Page 44

The soreness is back.

Different this time. This time I know why. This time the soreness has a face, a name, a body sleeping behind mine with his arm across my chest. The ache in my hips is the physical memory of his hips against mine. The tenderness in my thighs is the record of his body between them. Every piece of the soreness matches a moment from last night and the matching is a relief so complete that it reaches my eyes.

I blink and the gray light blurs for a moment.

Six days ago, I woke up sore and the soreness was a mystery. The trazodone. The dream. The body my sleeping brain invented to explain the ache. He told me, on the phone, that the soreness was chemistry. REM compression. Lactic acid. The explanation was clean. I believed it because believing it was easier than the alternative, which was that something happened in the dark that my body kept, my brain lost.

Now the soreness has a source. Now the ache has a reason and he’s lying next to me.

His breathing changes. The exhale near my neck shortens. His arm tightens across my chest.

"Hey." The word that starts every phone call, every midnight conversation, except now the word is coming from six inches away, from a mouth I can feel against my skin, and the closeness changes everything about it. The word is physical. The word has breath in it, warmth, the rasp of a voice I've been hearing through a speaker for two weeks delivered directly into my neck.

"Hey."

His hand moves from my shoulder to my stomach. His fingers spread, palm flat against my skin.

"What time is it?"

"Early. The light just started."

His mouth presses against my neck. My eyes close. The gray light goes dark behind my eyelids and all that exists is the pressure of his mouth, his hand on my stomach, Bean's weight on my ankles. The three points of contact that are holding me together.

"How do you feel?" His voice against my neck. The words traveling through the skin.

"Sore."

The pause. One second. Two.

"Good sore?"

"Yes."

His hand moves lower. Below my navel. The fingers slow, tracing the line of hair that leads down, the touch unhurried, exploratory. Not reaching for anything yet. Learning me in daylight, the body he touched last night in lamplight, the terrain mapped by feel now being confirmed by the November gray.

My hips shift and my legs open so that if he wants to reach down, he can.

"Milo." My name in his mouth. Against my neck. The vibration of the consonants traveling into my spine. "I want to see you."

"You're looking at me."

"Not your face." His hand stops. Just above the waistband of the sweats I put on after he fell asleep, the clean pair from the drawer, the ones I pulled on at 3:00 a.m. when I got up to pee and stood in the bathroom looking at my face in the mirror and didn't recognize myself. Not because I'd changed. Because I looked rested. Because I looked held. "I want to see you in the light. All of you. Last night was the lamp. This is different."

The gray light. The November morning. The difference between lamplight sex and daylight sex is the difference between reality and fantasy.

I turn over. His arm lifts to let me rotate and then settles back across my waist. We're facing each other. His face on the pillow, six inches from mine. The brown eyes. The jaw. The mouth that kissed me last night with a force that felt earned, accumulated, the pressure of two weeks of wanting released in a single point of contact.

"There you are," he says.

"Here I am."

His hand goes to my face. Thumb on my cheekbone. Fingers along my jaw. The hold is gentle but the intention underneath it isn't. His eyes are moving over my face, studying me.

"You're beautiful."

My hand goes to his chest. The ridge of bone under the skin. His heart is beating under my palm, steady, the rhythm of someone awake, calm, in no hurry to be anywhere else.

I kiss him. Slow this time. Last night was the collision. This is the after. My mouth on his, my hand on his chest, his hand on my face. The kiss builds from nothing, from the barest contact, our lips barely touching, the breath passing between us. His tongue finds mine and the sound I make is quiet, a hum that lives in my chest, and his hand tightens on my jaw.