Page 38 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“After.” Back down. This time I don’t stop. I stay with her through the wind-up and over the top, her heel pressing into my back, her whole body bowing off the quilt. The break rolls through her in dead silence, one long shaking breath at the end of it.

She comes down breathing like a sprinter and immediately starts plotting. I can see it happen — the eyes opening, the focus arriving. She pushes at my shoulder, and I let her turn us, and then she’s over me with her hair down and lamplight all over her. The look on her face is the one from the coat line. The fixing look. Aimed considerably lower.

“You said after,” she whispers. “It’s after.”

She starts at my throat and works down, taking her time at every place I named tonight — the chest, the ribs, the soft of my stomach, lower. When her mouth closes over my cock I say something to the ceiling that isn’t a word. She’s unhurried about it, thorough, wicked. One hand flat on my stomach to feel it jump. Eyes up the whole time, watching me the way I’ve been watching her all night, and that’s the part that wrecks me — being the one who’s seen. I last about two minutes before it stops being a thing I can survive quietly.

“Enough.” I haul her up the bed, and she comes up grinning, delighted with herself.

“Noted,” she says, in my voice.

When I slide into her at last we both go still for a second, forehead to forehead, her hands framing my face like she’s reading it in the dark. Then we move, slow and deep and deliberate, her leg hooked over my arm, the old bedframe silent under us. She’s soft and soaked around me, and every long stroke lands somewhere new. I can tell by her face. I have gotten very good at her face. When I shift her knee higher she bites down on nothing and her nails find my back. I do it again. I watch her the entire time. That’s the point tonight — I want her watched. I want her to feel what it’s like to be the one thing in the room a man can’t look away from, when he’s finally allowed to look.

“There you are,” I say, when her eyes come back to mine.

“Here I am,” she whispers, and tightens around me, and after that there are no more sentences. Just her name and mine, traded back and forth at zero volume, until she breaks a second time and takes me with her. My face buried in her hair. Her hand gripping the back of my neck like the world is trying to take one of us somewhere.

After, she lies on my chest doing the thing where she draws on my sternum with one finger. Words, I think, though she’s never once admitted it. The furnace hums, and somewhere below us Brenda drops a fresh round of ice, fully reformed, showing off.

“Mitch figured us out tonight,” I say, to the ceiling. “And Carol recognized the braid.”

Her finger stops. “Gus.”

“I know.” I catch her hand and hold it flat over my heart. “I’m not asking you for anything tonight. I’m just reporting the day, the way you taught me. All fine. Margot ate seconds. Two people are onto us.”

Her laugh comes out shaky. She props her chin on my chest and looks at me in the dark. I watch her line up a sentence and set it back down — twice. I let her keep it, whatever it is, because I have a few of my own I’m not saying yet.

Carol told me to be careful. Mitch told me to decide. Lying in a narrow bed with June’s heart going against my ribs, I have news for both of them: it’s decided. It’s been decided for longer than I’ve admitted to anyone in this room, including me. And I’m done being careful. That ended tonight, when I stepped on the loud stair and let the whole house hear me coming to her.

Sooner or later, somebody outside this house is going to find out. The only question left is what it takes from us when they do.

June

Christmas morning starts at six-forty, with a five-year-old standing on my bed.

Not beside it. On it. “He came,” Teddy reports, loud enough to wake the whole street. “He CAME.”

Santa still comes to this house. Margot, nine, guards the story for her brother like a sworn officer of the court. It’s the first thing all month that’s made me want to cry in the good way. By seven the living room is ankle-deep in paper. Teddy unwraps like he’s putting out a fire. Margot unwraps tape-first, folds each sheet into a square, and stacks the squares, and nobody has ever asked her why, because the answer is visibly that she’s Margot.

I’m staff, technically. I have a contract that says so, and a chair that says otherwise — the good one, closest to the tree. Gus steered me into it with a hand between my shoulder blades that lasted half a second longer than staff gets. He’s in a robe with his coffee, unshaved, directing who opens what next, and the sight of him like that catches me somewhere under the ribs. I look at the tree until I can trust my face again.

Santa delivered the scorpion candy — one bag, the same brand from the market in October. Teddy has been campaigning for it ever since that trip, and I may have passed the request along. He holds the bag up like a trophy fish and does not open it. He doesn’t want to eat it yet. He just wants to own it for a while.

Teddy’s gift to me is an envelope, homemade, the glue still tacky. Coupons. ONE FREE WAKE UP WERE I DONT TALK. ONE SPIDER REMOVAL (SMALL). ONE HUG, ENY TIME, NO QUESTIONS. They never expire, he explains. Even the hug one. Especially the hug one. I put the envelope somewhere safe and don’t use any of the coupons yet. Teddy was clear that coupons are supposed to be saved for when you really need them.

Margot hands me hers last, wrapped in a smoothed-out sheet of paper she saved from her birthday in the spring, because Margot doesn’t waste anything. It’s a hand mirror. Drugstore, pink handle, three dollars of mirror.

“For the back,” she says, to the tree.

The room goes on without us for a second.

“For the back,” I agree, when I can.

My gifts land too. The next girl-detective book for Margot — number eleven. I’ve been buying them for her since October, and neither of us has ever said so in front of anyone, because making it official would embarrass her. It’s our arrangement. A dinosaur encyclopedia for Teddy with a fold-out page, so he can stop borrowing dinosaur books from his school friend Wyatt. For Gus, publicly, in front of the children: a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST COOK. He reads it, looks at me across the wreckage, and says, “Accurate,” in his flat, serious business voice, which makes it funnier. Margot almost smiles at the mug — which, from Margot, is a laugh.

That night, kids down and wired and down again, the real exchange happens in the kitchen, in the stove light, where everything in this house happens. Mine first: a sandwich bag with a bow on it. Inside, a refrigerator magnet from the Sea-Tac gift shop, a cartoon salmon wearing sunglasses. He laughs from somewhere under the sternum and sticks it on the freezer door, dead center.

“You said she was getting a magnet.”