I take a bath.
I run it hot. I use her soap because her soap is the only soap here. It smells like cedar and like something green, rosemary maybe. I sit in the water with my knees up and my forearms on my knees and my hair in a loose knot on top of my head, and I do not read. I do not think in sentences. I let what happened in the bedroom at sunrise stay in my body where it sat.
It sat low.
It sat the way a woman's body sometimes answers a look without asking the woman's head what she thinks. I know this answer. I have had this answer before, twice in eleven years, both times at benefit dinners, both times about men I did not know, and both times I put the answer away in the drawer I put other answers I was not going to act on. I am not going to act on them, I said to the drawer, and the drawer closed.
I can't put it away this time.
I lean my head against the back of the tub and I close my eyes and I see her eyes.
I see the blue of them from this morning. I don't have a word for that blue yet. I see her hand flat on the arm of the chair. I see the way her jaw sat when I asked herare you going to say something? I see her not getting out of the chair. The not-getting-out-of-the-chair was the thing that did it to me. If she had gotten out of the chair I would have known what to do. She did not get out of the chair. She sat. She sat and she looked at me.
I sit up in the tub.
I get out. I dry off. I put on the sweats and the flannel shirt and no underthings because I do not have underthings, because my underthings burned in a fire four nights ago. I go into the living room.
Her laptop is on the coffee table.
I saw it yesterday and I did not touch it. I sit on the sofa this morning and I touch it. I open the lid. The screen comes up. It is locked. A password field, a small gray box. I put my hands in my lap. I do not guess. I do not try her birthday, which I do not know, or her department, which I do know. I do not want to be a woman who guesses her password. I close the lid.
There is a bookshelf to my right. Forestry. Structure fire. Biographies. Three books on trauma. I pull one of the trauma books out. I do not know why. It is a book by a woman I have heard of at benefit dinners without reading. I open the front cover. There is a handwritten inscription in blue pen.
Max, 2017. You're going to want this one. D.
D? A friend? A lover?
I put the book back.
I walk back to the bedroom. I stand at the foot of the bed. I look at the armchair where she was looking at me and I can’t stop thinking about the desire I saw in her eyes. I have never made love to a woman before, but god, I want to now. This one. This woman with the muscular forearms and strong hands. This woman who says so little.
Then I take off the flannel shirt.
I take off the sweats.
I lie down on the bed in the middle of the unmade quilt and I look up at the pine ceiling and I put one hand on my stomach, because I have not touched my own stomach in the morning in my skin in a lot of years, and I feel the rise and fall of it. My breath is a little fast. My breath has been a little fast since I opened my eyes at sunrise.
I had two theories about Max, and I had set them both down this morning. Today I was only going to be in my body.
I put the hand lower.
---
I touch myself slow.
I touch myself slow because I am out of practice and because I want to feel each thing I am feeling and because I have not touched myself for me in complete relaxation, in many years. When I touched myself in Daniel's house, I touched myself in the bath with the water loud enough to cover the sound, and I was half-listening for the door, and I came fast and then I was done and then I got out. This is not that.
I put two fingers at the top of my slit and slide them down.
I am already wet.
I am wetter than I have been in a long time. The wet is on my fingers and I slide it up to my clit. The wet answers a question I have been carrying since six in the morning, which is the question of whether this thing I am feeling is a thing that lives above my collarbone or below it, and the answer is, both. Mybody has been writing checks above my neck for three hours that my body below my neck has been cashing.
I put a finger on my clit and press.
My breath goes out of me.
I close my eyes.
