"And I'm going to hold you to sleep."
"Yes."
She lifts me off the table.
She lifts me like I weigh nothing, one arm under my knees, the other around my back, and I put my arms around her neck and I put my wet face in the side of her throat and I let her carry me down the hall.
---
The bedroom is dark. The lamp is low.
She lays me down on the quilt. She kneels beside the bed. She takes the harness off. She sets it on the chair, gentle, the strap on the seat, the buckle quiet. She crosses to the bathroom. She comes back with a warm washcloth and a clean towel.
She washes me.
She washes me the way she washed me yesterday in the bath. She washes between my legs, soft, slow, a careful cloth. She washes the come off the inside of my thighs. She washes the lube. She washes my back. She rolls me to my side and she washes the back of me. She is patient. She is the patient she always is.
She kisses each place she has washed.
The inside of my thigh. My hipbone. The small of my back. The knob of my spine. The shoulder. The wrist where the rope was last night. The bandage on my left palm. The cheek where I was sobbing. The eye where the wet has dried.
She does not speak.
I do not speak.
I do not speak because I do not have a sentence that would be the right size for what is in me. I have not been touched like this. I have not been spoken to like this. I have not been, since I was a small girl, held like this. I am not going to put a small word on it.
I lie on my side on her quilt and I let her work.
I watch her face. I watch the line of her cheekbone in the lamp light. I watch the dark of her hair. I watch the scar on her forearm move when she lifts the cloth. I watch her eyes on my body, careful, gone soft. I have never been looked at by a person who is looking at me as a thing to take care of. The look is not a look I knew a person could be looked at with. I had not understood the difference between the look of being wanted and the look of being tended. They are not the same look. Tonight they are the same look on the same face.
"Sleep, sweetheart.”
I nod.
She pulls the quilt up.
She slides under it next to me.
She gathers me into her chest. She lays my head on her collarbone. She puts her hand in my hair. She breathes.
I close my eyes. I put my hand flat on the front of her chest, low, where her ribs come together. I feel her heart. The rain is still on the cedar. The lamp is low. The kitchen is in the next room and I can smell the stew from here and the smell is good and the smell can wait.
The brass key is on the counter in the next room.
The strap is on the chair.
I think the sentence I had not let myself think yet.
I thinkI am safe.
I have not been safe in a bed in eleven years. I had not known I had not been safe. I had thought safe was a thing other women had and I did not. I had thought that was the shape of my life. I had been wrong about the shape of my life. The shape of my life is on a chair in this bedroom and on a counter in this kitchen and under my cheek in this bed, and the shape of my life is breathing slow, and the shape of my life is going to wake me in an hour to feed me stew at the kitchen table I came on.
I sleep.
15
MAX
