Page 43
The silence after.
His breathing and mine. The low hum of the lamp. Bean's collar jingling in the other room as she repositions on the couch.
I pull out. Careful. His body winces. The soreness will be real this time. Earned. Explicable. In the morning he'll feel me in his hips, his thighs, his back, and this time he'll know why.
The condom goes in the trash. His hand finds mine in the space between our bodies on the mattress. His fingers lace through mine and he holds on tight.
"Stay," he says.
The word enters my chest and does something to the structure there. Something unplanned. The notebook didn't have a line for this. The plan covered the knock, the recognition, the collision, the sex. The plan did not account for his hand in mine, his voice saying stay, the look on his face that isn't gratitude, isn't relief, but something underneath both of those, something that could be the beginning of something my notebook never outlined.
The more that happens after.
"I'll stay."
His eyes close. His hand stays in mine. His body turns toward me on the mattress, and his head finds my shoulder. His hair is damp with sweat. His breathing is slowing. Adrenaline are draining out of his system, the cortisol crashing, the body going soft against mine.
He falls asleep without the trazodone. His body chose something else to hold it under.
Chose me.
Bean's nails on the floor. She's in the doorway. She looks at us on the bed, two bodies instead of one, and she jumps up. She circles. She presses against his shins. The weight of her, settling.
His apartment in the dark. His body against mine. His breathing steady and slow and his hand still holding my hand, the fingers loosening as the sleep deepens. Outside, a car passes. A dog barks. The neighborhood is quiet. Halloween lights filtering through his blinds.
Midnight passes. November arrives. Halloween is over and he survived it. He survived it because I came through the door with a face he recognized, a voice he trusted. His body did what I knew it would do. What I built it to do. Phone calls, a coffee shop, a night in his bed while he slept. All of it engineered for this.
His body chose me. His mind chose me. The two choices feel different from this side. The body's choice was mine to construct. The mind's choice was his to make. Both of them ended here, in the dark, in his bed, his hand in mine, his breathing against my shoulder.
The notebook can go in the shredder tomorrow. The plan is finished. What's left is something the plan didn't build. Can't contain. For the first time in days, I'm not sure I need to.
His hand tightens in mine briefly before I drape my arm around him and the frown on his face releases and his breath deepens.
I close my eyes. The sleep is different tonight. Every other night I sleep like a man who rests because he has to. Tonight I sleep like a man who got what he came for. Something else. Something I don't have a word for yet.
His breathing. Bean's breathing. Mine.
November.
Chapter Fifteen: Milo
November. Finally.
The difference between October light and November light is something I've never noticed before because October has never ended well enough for me to see the transition. October ends in the dark, in the apartment, behind three locks, the lights off, the curtains drawn, the holiday passing over me the way weather passes over a bunker. I've never been awake for the first November morning breaking over the horizon. I've never seen what the light does when it comes through the window on the other side.
It's gray, nothing special on its own, but it’s beautiful. The quality of light that doesn't demand anything, that comes into a room without announcing itself. The bedroom window faces east, and the gray is filling the room in slow degrees, touching the edge of the dresser, the doorframe, the pile of clothes on the floor that belongs to two people.
His arm is across my chest.
A man's arm, bare, the forearm resting on my chest, the hand loose near my shoulder. His body is behind mine, his chest against my back, the heat of his skin is comforting, like a blanket I don’t want to remove. His breathing is slow. His mouth is near my neck. Each exhale touches the skin below my ear, and the sensation is so erotic, that I have to physically force myself to concentrate on something else.
Anything else.
Bean. Her weight on my ankles. The familiar warmth of her body pressing into the sheets, the pressure I wake up to every morning, the only contact I've had in fourteen months.
Until last night.
The memory comes in pieces. Not because it's fragmented. Because my body is processing it in layers, each layer arriving separately, each one real. His mouth on mine. His hands on my waist. My shirt coming off over my head and his eyes on my body and the way the looking felt, being seen by someone who'd been a voice for two weeks, the voice becoming a gaze. His fingers. The preparation. The slow, deliberate opening that my body accepted without resistance, as if the resistance had been removed somewhere in the fourteen days of phone calls, somewhere in the dark, somewhere between his voice saying come for me and his body doing what his voice had promised.
