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It wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud. It was true.
He moved like he had all night and no game in the morning, drawing back slow enough that I chased him and then giving it back before I could complain, and the sounds coming out of me were low and broken and not one of them arranged. His mouth found the spot under my ear.
“Tell me,” he said. “Whatever it is. I’ve got it.”
It came up out of me just as the book had an hour before, because he’d left the door open and stood there long enough.
“I don’t want to go back to my side of the wall,” I said. “I lie there at four in the morning and I write and I think about this. I’ve been thinking about this since October. I built a life once out of being useful to a man and I swore I’d never do it twice, and then you went and cut a banana into seven pieces.” My breath broke on a long slow stroke of him. “Tell me I’m not here because you need me.”
“You’re not.” It went into my throat, certain, no gap in it. “You’re here because I want you. Those are different and I know the difference cold.” He slid a hand under the small of my back and tipped the angle up, and I lost the thread of my own argument. “Keep talking. I’ve got every word.”
I couldn’t keep talking. He’d asked for the uncareful truth and I’d handed it over, and then the truth stopped being words. The slow wind of it tightened low and pulled, and he knew before I did, he always knew, and he didn’t rush it, he kept the same deep unhurried rhythm and let it take me past where I could finish a sentence or keep a face or stay in one piece.
“There it is,” he said against my skin. “Let me have all of it.”
It didn’t crash. It climbed. It drew up tight and then let go in long slow pulses that clenched me hard around him and dragged a sound up out of me I’d never once made for anybody, open and high with his name broken in the middle of it, and he held me down into it with his palm flat at the base of my spine and his mouth at my throat and wouldn’t let me curl away from a second of it.
He said my name against my pulse, again and again, which from a man of three words at a time was a landslide, and then he went over right behind me, deep and shaking and almost silent, his forehead dropped into my shoulder and my name coming apart against my skin, and I held his face to my neck and stayed with him through all of it.
After, in the dark, he didn’t move off me. He only breathed, with his mouth on my shoulder, and said, “There she is,” and I started to cry a little and laugh a little at the same time, and he put his thumb along my cheekbone and wiped it and didn’t ask which one it was.
We put the last presents under the tree at midnight, on Christmas Eve, the two of us, me in his shirt and him in nothing but sweatpants, assembling a kitchen set for Iris by the light of the tree because the instructions were a war crime and the set had forty screws.
His phone lit on the floor between us while he fought the oven door, and because it was face up I read the exchange as it happened.
Cole: merry christmas to my favorite line of men and also theo
Theo: Joyeux Noël, imbécile.
Merry Christmas, idiot. I didn’t need French for that one.
Cole: he called me a name but he said merry christmas first so it balances
Kasperi: my mother wants to know if the nanny is still there over the holidays
Kasperi: onko lastenhoitaja vielä siellä. that is how she said it. same question, louder
Kasperi: I did not ask her to ask. she has her own interest in this
Cole: mrs mäkinen wants to know too?? this is bigger than me now
Griffin: leave it alone, it’s christmas
Cole: I am leaving it alone, festively
Eli picked up the phone, pressed his thumb to the screen once, and set it back down.
Cole: [Eli left the chat]
Cole: [Cole added Eli to the chat]
Cole: on this holy night
Eli turned the phone face down on the carpet without a word and went back to the oven door, and I bit the inside of my cheek and handed him a screw he hadn’t asked for yet but was going to need.
Iris had left Gerald a snack by the fireplace, next to the one for the man in the suit, because Gerald got equal billing or there was trouble. There was a blue plate out. There was always a blue plate out. Eli had set it without a word while my back was turned, the same as he set out the coffee cup, one of the hundred quiet chores he handled and never mentioned, and I stared at the blue plate with three cookies on it for a stuffed dragon and had to sit down on the floor among the screws.
“You okay?” he said, not glancing up from the plastic oven.
