Page 50 of Close Reading

“I’m sure,” I say. “I have been sure for an amount of time I am not prepared to disclose.”

She laughs. This laughter is just joy. Her joy at being here.

She pulls the sweater over my head. She does this slowly, giving me time, giving me the option to stop, the option present in the pace of her hands. The sweater comes off. The air hits my skin. I am standing in my bedroom in my bra and trousers and she is looking at me.

The looking.

She is looking at my body the way she looked at the passage I wrote about root networks: with attention, with the close reading of someone who cares about what they are seeing and who intends to see all of it. Her eyes move across my shoulders, the swell of my breasts above the bra, the curve and folds of my stomach, the width of my hips.

“God,” she says. Softly, to the room, to the air, to whatever part of the universe is responsible for the fact that she is here and I am here and the sweater is on the floor. She takes a deep breath. “God, Margot.”

The God, Margot undoes something. It is the ache underneath the tenderness. The sound of a woman who has been waiting for a long time and who is only now being allowed to have what she wanted. The cost of that waiting is in her voice. I put it there.

I reach behind my back. I unclasp the bra. I let it fall.

My breasts are bare. Heavy, full, the nipples hardening in the cool air and in the heat of her gaze. She steps forward. She puts her mouth on the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. The sensation, her lips on my skin, the warmth of her breath, the wet heat of her tongue tracing down to the hollow of my throat, empties my head. There is no sentence. There is her mouth and my skin and the need to be horizontal with this woman immediately.

I walk her backward to the bed, my hands on her hips, her mouth still on my throat.

We reach the bed. Her knees hit the mattress, and she sits. I stand above her, between her legs. Her hands on my skin and my hands finding the buttons of her blouse and her skin, warm, and the bra underneath, dark red, the same red as the blouse, chosen deliberately. A detail I catalogue because I am still me even now. The curve of her breast in my palm and the sound she makes when I touch her there, a sharp intake, and I want to hear that sound again.

She pulls me down, rolling me over. I am on my back. She is above me, her hair falling forward, her face close.

She touches me, without rush. Her hand on my breast, cupping the weight of it, the thumb circling my nipple with a slowness that is maddening and deliberate.

She begins to move lower. Her mouth tracing down my sternum, farther down to my stomach, the intention clear, and I⁠—

“Stay here,” I say. My voice is soft. “Stay close.”

She looks up. She reads me.

“I need your face,” I say. I cannot say precisely what I mean. “I need to see you. I need you— here. Close. I can’t—” I stop. I breathe. “If you’re down there and I’m up here I will lose the— I will go somewhere in my head and I don’t want to go there. I want to stay here. With you.”

The admission costs me something I can feel, a heat in my face that is not arousal but the flush of having said the unsayable thing, the thing the system was designed to prevent me from ever needing to say. I will go somewhere in my head. The sealed room. The architecture. The place I go when the vulnerability exceeds what the system can manage. It is the opposite of being here, and being here is the only thing I want tonight.

“Okay,” she says. Simply. No performance of understanding. No reassurance that might tip into pity. Just okay, the word that accepts the limit without examining it, without asking why, without making the limit a problem to be solved. She moves back up my body. She settles beside me, propped on one elbow, close, her face near mine, her breath on my mouth.

“What do you want?” she asks. The asking is warm. The asking is not clinical. The asking is a woman lying beside me in my bed with her hand on my stomach and her eyes on mine, asking me what I want in the same voice she uses to ask me what I think about a passage, with genuine curiosity, with the expectation that my answer will be interesting.

“Your hand,” I say. “Just your hand. Just—” the words are harder than they should be. Twelve years of not asking makes the asking almost impossible. “On me. Not inside me. Just— I don’t⁠—”

“I know,” she says.

The way she says it. I know. No pause, no recalibration, no flicker of disappointment. The ease of those two words, as though what I am asking for is not a lesser version of something else, as though the limit is not a limit but simply what tonight is. The ask becomes ordinary in the space of a breath, and the ordinariness is the kindness, the only way it could survive the asking.

“Hey,” she says. Her hand comes to my face. Her thumb on my cheekbone. “We’re just here. Just you and me and whatever this is.”

“This is terrifying,” I say.

She laughs. It lands on my mouth because her mouth is six inches from mine. “I know. You’re doing it anyway. You’re lying in this bed scared out of your mind, and you’re still here and you haven’t run to the kitchen to make tea and that is— Margot, that is everything. The tea can wait.”

I almost laugh. The almost laugh that has been getting closer to the real thing for five months. “The tea can always wait.”

“I’m going to remind you that you said that.”

“I will deny it.”

“I have witnesses.”