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“You’re tense.”
“I’m fine.”
She ran her hand over his muscles with easy familiarity, like a hostler with a horse. “You shouldn’t be tense after that.” She narrowed her eyes. “You weren’t tense. You too were beautifully, blissfully relaxed. Then I fell asleep and you became tense. Do you not like this part?”
“What part?”
She sank back down. He rescued his arm as she lay on her side, head propped up, studying him. “Did you not intend to sleep with me? You prefer to have your own room for sleeping? Is that how you… Never mind, I suppose, if that is what you prefer.”
The sleeping part, as if it was simply one part of the experience. A continuous stream of holding her, feeling her arms around him, making love, sleeping, waking, eating, doing it again. Again and again and again.
Until she found something else to interest her and wandered away.
“No. I…” He wasn’t sure what to say.
“You want to leave? It must have been difficult for you, with me all over you like a blanket. Or am I the one who is supposed to leave?”
“No. I was merely … thinking.”
“Oh.”
His brain was tense too, moving everywhere, settling nowhere.
“Leo?”
“Hmm?”
“Would you like to tell me what you’re thinking?”
“No.”
“No. Of course not.”
“That is, I don’t know. Nothing in particular.”
Her hand drifted over him again, over his chest and shoulder and arm. His mind traced her touch, while his eyes stared at that little tear in the canopy.
“I can feel you leaving me already,” she said. “Ever since you walked into my studio four years ago, I have known that one of those visits would be your last. It is sad to know that last visit has been and gone.”
He made to sit up, but she pressed on his chest.
“Wait. Let me take this chance to speak. When we leave here, we’ll not speak again, except perhaps polite niceties when necessity demands it. You will … go about your life, and I shall miss you. That is all I wish to say. That I will miss you very much. I don’t know what I shall do without you.” She sighed and flopped down onto the pillows. “I suppose I shall have to eat more cake.”
“How comforting to know I’ll be so easily replaced.”
“Oh, not easily. It will have to be very fancy cake.” Then she laughed, a mirthless sound. “Listen to me, hiding behind a joke. As if things will not hurt me if I take them lightly. As a strategy, it is an utter failure. How does your strategy serve you?”
Her words were bouncing through his brain like the ball on a roulette wheel, and somehow his mouth said, “My strategy?”
“You hide behind your clothes.”
“We all hide behind our clothes,” he said. “That is the entire point of clothes.”
She sighed. “There it is. Your clever words, so you never give away anything of yourself. So very contained. Careful. Curated.”
She wasn’t touching him now. He missed the warmth of her hand. There were inches between them, close enough that he could feel her presence.
She truly saw him, didn’t she? Saw right through his defenses, his deceptions. She accepted him anyway. Juno always welcomed him, just as he was, and he needed that.
