Page 45 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Fourteen months.” His mouth moves to the inside of my thigh between words. “Fourteen months I talked to a woman I’d have crossed the country for, and the whole time she was going to end up here. Under this exact lamp.” A slow kiss, higher. “I’m taking my time with the ending.”

When I’m past ready — shifting under him, pulling at his shoulders — he settles between my legs. He takes me apart with his mouth so slowly it should be illegal in this county. No teasing, no stopping. Just patience with a purpose, his tongue soft and certain on my clit, two fingers curling exactly where I taught him without ever saying a word. The first one rolls through me long and low, and he stays with me through every second of it. When I come down he’s watching me over the length of my own body, chin still resting on my hip.

“Lights on was the right call,” he says, hoarse.

“Come here.”

He takes the long way. Back up my body, mouth on everything he passes — hip, ribs, the underside of my breast, the base of my throat. By the end I’m restless and laughing and pulling at his shoulders with both hands.

“Gus.”

“You had a whole day of my patience,” he says, into my sternum. “You can survive two more minutes of mine.”

“I want it noted that I survived it badly.”

He comes up over me and I take him in hand and guide him, and we both watch that too, because tonight nothing gets hidden, not even this. He pushes into me slowly, so I feel all of it, and when he’s all the way there we just stop, perfectly still, breathing each other’s air.

“Hi,” I whisper. It’s all I have.

“Hi.” His eyes are wet at the edges, and he doesn’t hide that either. “I talked to you every night for over a year. I never once knew what you looked like. Look at you.”

We move the way you’d read something you never want to end. Long, deep, unhurried, my leg wrapped over his, his hand under my jaw, his thumb at my cheekbone. Every time it starts to build too fast, one of us slows it — him with a stilled breath, me with a hand flat on his chest. Getting there isn’t the point, and we both know it. In between there are words, whispered right against skin. My name, over and over, like he’s making up for fourteen months of Juno. His, from me, because I can finally say it with everything attached. At some point I roll him under me and sit up in the lamplight and let him look. All of me. No crop, no frame, no angle. The sound he makes is half wonder and half grief for the time we lost. I ride him slowly with his hands laced through mine. Deep, rolling, no hurry left anywhere in the world. The lamplight is on all of it — on me, on his face, on the place where we’re joined — and neither of us looks away from any of it.

“Talk to me,” I say, moving on him. “Tell me something true.”

“There’s nothing left to tell,” he says, wrecked. “You know all of it now. You’re the only person alive who knows all of it.”

The build comes up from so deep it scares me a little, and I say so.

“I’ve got you,” he says. “Both of you. Go.”

I break looking straight at him, long and rolling and complete, and it pulls him with me. His hands hard on my hips. My name breaking in half in his mouth — June, the real one — like it’s the answer to something he’d been asked all his life.

After, we lie tangled in the light neither of us moves to turn off. His heart under my ear finds its slow gear. Sleep is available. I don’t want this to be over yet.

“I can hear you being awake,” he says, eyes shut.

“I’m hungry.”

He opens one eye. “It’s almost three.”

“I know what time it is.” I’m already reaching for his shirt, which is how his shirts get lost. “Come downstairs. I want to show you something.”

The kitchen at three in the morning has always been mine alone — my hour, my place, in every house I’ve ever worked in. Tonight, for the first time, I’m sharing it. He sits at the counter in his flannel pants while I do it properly. Rice from the good pot, day-old and fried hot. One egg each on top, edges crisp, yolk soft, soy sauce in a thread. Two plates. I have made this exact meal a hundred times, in four cities, in every bad year I’ve had, and I have never once made it for another human being.

I put his plate down in front of him. “Rice and a fried egg. This is what I eat when the night is too big. I ate it the night my mother died. I ate it the night I paid off the last of the debt, and the night before my first shift on Velvet. And in November — the night you told me about her — I ate it three feet from where you’re sitting.” He goes still, fork down, listening with everything. “Every bad night of my life, this meal has gotten me to morning. It has never once let me down. And I have never made it for another person. So.”

“So,” he says, quietly. “You’re introducing me to something important.”

“The most important meal I know. Don’t let the egg get cold.”

He eats it the way he heard the Winnipeg breakfast — like it’s the nicest thing anyone has given him all week. The yolk gets broken with the ceremony of a man cutting a ribbon. He has seconds. In the freezer, right on schedule, the ice maker grinds, and produces, and Brenda’s cubes rattle down into the bin like applause from the cheap seats.

“She approves,” he says.

“She’s known longer than anyone.”

We wash the two plates together, him washing, me drying, three-fifteen in the morning, and the thought arrives without drama, the way the true ones do. The man I love knows exactly who I am now — the window, the debt, the site, all of it. I can’t remember the last time one person knew the whole of me. Not since before the layoff. Maybe not since my mother got sick. There’s no hidden version of me left, no part folded away where nobody can see it. All of me is standing in one warm kitchen, in a man’s shirt, drying a plate.