Her hand comes up and touches my face. Her palm on my jaw. Her thumb below my eye. And she says, "There you are."
I nearly lose it. My hips stutter. My arms shake. She pulls me down and kisses me and I bury my face in her neck. Her pussy spasms and I move faster, harder, and she matches me, her hips rising to meet every thrust, and the pressure builds and builds, and I can feel her tightening around me, getting close again.
Then she screams.
But it’s a different scream…
Terror.
Her eyes go wide and blank and she's not in the room anymore. Her body locks rigid under mine, every muscle contracting at once, her hands going from my arms to my chest pushing,shoving, her palms flat against me trying to get me off her. The sound coming out of her mouth isn't my name. It isn't English. It's a string of syllables in a language she doesn't speak, high and fractured, the sound of a child, and her eyes are open but she's not seeing me. She's seeing something else.
Someone else. Somewhere else.
Italian. She's screaming in Italian.
I pull out, immediately. I roll off her and put two feet of space between our bodies. She curls into a ball on the far side of the bed, her knees to her chest, her arms over her head. She's shaking so violently the mattress vibrates. The tapping is back. Her finger against her own forearm, so fast the sound is a continuous buzz against her skin. Grabbing a blanket, I pull it over her, tucking her in before grabbing my boxers and sliding them on.
I know what this is. Danila told me. The emotional content hits before the narrative context. She's feeling what was done to her before she remembers what was done to her. Something about the sex triggered a suppressed response. The vulnerability, the position, a man's body above hers, a physical sensation that her brain filed under a category it can't access yet.
I did this. I killed the Marinos. I cut the pills. I put myself in her bed.
And now she's curled in a ball screaming in a language she doesn't speak while her body remembers being hurt by people she can't see.
I don't touch her. I don't speak. I sit on the edge of the bed, two feet away, and I wait. The screaming stops after about thirty seconds. The shaking continues. The tapping continues. Her breathing is ragged, wet, the breathing of someone who's been crying without knowing they started.
"Grace.”
No response. The shaking continues.
"Grace. You're in your apartment. You're in your bed. It's Tuesday. The restaurant is closed. Javi went home early. You're safe."
Her breathing hitches. One of her hands releases its grip on her forearm. Her tapping slows. One beat. Pause. Two beats. Pause. There’s a ring of red where she gripped.
"I'm here," I say. "You're safe. Nobody is going to hurt you."
She uncurls. One limb at a time. Her face comes out from behind her arms, and her eyes find me in the dark. They're wet and red and terrified and confused. She looks at me and I don't know what she sees but she reaches for me.
Her hand finds my arm. Her fingers grip my bicep. She pulls, not hard, just pressure.Come here. Come closer.I move to her and lie down behind her and wrap my arms around her and her body is small and shaking against my chest and her finger taps my forearm in the slow rhythm that means the worst has passed.
"What happened?" she whispers.
"You had a flashback."
"A flashback to what? I don't have anything to flash back to. I don't remember anything."
I hold her tighter. My face is in her hair. She smells like shampoo and sex and salt from the tears she doesn't know she cried.
"Your body remembers things your mind doesn't," I say. And it's the truest thing I've told her, and the most incomplete, and the guilt of what I'm not saying sits in my chest next to her heartbeat.
"I was speaking another language," she says. "I heard myself. What language was that?"
I don't answer. If I answer, I blow everything open tonight, in this bed, with her naked and shaking and not ready. If I don't answer, I'm lying by omission to a woman I just realized I’m in love with.
"I don't know," I say.
The lie sits between us in the dark. Her tapping slows. Her breathing evens. Her body stops shaking. She presses back against me, her spine against my chest, and my arms tighten around her, and I just hold her.
She falls asleep against me. Her finger rubs my forearm in small circles in her sleep. Slow. Spaced. The rhythm of a body finding its way back to something it can trust.
