Page 135 of Graceless

He pushed inside me slow.

The stretch of him. The heat. The sound we both made — his forehead dropping to mine, a tremor going down the whole architecture of him, ten thousand years of discipline arriving at one bed in Bensonhurst — and he held there, all the way in, until I could breathe again.

Then he moved.

Deep. Unhurried. Nothing like the beach and everything the beach had promised — no goodbye in it, no secret under it, nothing held back anywhere in the length of him. The headboard found the wall and kept time. My nails found his back, the two old scars, the only receipts. His voice found my ear, saying my name, the whole name, like a vow with one word in it.

"Harder," I said.

He stilled. Lifted his head. Looked at me — the question, the leash, the last inch of it.

"I'm cleared," I said. "All restrictions lifted. Harder."

The sound he made was not a human sound, and then there was no more slowly anywhere in the room — the bed frame arguing with the wall, his hand fisted in the quilt beside my head, tendons standing, all that held-back power finally spending itself and me rising to meet every stroke of it, loud, shameless, Donnie and the pipe and the whole borough be damned.

"Look at me," I said.

He did. Blue burning an inch away, nothing banked, nothing hidden, every century of him wide open.

"I love you," I said, straight into it. "I love you, Raq."

It broke him.

He came apart with a sound like a wall coming down, his whole strength shaking over me, and I went with him, looking into all that burning blue the entire way, his name in my mouth and mine breaking in half against my neck.

After, he stayed — forehead to my shoulder, heart going slow and enormous against mine, his hand already back on the curve of my belly like it had appointments there. The ten o'clock light had become the noon light, and neither of us had anywhere in creation to be.

"You said it," he said, into my shoulder.

"I said it."

"Say it again."

"Greedy." I turned my head and put my mouth to his ear and gave it to him slow, the way he gives me the true ones. "I love you. I loved you at the stoop and I loved you furious on that couch and I loved you standing on my roof with the whole sky coming. Now you know. Plan around it."

His arms closed, and the laugh moved through both of us — the real one, the rare one, wrecked and warm.

"So," I said, into his hair. "Normal activity."

His laugh moved through both of us — the real one, the rare one, wrecked and warm.

"I will write the doctor a card," he said.

We lay there while the noon light moved. Under my palm his heart went on at its enormous unhurried pace, a clock built for a different span than mine — a body five days past a war and smooth as the day I met it, while my hospital bracelet was barely in the trash — and the thought arrived the way the true ones do, quietly, without asking.

"Raq."

"Mm."

"I'm going to get old."

The stillness came into him. Not the wall — the other one, the listening one.

"Yes," he said.

"And you're not."

"No."