. Slow enough that I could turn it into something else with a shift of my weight — a joke, a cut it out.
I lean back into her instead.
It is the smallest motion of my life. Quarter of an inch. Shoulder blades to sternum. Her breath catches and her forehead drops against the side of my neck.
“Christ, Cait,” she says, almost to herself. “I thought I made it up.”
I let out a sound that is half laugh, half something else.
“Made what up?”
“All of it. The whole — ” She exhales against my skin. “Six months, I’ve been making it up. In my head. Last night, on the dance floor, I thought — and then you didn’t — and I told myself I made it up.”
“You didn’t make it up.”
Her hand spreads warm across the small of my back, under my shirt now.
“No?”
“October,” I say.
A pause.
“…the soup?”
“The soup.”
She laughs — short and stunned. Her mouth presses to the place where my neck meets my shoulder. But it’s not a kiss yet. A landing?
When I turn around she is closer than I expect. Her eyes are doing something I have not seen them do before — bright, a little frightened, the look of someone who has stopped pretending and is not yet sure whether the space between us will allow it.
I put my hand on her jaw. She turns her face into my palm, and that’s what does it. That small motion. The give of her.
I kiss her.
She makes a quiet sound into my mouth, and her hand comes up into my hair. The kiss stops being polite. She kisses like a person putting something down she has been carrying for a long time. I kiss her back like a person who has just realized she was carrying it too, on the other side.
Only neither of us knew.
When we break, she rests her forehead against mine.
“You let me sleep on your couch in November,” she says.
“You were tired.”
“I was awake for an hour after you covered me up.”
“…Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.“
“Yeah.”
She lifts me onto the counter.
There is a specific competence to the way she does it — hands under my thighs, a step in — that suggests she has must have thought about it before. With detail.
I will be devastated by this later.
Right now I am more interested in the fact that the tile is cold, and her hands are warm, and my shorts have ridden up past anywhere I could rescue them.
She runs her thumbs along the bare skin of my inner thighs. Watches my face.
“Can I —,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You don’t even know what I —”
“Yes.”
A small smile. She kisses me again — slower this time. Learning. Her hand slides up under my shirt and stops, with the side of her thumb, just under my breast, where my heartbeat is. She holds it there.
This is what begins to take me apart. The fact that she stopped to feel it.
She pushes the cotton between my legs aside with two fingers, and the first stroke of her bare hand against me makes her breathe out hard through her nose, like the proof of me is more than she planned for.
“Honey,” she says, quiet. “You’re soaked.”
“I’ve had a long six months.”
She laughs into the curve of my neck, surprised by it, and slides one finger inside me.
I forget, briefly, what year it is.
She works me open carefully. One finger, then two, watching my face the way she watches a thing she’s reading. Her thumb finds a rhythm I did not have to teach her. My hand fists in the back of her shirt, in her hair, anywhere that will hold.
I come the first time embarrassingly fast. I have been on the edge of this since the soup, and she does not pretend otherwise. She kisses my temple while I shake against her, and says, very quietly, I know. I know. Me too.
The me too is what does it. Not the hand. The me too.
She slides her arm around my waist and turns me, gently, so I am facing the counter again. Lifts me down onto my feet. Kisses the back of my neck.
“Lean forward for me, sweet thing.”
I do. I rest my forearms on the counter and press my forehead to the cool of them. The morning light is coming in pale over my hands, and I feel her step in behind me and ease the shorts down my legs. Not all the way off. To my knees. The shirt stays. Everything else is just — moved aside, the way you move aside something you don’t have time to take off properly.
She kneels.
Her hands settle at the backs of my thighs first. One slow pass up, palms open, like she is taking the shape of me. Then her mouth.
She kisses the inside of my thigh first. The other one. The crease where leg meets hip. Then her tongue: flat, slow, unhurried. She moves up the length of me from behind, and I moan into my own arm.
She is patient about it. Her hands hold me open. Her mouth finds a pace I cannot match with breath. She makes a small, low sound against me — pleased, almost private, like she had wondered and is being answered.
Her fingers slide back inside me while her mouth keeps working, and the second orgasm comes up through me slower than the first. It is deeper. Longer — a long pull from somewhere I do not normally let people reach. I press my mouth into the inside of my own elbow. My knees nearly go.
Her hand finds mine on the counter, as she laces our fingers.
That is what finishes me. The hand. The holding.
When I can speak again, it is a small, wrecked thing into the wood:
“Don’t stop.”
She doesn’t.
She takes me through a third one with her mouth and her hand and the steady weight of her forearm across my lower back, anchoring me, like she knows I will float off the counter otherwise. I come apart with her fingers laced through mine and her name caught somewhere behind my teeth, and afterward she stays there a moment, kneeling. Her cheek is pressed to the small of my back, breathing.
___
Later she will lift me up and turn me around and carry me to the bedroom because my legs are no longer reliably mine. She will lay me down in my own bed — the bed that is no longer the same bed — and pull the quilt up over both of us, and tuck her face into my neck, and we will not get out for a long time.
Later she will say, October, huh, into my collarbone, and I will say, October, and we will not bother to laugh about the wasted months because there will be too much else to do.
The coffee, by the way, will go cold on the counter.
I will not, it turns out, mind.
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