She crawls up my body. She unties the rope in two moves. She brings my arms down, rubs the wrists with her thumbs, kisses each one. She lies on her side, half on top of me, and she pulls me into her. I put my face against her throat. I put my wet cheek against her collarbone. She strokes my hair. She does not speak. She lets me shake. She kisses the top of my head once.
"Okay?” she says, after a minute. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I can barely speak.
"You're okay?”
"I'm okay. I'm okay. I’m…..”
"I know."
"Max."
"Yes."
"That wasn't sex."
"No?"
"Not the way I understood it."
"How did you understand it."
"As a thing you endured for his pleasure.”
She kisses my temple.
"Not tonight," she says.
"Not ever again."
"Not ever again."
We lie.
The rain is heavier now on the cedar. The woodstove in the next room is a low tick. Her arm is across my shoulder. My hand is flat on her stomach, just below the old surgical scar I had not known about an hour ago. My hair is stuck to her collarbone. The room smells of her skin and my skin and the salt-clean of my own come.
"Are you sore," she says after a while.
"A little. The good kind."
"I'm going to run you a warm washcloth."
"Not yet."
"Not yet."
She stays.
I put my mouth on the skin of her throat. I kiss her pulse. I kiss her jaw. I kiss her shoulder where the sheet had been wrinkled under it. I find the star-scar on her back, between her shoulder blades, the kind I asked her about this afternoon because it was mine she was going to find. Hers is a raised knot in a shape I can put a thumb on.
"Nine," I say.
"Yeah."
"You fell."
"Off a roof. My dad was not happy."
