by CD Reiss
I’d intended to bring him behind the headstone where he’d left me, but the stone, and all the others around it, was covered in burned-out branches. I couldn’t recreate the moment for him or myself. I stopped at the white fence. “I…”
I couldn’t finish, because the realization hit me like a cyclone that started in my heart and twisted through my mind. The scene of my past was blocked by the fires of my present.
“What is it, Catherine?”
“It’s not the same.”
He nodded, and I knew he wasn’t stalling. He nodded because he understood me. Maybe I never knew if he was having exactly the same thought.
I tore my eyes away from the web of bushes and looked the man in the face. “We’re different. Things that happened, we’ve done things. And they changed us. We can’t go back. We don’t get a redo.”
“But we have now.”
“What if I don’t love you now?”
“Are you saying you don’t?”
“I’m saying I don’t know.”
“I think you will.”
“You filled a space for me. What if I don’t have that space anymore? What if it’s all filled up already?”
He touched my face with a tenderness that melted the skin underneath it. I wanted him, but I didn’t need him.
“Chris—” My voice broke. “What if now isn’t enough?”
“My now wants your now. Come forward with me. All you’ve done in this world has made you the woman that would have been too much for the Chris you knew. Back then, I needed simple answers, and you gave me one. That answer, money, it isn’t the answer anymore.”
I put my hand on his chest and bit my lip against giving him an easy response. We both deserved better.
“It’s not simple anymore, is it? Back then, you gave me reason to be my own woman, and when you left, I became that woman. I don’t have any simple answers now.” I felt his heart beating through his jacket. Felt the life in him fighting to get out. I wanted to see that life. “I don’t know if I love you, but I want to know the man you are and I want to see the man you’ll become.” My tears got cold in my eyes, and I blinked them away. They weren’t tears of disappointment, despair, or tension. They were tears of relief. “That’s not the same as it was, is it?”
He wiped a tear away with his thumb. “It’s not the same. We won’t know until we try. I’m not going to ask if you still want me. You can’t still want that kid. But do you want me now? Because the man I am now wants the woman that you are now.”
I barely had a voice to answer, so I whispered, “Yes.”
His kiss was as tender as his touch, gently greeting my lips. The greeting turned into something warmer, then hotter, as his tongue broke past my teeth, touching mine, connecting us at the mouth in a way our hands could not. I clutched his jacket, his hair, wanting to know his body as well as I knew my own.
He pushed against me, hip to hip, hitching me against him until my legs were wrapped around his waist. He carried me up the back porch. Still kissing, I reached for the doorknob and opened it. We were locked together through the house, up the stairs, and I directed him to the room at the end of the hall. The room with the made bed and the boxes of old letters. Groping him, kissing whatever piece of skin I could find, I tasted the present and the unknown future.
When he closed the door, the hall light cut off. Moonlight streamed through the windows. We undressed each other like animals getting past our prey’s skin, reaching for the vital organs.
I’d never felt this before. I’d wound my entire emotional life into despair and unworthiness, and suddenly they were coins flipped to passion and desire. His body was firm and powerful and my body was melting into liquid fire, bubbling at the edge of the pot, lid tapping and rattling.
Laying me on the bed, he said, “You are more beautiful than I ever imagined.”
He dropped his pants, and his erection was a singular perfection. Finally, I’d have it again. He crawled on the bed and drew his hand down my body, between my breasts, over my belly. I felt as though I’d never been touched before. Not by him. Not by this man. My body answered his hand by arching, my blood answered by closing the gap between us.
I gasped for him, saying, “Yes. Now,” without making the words.
“I want you right now,” he whispered with a voice as thick as the darkness. “And I’m going to have you, but I’m not rushing. We both waited too long.”
“I have all night.”
“Good,” he sighed into my breast, kissing around the base, working his way to the peak.
He sucked until it was hard. I squirmed, but he took his time, doing the same to the opposite side. His lips worshipped my belly and hips, my thighs and my knees. He pulled them apart and ran his tongue along the inside of one, then the other. My fingers were woven through his hair, gripping tight when he got close to my center.
He paused with his mouth so close to my core I felt his breath on my wet skin. I held my own breath until my lungs hurt. My exhale was a whimper. His voice was the rustle of the grass in the wind. My name was a prayer.
His lips were reverent, soft, slow. His tongue ran slowly along my seam, not just offering pleasure but tasting me, as if the pleasure wasn’t mine but his. When it reached my clit, the darkness behind my eyelids lit up with lightning and my ears rushed with my own cries. The pot bubbled over, hissing against hot metal.
And still, he was slow and deliberate. My legs opened wide for him, and my body bent and thrust with an orgasm that rushed hard and fast after thirteen years of waiting. Lifting my hips off the bed, I twisted, and he grabbed me by the thighs so he could keep his face between my legs as I flipped.
“You have to stop,” I lied, pushing myself onto his face and coming again. I fell back, away from him. “Oh, my. My God.”
Resting his weight on one elbow, he smiled at me with a slicked face. “I wouldn’t have known how to do that when I was sixteen.”
I climbed on top of him, straddling his shaft as it lay against the length of my seam. “I can’t wait to find out what else you know.”
“This.” He shifted my hips forward then back, sliding against me.
I followed his rhythm, aroused all over again. I bent and kissed him. “Can you come like this?”
“I want to fuck you.”
Sitting straight, I rode him, taking control of the pace. “You’re thinking about protection.”
“Yes.”
“I just finished my period.”
“Kismet.”
I whispered in his ear. “I also got a condom from Harper.”
We laughed, and I reached into the nightstand drawer. We put it on.
Lifting myself a little, I gave him room to guide himself to my entrance. I placed my weight down slowly, letting him into me, feeling my body react to his presence.
We were joined again, but this time it was without fear, without sneaking. We weren’t two romantic kids against the world, but two people. No more. No less.
He pushed his body against mine, letting me set the rhythm and wrapping himself around me when I leaned into him. My lips, his lips. My heart. His heart. One breath. One moment inside of a life.
My orgasm blossomed like a rose, opening from a tight bud into a splay of petals and pleasure. I cried into his neck, and he thrust hard into me twice, then sucked in a breath, knotting his brows and arching his neck to look me in the face as he filled me.
This was what he sounded like when he came.
This was what he looked like now.
It was beautiful.
Chapter 34
CHRIS
When I woke, the sky was just turning chambray on the eastern horizon. Catherine was wrapped in my arms, her body rising and falling. A long strand of light brown hair lay across her cheek and over her eyes. I pulled it away and tucked it back with the rest of her curls so that I could see her face in the sunrise.
I disentangled myself to go to the bathroom, still naked and aware of Harper's footfal
ls in the hallway on the other side of the door. As I swung my legs over the bed, my foot hit a dusty, desiccated cardboard box. The flaps weren’t sealed or puzzle-locked. I had a feeling I knew what was inside before I even peered in. From above, in the dim light, it looked like a box of garbage, but it didn't take long to see the angled seams of envelopes.
My letters.
I'd written them. I bought the paper, the pens, paid for postage. I'd licked the envelope flaps with my spit after dumping all of my heart’s desires onto the pages. And yet I didn't feel like I had the right to look inside. They were Catherine's property. My heart, on a page, delivered to her. A moment in time that I thought was my own was now her possession.
When I got out of the bathroom, she was roused a little, half sitting up but still so drowsy that her body was limp.
“Good morning,” I said, getting on the bed with her.
“Good morning.” She put her arms around my neck. “I hate to bring this up, but I haven't really thought about it. And I think I have to.”
I knew what she was going to say before she even said it. “I'm a free man. I could be somewhere else, but I don't have to be and I don't want to be.”
“No one is in New York waiting for you?”
I kissed her. “They’ll send out a search party at some point. Did you ever want to go to New York?”
She didn't exactly push me away, but she didn't get closer either. “I can't just run off to New York.” She smiled, and a little laugh escaped her throat. “That's ridiculous. I can do whatever I want. People still need me here, but they won't for long. I was thinking, just a week ago, that I can go anywhere and do anything. I was going to go to London. The places I've never been. And I don't know why I'm hesitating with you.”
She was so honest with herself and with me. I could love this woman if I only knew who she was. And I was sure—positive—that she would love me too.
“We have a gap,” I said. “A big gap to fill where our lives have been. We have to string ourselves across it.”
“Christopher Carmichael, I didn't know you were such a lyrical man.”
“Didn’t I talk some shit about flying monkeys?”
“You were a poet in the making.”
“Then let me grind these rusty gears back to life.”
She shifted to her side, propping herself on her elbow. “I’m ready.”
I knew what I wanted to say, but not how to say it. No matter what I came up with, it was something I’d heard before or was too small in scope. I wanted to draw around us with permanent marker and show her the beauty of everything inside the line.
“We were destined. I don’t want to make the mistake of saying that there’s a now us and a future us. We were always in the stars, and for the past thirteen years, we were just waiting for the planets to catch up.”
“That’s not bad for a hedge fund manager.”
“I’m not a hedge fund manager anymore.”
“Really? What are you?”
“Yours.”
Chapter 35
CATHERINE
The counter was too crowded. I couldn’t fit a Dixie cup between the pots and bowls. Mrs. Boden arrived. She was over ninety and wore bangles on her wrists every day of the week.
“I can take two.” She held out both her hands. I put a bowl in each.
“You got it?” I asked.
Behind me, the screen door slapped. It was Reggie, still bandaged.
“I have it, young lady,” Mrs. Boden said before going out.
I should have been nervous to be alone with him, but I’d known him so long, I couldn’t find fear. “Reggie, good morning.”
“Morning.” He jammed a hand in his jeans. “I brought the truck so I could take the big stuff.” With his free hand, he indicated the food everyone had dropped off for the soup kitchen.
“I can give you a hand.”
“I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I called you a lie, and I knew it was a lie, but I said it anyway.”
“Okay.”
“And I had no business getting in your face. My feelings are the same, but I have to be a man. Just be a man about it. You’re a woman of your own mind. That’s the end of it. We’ve been friends for a long time and that’s all I want from you if that’s what you have to give. I’m upside down thinking I spoiled that.”
I picked up the heaviest stock pot, and he rushed to relieve me.
“Thank you.”
He turned and kicked open the screen door.
“Reggie.”
He stopped with the door half open.
“Things are changing and you sensed that. You reacted to it. You didn’t spoil it. We’re still friends, but like I said… things are changing.”
“Yeah.”
“But not what I think of you. That hasn’t changed. We’re still friends.”
“I appreciate that. I couldn’t live with myself.”
I put my hand on his arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’d better get that out or everything’s going to be cold.”
As he walked across the back porch and I went to the kitchen to get another pot, Harper barreled down the stairs in her yellow polo.
“You’re working?” I asked. “I haven’t made you lunch.”
“Don’t worry. I got it.” She yanked the plastic tail of the bread bag off the top of the fridge, spinning it in the air before catching it.
Mrs. Boden came back in. “Got room for two more.” She cradled two bowls in her arms and headed out.
Harper leaned into the pantry for a jar of peanut butter.
“Are you all right?” I asked my sister.
“Fine.” She snapped a shopping bag from under the sink and dropped the jar of peanut butter and loaf of bread into it. She tried to leave, but I put my hand on the door. “What?”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m going to be unfine and late.” I knew the warehouse shifts as well as she did, and she wasn’t late. When she realized I wasn’t budging, her shoulders slumped. “I’m as fine as I need to be.”
“Taylor?”
“That’s over. He needs to have his life. I’m not going to hold him back.”
“That’s awfully mature of you,” I said through a haze of disbelief.
“Whatever.”
I took my hand off the door and wedged myself between her and it. “How are the college applications going?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see the point.”
Reggie clopped up the porch to get more pots, and I pulled Harper into a corner to give him room.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s, like, a hundred dollars per application.”
“How many do you want to send out?”
“Three. Stanford. MIT. Michigan.”
I would give it to her even if three hundred dollars meant I had to stay. “You have to become what you were meant to be.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
“Harper.” I put my hands on her biceps. “I never thought I was meant for anything. I wasn’t pretty like Marsha. I wasn’t smart like you. Mom always dreamed so small for us. But she was wrong. I was wrong. I became something here. I found my purpose in my people. But you? You’re never going to be your best self here.”
She looked away from me, twisting her mouth into a defiant curve.
“Maybe,” I added, “you’ll find your purpose and Taylor at the same time.”
“We’re all going to find Taylor.” She clopped the floor between her feet. “There’s talk he’s buying the factory.”
“Our factory?” I exploded from the inside out. “That’s wonderful news! We haven’t heard a thing since… was he the one we cleaned it for?”
“No. It’s…” She shook her head. “It’s complicated. But it’s real and you know what? I don’t want to be here when he’s here.”
Behind her, Johnny and Pat joined the march of food-carriers.
“Do you have three hundred dollars?” My offer was tinged w
ith hope.
She looked less thrilled. “It’s three seventy-five, and I can put it together.”
“Are you sure?”
“If you let me get to work already.”
I hugged her first, planting a long kiss on her cheek. “I love you, Harper.”
“I love you too.”
She pulled away and brushed past Reggie to get out the door.
Chapter 36
CATHERINE
The soup kitchen closed at two. We cleaned up, distributing the pots and bowls back to their owners, and went home. I didn’t repeat Harper’s news and wouldn’t until I knew for sure. But in that time, as I chatted with my people, exchanging smiles and hugs, I realized I wasn’t needed anymore. I didn’t know whether to feel free or lonely.
Chris’s rental car was in the front yard. Inside, the dining room sconces glowed and a beat-up wooden table stretched from entry to egress. He sat in one of the plastic folding chairs from the back porch.
“Hi,” I said, dropping my bag by a table leg. It had been scratched to the raw wood by an army of cats. “This is… big.”
“Biggest I could find.”
We stepped toward each other as if we were molding the space between us.
“I’ll bite. Why does size matter so much?”
Fingertips touching. Palms pressed flat together. Bodies against each other.
“We have a lot of stories to tell and I don’t want to run out of space.”
I glanced at the tabletop. A hundred rings marred the wood, but there wasn’t a story on it that I could see.
With my head turned, he laid his lips against my cheek and kissed it, breathing deeply. “You smell like paprika.”
“I need to wash up.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Tell me what the table’s for first.”
“It’s the distance between who we were and who we are.”
“No wonder it’s so big.”
In one smooth motion, he picked me up, then carried me upstairs. We didn’t make it to the bathroom. By the time we were at the top of the stairs, we were kissing as if we wanted to eat each other alive, clawing our way to each other’s skin.
