“That, too.” Wyatt grins. “But it happens to be true.”
“I’ve had a baby. I’m old—”
“I’m three years older than you.” He cups my face in his hands. “Dawn. If it will make you feel better, I could show you my appendix scar, and where I think I’m going bald, and you could point out your stretch marks and wrinkles. But I’d much rather pay attention to all the bits of you that are glorious.”
I pull on his hair. “I don’t have wrinkles. And you’re not going bald.”
“Thank God,” Wyatt says, and he peels off my shirt. His hand skims up my side, beneath the lace of my bra. My heart beats under his palm.
I pull away the sheet and grab hold of him, stroking, watching the tendons in his neck stretch as he arches back. “Not yet,” Wyatt murmurs, and he flips me onto my back. He kisses me, long and slow and lovely.“Entirely as a god have you come into being,”Wyatt quotes.“Your head is Re. Your face is the Opener of Ways, your nose is the divine Jackal…”
He brushes a kiss over my closed eyes.“Your two eyes are the two children of Re-Atum. Your tongue is Thoth. Your throat is Nut. Your neck is Geb.”
His hands close over my arms; his tongue circles my breast.“Your two shoulders are Horus. Your breast is He Who Pleases the ka-spirit of Re.”He glances up. “Side note: It also pleases me a good deal.”
I feel him sliding his palms up my thighs.“Your two sides are Divine Utterance and the Divine Scarab…your stomach is the Dual Lion…”He spreads me wide, bending my legs so that he can settle between them.“Your bottom is Isis and Nephthys,”he whispers.“No part of you lacks in divinity.”His mouth closes over me.
In that moment, I feel every second I’ve missed with him. He breathes life into me. When Wyatt lifts his head and moves up and slides into me, I wrap my arms and my legs around him, as if that is all it would take to keep him there.
After, I lie on my side, with Wyatt curled behind me, and he laughs when I yawn. “We used to do that three times a night,” I say.
“Maybe weareold,” he concedes.
I test myself, poking through my thoughts for regrets—but I don’t find any. There is no guilt in me, no rush of shame.
But what happens, now that it’s done?
Wyatt spreads his hand over the round of my belly, the five pounds I cannot ever lose. “I would have liked to see it, you know.”
“Me getting fatter?”
“You having a baby,” he says.
I press his hand flat and close my eyes so tight that it hurts. Then I turn in his arms, so that we are face-to-face. “I want you to think of mewhen,” I say. “The second before a kiss, when you’re so close you can’t see clearly and you can feel your pulse in the air. Then.”
Wyatt leans in by inches. “Now?” he whispers.
“Now.” I nod.
I kiss him until I feel him stirring against me, until I smell him on my skin, until I can see him when my eyes are closed. When we finally break apart, Wyatt is smiling at me, lazy. He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Where are you off to, that I’ll have to remember you?”
I kiss him again, so that I can swallow my answer.
—
NEHEH DJET.Time in a circle, time in a line. Ancient Egyptians believed the world was structured both ways. Lying in the arms of the man I used to love, and maybe never stopped loving, I am painfully aware that ages have passed—and at the same time, it feels like yesterday.
I wonder what will happen to me now, if I have to stand in the Hall of Two Truths and defend my actions. If I’ll qualify asakhu,the blessed dead, or if I’ll just be damned,mut,gone. If I’ve done something unforgivable, or if I’ve moved closer to the person I was meant to be with.
In the Netherworld, the blessed dead and the damned share the same space. In the New Kingdom’s Book of Gates—a later funerary text—there is a lake, which is cool water for the blessed dead but feels like a lake of fire for the damned.
I fall asleep fitfully, thinking of fire and drowning, and wake up when the door to Wyatt’s room bursts open. I jackknife up, forgetting where I am for a moment, and Wyatt has the grace to throw the sheet over me. Sunlight floods the tiny room, and I think maybe we have overslept, but then I remember it is Friday, our day off. Alberto is standing in the doorway, and my stomach flips, thinking that I have finally given him a reason to hold me in contempt. But he doesn’t even seem to notice me. “Dailey’s here,” he bites out.
“Fuck.” Wyatt leaps out of bed, grabbing clothes from where they’ve been draped on his desk chair, hopping into his boots. He scrubs his hands through his hair, trying to rake it into a semblance of order. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,fuck,” he mutters, streaking through the hallway and leaving me behind.
Alberto blinks at me in Wyatt’s bed. “You’d better get dressed.”
I wonder if Wyatt has told his benefactor that I asked to work at the site, if he is going to be in trouble for hiring me without getting approval first. “Is Dailey going to be upset to find me here?”
