Page 40 of Havoc

"Nobody has touched me since April. Nobody. My mother died on a Tuesday and after the funeral I stood in a kitchen and shook forty people's hands and that's the last time anybody put a hand on me on purpose until you crouched down in a road and took my boot off." The wind again. "So some of this is that. I want you to know I know it. I'm not going to pretend I've been swept away by anything, because I haven't, I'm thirty-three and I've been awake the whole time."

"Alright."

"And the rest of it isn't that." I make myself keep looking at him. "The rest of it is you, and I've had six days to talk myself out of it and it hasn't taken, and I'm tired. I'm so tired of being careful. Careful is what I did for four years and it bought me a shoebox."

He hasn't moved.

"So I'm going to ask you a question," I say. "And you're going to answer it, and whatever the answer is, tomorrow we're both going to get up and go back to being whatever this is. Do you want me to go inside?"

The frogs.

"Say the question straight," he says.

"Do you want this."

"Yes."

No pause on it. Not a half second. It comes out of him the way something comes out that's been sitting behind a man's teeth for six days.

"Then get up," I say.

He gets up.

And the careful thing goes out of him somewhere between the chair and me, and I want that on the record too, because I saw it happen and I wanted it to.

We don't make it out of the doorway.

My back goes into the frame and the whole house takes it, and I think about the door frame he told me about eleven minutes ago and then I stop thinking about anything at all. His mouth is on mine and his good hand is in my hair at the back and the taped one is at my hip, and neither of us is gentle, and neither of us was ever going to be.

He tastes like coffee gone cold.

Some sound comes out of me I've never made.

"Say it again," he says against my mouth. "Say it out loud, Lennox, I ain't⁠—"

"Yes."

"Say the whole⁠—"

"Yes. Now shut up."

The shirt goes over my head and my hands are hauling at his belt and I have never once in my life been this person, the one who wrecks a doorway with a man she's known nine days, and the whole time the honest part of me is standing off to the side taking notes and it's saying there you are.

He gets both hands under me and I'm up off the floor and against the frame with the wood cutting into my shoulder blades, and it hurts, and I don't say anything about it because I want to feel it tomorrow.

He says my name once and there's nothing left in it. No flat. No control. Nothing that man carries around in front of ten other men, gone, all of it, and what's underneath is so much rougher and so much younger than I was ready for.

Then it isn't a doorway anymore, it's a wall in a dark hallway, and it isn't slow, and neither of us pretends it's anything but what it is.

He holds on like a man going under.

I hold on harder.

Afterward we sit on the floor of the hallway with our backs against opposite walls and our legs tangled up in the middle because it isn't wide enough for two people to sit in it properly.

Neither one of us says a word for about four minutes.

There's a mosquito somewhere. The kitchen light is on around the corner and it throws a long yellow rectangle down the boards and it's the only light in the house.