“Okay?” he asks, low.
“Yes,” I say. “Don’t stop.”
He makes a sound, low in his chest, and eases closer.
He kisses me like he has all night and knows it. His hands move from my hair to my jaw, and I become aware all over again of his fingers, a musician’s hands, the same hands that have been in my head since his first visit. The fact of them against my face is so different from imagining them that I make a sound I wasn’t planning to make.
His name. I say his name against his mouth before I know I’m going to, and I feel him go still the way the room went still when I played: that full-body stillness, the thing in him that stops when he’s reached somewhere he wasn’t guarding.
Not the stillness of pulling back. The other kind. His hands stay where they are. His mouth finds the corner of my jaw, then just below my ear. He takes his time there, deliberately, as if he is learning something he intends to remember.
I’ve been still for too long in my life. Still while things passed. Still while I managed and maintained and kept everything running and kept myself small enough to fit inside the life I’dbuilt after the life I’d planned fell through. I am not still right now. My hands are in his hair and I’m pulling him back to my mouth and he comes willingly, makes that low sound again, and his arm goes around my waist. The weight of it settles heavy and solid against me through my shirt. I want that warmth everywhere.
I understand, in a way I haven’t before, why people do things they know are going to change everything. It’s not recklessness. It’s that the alternative, stepping back, being sensible, saying goodnight, has stopped being imaginable.
“Kragen,” I say. His name sounds important in my mouth, like I’ve been holding it back.
He pulls back. Looks at me. Doesn’t say anything.
He is doing that thing again. Being completely, entirely present. Not managing forward momentum or working toward a destination. Just here, taking me in. I have spent a significant amount of my adult life with people who were always partly somewhere else. He is right here. With me.
That is the thing that undoes me. Not his hands, not the size of him, not the passion of his mouth. The attention. Eight years of stages and crowds and noise, and he came back to this—to stillness, to listening, to sitting in a woman’s grandmother’s living room at ten o’clock on a Thursday and being nowhere else at all.
Then he kisses me again, and this time I stop keeping track of anything.
The kiss goes on. I let it. I would like it to go on considerably longer, but at some point, we both need to breathe, and we do, pulling back slightly, foreheads almost touching, neither of us moving apart. Both my hands are gripping his hair, though I have no memory of reaching for it. I tip my face toward him.
He looks down at me.
“Hi,” he says.
The knot in my chest loosens. I almost laugh. “Hi,” I say.
He eases back a bit, but doesn’t let go entirely. His hands stay at my waist. I don’t move away from them. We stand here in my grandmother’s living room in the lamplight, reassembling ourselves.
“That was—” he starts.
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at me. “I wasn’t finished.”
“I know. But yes.”
He almost smiles. Then he does smile, and it’s different from his regular smile, lower-wattage and more real, and I feel it somewhere behind my sternum like a plucked string.
We end up on the porch without quite deciding to. He pushed open the screen door, and I followed him out. Now we’re standing in the dark with the summer night around us and hisarm around my shoulders, which should be unremarkable and is not because his arm is approximately the size of a small tree and I am five feet tall and the absurdity of this ought to be funny and is instead just… right. Completely, inexplicably right.
The stars are out. Missouri in June, no clouds, the kind of sky that makes you remember the sky exists. We look at it for a while without talking. Below the property, the creek is running, and somewhere in the oaks the owl says its one thing again, and the night smells like cut grass and something sweet drifting from the snowball bushes near the mailbox.
“I should go.” He doesn’t move.
“Probably,” I say.
After another minute, he turns his head and looks down at me and says, “If I don’t leave right now, I’m not going to want to.”
I look up at him. “Then you should probably leave right now.”
“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t move for another few seconds. Then he takes his arm back slowly, as if he’s ordering it to obey, and straightens up. I feel the absence of him immediately.
