Page 32 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“There are things we’d want to—”

“Absolutely.”

Neither of us says a sensible word. He puts down the coffee. I put down the fork. And I could not tell you which of us moves first. His hands are in my hair, my hands are under his shirt. The stool scrapes back. He says, against my mouth, “Not the counter. It’s daylight. I want a bed and a door and no timeline.”

“The kids—”

“Sunday dinner. We have the whole—” He stops himself, forehead against mine, and does me the courtesy of not saying how many hours. “We have today.”

I take his hand. I walk him up his own stairs — me first, him following, his thumb moving over my knuckles like he’s making sure I’m still there. At the top I turn left, to my room. He follows me in under the slanted ceiling and shuts the door with a click that sounds louder than it is.

My room. My quilt, my two used drawers, my window with the crack of Saturday light. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it in the one room in this house that’s mine.

“Good call,” he says quietly, looking around like it matters to him. “I used to wonder whether you’d ever really move into this room. Whether you’d stay.”

“I moved in in September.”

“I know,” he says. “The suitcase went up on the shelf. I noticed.”

He noticed. Of course he noticed. I pull my sweater over my head — the good one, worn for four total minutes — and watch it land on the chair, and watch him watch me. Last night was all speed and flour and no chance to think. This is the opposite of that, and being seen in full daylight by Augustus Vaughn, unhurried, is almost more than my nervous system can take.

“Come here,” I say, before I lose the nerve, “and take your time.”

He takes his time.

The sweater goes first, then the jeans, then everything, and he undresses me slowly, carefully, one thing at a time. He pauses at each stage to look, until I’m flushed everywhere it shows. The scar crosses his knuckles when he draws the backs of his fingers down my sternum. I watch that hand travel over me — the exact hand from the photograph — and something in my chest pulls tight and sweet and terrible all at once. He lays me back on my own quilt in a rectangle of sun. He kisses my throat, my collarbone, the underside of my breast. Then his mouth finds the mole on my hip, and my heart holds still for one beat. That mole is the thing Juno cropped out of every frame for two years. It was never on the page. Now it’s the first place he lingers. His mouth keeps going after that, slow, in the wandering order of a man with no destination. I end up pulling at his shirt, because being the only naked one in daylight is a lot.

His shirt comes off. The forearms — rolled sleeves in my head for two months, and now not even a shirt. I put both palms flat on him and take my own tour. Ribs. Shoulders. The gray scattered across his chest, and the softness at his middle that hockey left behind when it went. He holds still and lets me look, and looking at him looking at me is its own plain, ordinary miracle.

“You’re staring,” he says.

“You’re worth staring at. I don’t think anyone’s told you that enough for it to stick.”

His breath does something at that. Then his mouth is back on me and the morning goes slow and golden and quiet — breath, the quilt shifting, the small sounds neither of us can help. He works his way down my body and settles in, hands under my hips. He takes me apart with a patience that borders on rude — long, lazy, stopping every time I get close. By the end I’m whispering threats into the sunlight, and he’s laughing quietly against me. When he finally lets me finish, I come with my hand pressed over my own mouth, two months of habit.

He climbs back up and pulls my hand away from my face, gently, and pins it to the pillow, fingers laced through mine.

“None of that,” he says, low. “Nobody’s home. I want every one of those.”

Then he slides into me, slow, watching my face the whole way, and the sound I make is small and true and entirely new to me. His eyes close for a second like he’s keeping it. And then we move together, easy, no rush — my heel sliding down the back of his leg, sun across his shoulders. His mouth stays at my ear, saying my name and then things that are not my name, quiet and specific and filthy in the most courteous possible way. It builds the way slow things build, from underneath. When I come it takes me by surprise — a long, rolling one, his name buried in his shoulder. He comes moments later with a shudder, my face held in both his hands like something that might tip.

The sun has moved a whole floorboard by the time either of us speaks.

“So,” he says, to the slanted ceiling. My head is on his chest. His heart is still going. “We were going to talk.”

“We were.”

“We should be careful.” He says it stiffly, like he rehearsed it in the car. “The kids. Carol. Deanna. Your job. My — everything. Until we know what this is, nobody should know there’s a this.”

“Careful,” I agree, into his chest. “Extremely careful. Beyond careful.”

“I mean it.”

“You’re saying it,” I say, “with my hair wrapped around your fingers.”

He looks at his hand. It stays right where it is. “I’m told I’m very disciplined,” he says. “It’s in articles.”

Neither of us asks the question that matters — careful until what, careful of what, what happens when careful runs out. The talk we should be having sits in the doorway of my room all morning, patient, and we just don’t look at it.