Page 57 of Close Reading

One hand on her breast. One hand on her backside. Both at once. The playful, simultaneous double grab. The gesture arrives from my body before my mind has time to intervene, from a place in my muscle memory that I sealed twelve years ago and that has been, apparently, waiting. My mouth opens and the words come out before I can stop them:

“Double trouble.”

The words are in the room. The gesture is on her body, my hand on her breast, my hand on her backside, the double trouble, the thing that was mine and Lyra’s, the private joke, the intimate gesture, the last thing I associated with being loved before I stopped being loved in public on a Tuesday morning in a quad with an earring in my hand and my daughter in a stroller.

Priya laughs. She laughs because she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what the gesture is, what the words mean, where they come from. She laughs because the gesture is funny and sexy and perfectly timed and she returns it, one hand on my breast, one hand on my backside, both at once, and says, delighted: “Double trouble back.”

And my laughter stops.

The image arrives all at once. A detonation. Lyra’s hand on Bailey’s breast. Lyra’s hand on Bailey’s backside. The quad. The old-growth trees. The shadows on the grass. Eleven minutes until the tenure review. Sophia asleep in the stroller. The earring in my hand. The double trouble on my student in the middle of the quad where anyone could see.

The kitchen tilts. I brace myself on the counter. I am crying. This crying is the kind that starts without permission and does not ask how long it is allowed to stay. The helpless kind. The kind I swore I would never do again.

Priya does not ask what’s wrong. She puts her arms around me, all of me, her whole body wrapping around mine, warm and present and solid. She holds me against her chest and her hand is on my hair and she does not say what happened and she does not say are you okay and she does not say anything. She holds me. The holding is complete. The holding says: I am here. Take as long as you need. I am not leaving this floor.

I cry for a long time. I do not know how long. The crying empties something, a reservoir, a storage facility, a sealed container that has been pressurized for twelve years and that has, on this kitchen floor, in these arms, released.

When I can speak, I tell her everything.

The earring. The quad. Lyra and Bailey. The double trouble, the original, the gesture that was ours, the private language that I thought no one else knew. The tenure review. The whisper lecture. Sophia sleeping through the applause. The blowout. Bea in the trees with the tenure tray. The empty house. The cat litter. Sappho taken and Sophia left. The crying. The blazers at the dry cleaner. The decision: never again.

Priya listens. She holds me in the kitchen and she listens with her whole body, completely, without interruption. Some stories require the listener to be still and warm and present and nothing else, and she knows it. She had heard rumors, the public cheating, some drama, the student involved. She never knew the details. She never knew about Sophia in the stroller. She never knew about the whisper lecture. She never knew about Bea in the trees. She never knew that the gesture she just did—the playful, delighted, double trouble returned with love—was the thing that broke me twelve years ago and has just, on this floor, broken me open again.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I’m not sorry for doing it. I’m sorry for what she did with it. I’m sorry someone took something that was yours and used it to hurt you.”

She holds me tighter. The crying slows. Stops. Priya’s hand is in my hair. Stroking, slow. Her breath is warm on the back of my neck.

Then her hands move.

Slowly, carefully. She puts one hand on my breast. One hand on my backside. Both at once. The same gesture. The same placement. But the hands are different this time—tentative, light, a question asked with palms instead of words. Her hands are saying: I know what this means now. I know what it cost. I am putting my hands back where they were twenty minutes ago when everything was good, and I am asking if we can go back there.

The feeling is… complicated. I laugh. The laugh surprises me. It surprises Priya. I feel her hands tighten for a second, uncertain, and then relax when she hears the laugh and understands that the laugh is not rejection. The laugh is surprised. Priya’s instinct after hearing the worst story of my life is to put her hands back and try again.

That is so Priya. The stubborn, hopeful, unstrategic trying again of a woman who looks at ruined things and sees what can grow there. The laugh is for the trying. The laugh is for the absurdity of it, the gesture that was a joke becoming a wound becoming, in this kitchen, in these hands, a joke again, a new one. Ours.

“You’re ridiculous,” I say. My voice is rough.

“I know.”

“You just heard the worst thing that ever happened to me and your response is to put your hands back on my breast.”

“And your butt.”

I laugh again. The second laugh is closer to the real one, the one that has been getting easier and more frequent since September. I put my hands on her. One on her breast. One on her backside.

“Double trouble,” I say.

The words taste different. The words still carry the quad and the earring and the twelve years in their syllables. But they also carry this floor. This kitchen. This woman. The words can hold all of it, it turns out. The words are bigger than I thought.

She kisses me. The kiss is salty, the residue of the crying still on both our faces.

We stay in the kiss for a long time. There is nowhere else to be. The crying is over and her mouth is warm and tastes like chai and tears. Her hand is in my hair. My hand is on the back of her neck. The kiss deepens without either of us deciding to deepen it. The heat arrives like dawn, as a gradual brightening that you notice only when you realize you can see.

Her body shifts against mine. The shift is small, her hips pressing closer, her chest against my chest, and the warmth between us changes register. Tenderness discovering that desire had been in the room the whole time, waiting for the crying to finish.