Page 51 of Close Reading

“There are no witnesses. We are alone in my bedroom.”

“I’m a witness. My hand is about to be a witness.”

The laugh arrives. The real one. In my bedroom, in my bed, with a woman’s hand on my stomach and my heart hammering and the wall not down—the wall is not down—but the window is open and her hand is reaching through it, and I am letting her reach. The letting is enough. The letting is tonight. Tonight does not have to be the whole story. Tonight is the first sentence.

She kisses me. Slower now, the urgency from the stairs settling into something more deliberate. She kisses my throat. The hollow at the base. She moves lower, and her mouth finds my breast and the sound I make surprises me, the willingness of it, the sound leaving my body without being vetted. Her mouth is warm and unhurried and she stays until my fingers are in her hair and my breathing has changed and I am not thinking about the wall or the window or any of it.

Her hand traces down my stomach. Slowly. The flat of her palm, the warmth of it on my skin. She traces the curve of my hip. The inside of my thigh, her fingers light, drawing a line that makes my legs open without my deciding to open them. She moves back up. Down again. She is learning the territory by feel, by attention, by patience I did not know a body could have.

“I’m so happy to be here,” she says. Against my skin. Simply, without architecture, without strategy. Just the thing, said into the warmth between us.

“I’m ready,” I say.

Her hand slides lower.

Her fingers find me. The first touch, light, exploring, her fingers learning the shape of me. Then she brings her hand to her mouth and wets her fingers and comes back, and the second touch is slicker, warmer, and my hips lift off the bed.

She strokes me. Slow, deliberate, her fingers learning the topography of me through attention and response. She finds the rhythm I need before I know I need it. She is reading my body like a text: closely, attending to what it is saying and what it is not saying. Her fingers are in the spaces between and the spaces are opening and I am losing language. I am a professor of Comparative Literature and I am losing language because a woman’s hand is between my legs and the hand knows what it is doing.

I make a sound. A sound from the place where the roar came from. She is looking at my face while the touching happens. Watching. Attending. Seeing.

My breathing has come apart. I am panting with my head back and my hips rocking against her hand in a rhythm she is matching and that is accelerating and that I could not stop if I wanted to. I want more. I want her pressure harder. The word: more. Not elegant. Not precise. A single syllable expelled from a body that has stopped consulting the mind.

She gives me more. Her fingers press and circle and the circling tightens and the pressure builds and my back arches off the bed and my hand is in her hair and my thighs are shaking. She maintains exactly the rhythm and pressure that produced the tremor, because she understands that when the experiment is producing results you do not change the variables.

And then, softly, against my temple, her lips brushing my skin: “God, Margot.” And I’m undone again. God, Margot. Still soft, with tenderness and wonder, but the ache is gone. And the two words are the gasoline on the fire that was already raging.

The orgasm arrives, not as an explosion but as a wave, slow at first, building from the place where her fingers are moving, spreading outward through my hips and into my stomach and up through my chest and into my face. My breathing stops—one held second, the body suspended at the crest—and then the wave breaks and my breath comes out as a sound I have never made, a sound that has been stored in the same place as the roar and the crying, and the sound fills the room. I look at her. I look at her while the wave moves through me and my hips press against her hand and my thighs tremble and my chest heaves and the orgasm takes everything the system was holding and releases it in one long, shuddering exhalation. She looks back. Her eyes on mine while my body comes apart in her hands. This looking is more intimate than the touching, more intimate than the sound, more intimate than the months of wanting now resolving into the simple fact of being here, with her, seen.

The wave recedes. I am breathing. She is breathing. Her hand is still on me, gentle now.

And I cannot stay here.

Here is the most exposed I have been in twelve years, laid bare, seen, held open, and the tenderness of it is almost unbearable. I need to move. I need my hands on something. I need to do something, because the doing is where I live, the doing is where my precision has a direction, and without direction I am just a woman lying in a bed with her composure in pieces.

I move. I rise over her. The shift surprises her. I can see it in the slight widening of her eyes as I change the dynamic. But she reads me. She always reads me.

“Hi,” she says softly, just meeting me where I am.

She is on her back and her hair is spread across my pillow and I am looking at her—her face, her throat, her chest, the dark red bra that matches the blouse that is somewhere on my bedroom floor, and I need this. I need the looking to be mine.

“Tell me what you want,” I say.

“Your mouth,” she says. No hesitation. “On my throat. Then lower.” She reaches up and takes my hand from where it’s braced beside her head and brings it to her breast. “Here first.” She holds my hand there for a moment, my palm against the warmth of her through the fabric, her heartbeat underneath. Then she slides my hand down. Over her ribs. Her stomach. Lower, until my fingers are at the waistband of her pants and her hips shift under my touch. “Then here.”

She is looking up at me, and she is not shy about any of this and— I want her. The want arrives without a system, without a framework, without the careful architecture I bring to everything. I just want her.

I kiss behind her ear, down to her neck, the hollow at the base. I unclasp the red bra, the matching, the deliberate choosing of this bra for this evening. The sight and feel of her breasts, impossibly soft and warm as they rest in my hands, in my bedroom in the lamplight produces a response in my body I did not anticipate. A heat. A hunger. I have been managing desire for this woman for five months in the abstract, the green sweater, the strip of skin, and the abstract is gone. There is nothing abstract about the curve of her breast or the dark of her nipple or how her chest rises with her breathing. This is a body. Her body. In my bed.

I kiss the slope of her breast and I take her nipple into my mouth and she arches, her whole body arches, and the sound she makes is a gasp that becomes my name—Margot—in a register I have never heard from her, lower, rougher.

I want to hear that sound again. I move lower. Her stomach, soft, the warm skin, moving with her breathing. Her pants are still on. I reach for the button and I pause.

“Yes,” she says. “God, yes.”

I unbutton. I unzip. She lifts her hips, and I slide the trousers down and her underwear with them. And there, a scar low on her abdomen, silver, horizontal. I press my mouth there, briefly. She inhales. I pull back. I want to look at her.

Her hips. The width of them, the curve from waist to thigh. Her thighs, full and strong, thighs that walk through forests and across campuses with the physical ease I have been watching since September. The dark hair between her legs. I am looking at all of this with the focused attention I bring to everything and the focused attention is, in this context, desire. The looking is the wanting.