Page 106 of Havoc

He takes his time.

He takes so much time I say something ugly to him about it and he laughs against my collarbone and takes more, and I get my hands in his hair and tell him exactly what I want in words my mother would have gone to confession about, and he does all of it, and he is not in a hurry about one single part.

There's a mark on my hip from a countertop nine days ago that's gone yellow at the edges. He finds it with his thumb and stays there.

"Eli."

"Yeah."

"Don't stop doing that."

"Wasn't fixin' to."

Somewhere in the middle of it I get my hand around the back of his neck and pull him up so he's looking at me, and I hold him there, and neither of us says anything for about four seconds.

"Say it," I say.

"Say what?"

"You know what."

He puts his forehead against mine.

"I love you," he says. "I ain't said that to anybody since I was fifteen years old and I ain't sure I got it right then."

"You got it right."

"How do you know?"

"Because you said it in a house with nothing in it," I say, "to a woman with nothing left, and neither one of us has got a single reason to be lying."

Afterward he falls asleep on his back with one arm over his eyes and the other one under my neck, and I lie there in ninety degrees with my hand flat on his chest counting it go, and there is a piece of black leather with white stitching sitting on the kitchen table nine feet away.

* * *

Sunday morning, I open the refrigerator for the milk.

Four pounds of butter.

Four one-pound boxes stacked two by two on the middle shelf where a twenty-one-year-old boy put them himself on a Sunday morning three weeks ago because a man on a telephone said how the hell would I know, Cricket.

I stand there with my hand on that door for a long time.

The milk's gone over. The bread's green. The eggs I threw out the day I left because I knew I wasn't coming back and I couldn't stand the idea of them going bad in a house with nobody in it.

The butter's fine. Butter keeps.

I could throw it out. That's a thing a person does. It's been three weeks and nobody would know and nobody would ask and it would be the sensible thing.

Havoc comes in behind me, barefoot, and stops.

He doesn't say anything.

He stands there in a doorway in his own kitchen and looks at four boxes of butter on a middle shelf, and I hear him breathe out through his nose, once, hard.

"Leave it," he says.

"I'm not throwing it out."