Page 91 of Dirty Ink

We crawled up and under the sheets at the same time like we were performing some kind of ritual. Side by side we laid flat. Hands resting on our stomachs. Eyes facing the moulded ceiling.

“What do we do now?” I asked in an almost reverential whisper.

“Now we turn out the lights.”

Her voice was also soft. Like the kind of breeze that only comes at night.

I reached out for my bedside light at the same time as she did for hers. I mirrored the movement of her arm in the pale yellow light. The crook of her elbow. The fumbling fingers. The slow twist of the little brass knob. The lamps went out at the same time. Synchronised like a clock. Darkness didn’t flash or twitch or jerk onto us but fell in one gentle swoop like a blanket lifted high and then left to fall. It fell upon my eager skin. Connected first with the raised hairs of excited goosebumps. Then sank. Moulded to the lines of my thighs. Pooled like water in the contours of my stomach. Caressed my cheek like a cupped hand.

“And now what do we do?” I asked.

I resisted the urge to turn my head toward Rachel. I kept my eyes focused on the darkened ceiling. I counted the lines the blinds cast across the wall behind me.

Rachel was silent for a moment. I could feel how close her body was next to mine beneath the sheets. I sensed that her pinkie was just a hair’s breadth from mine. If I breathed in a little too deeply, our fingers would touch. Would there be sparks like when you rub your socks at the foot of the bed as a child? Heat lightning silent and beautiful? Weaving like delicate lace between us?

“Now we close our eyes,” came Rachel’s whispered response after several silent moments.

This time I did turn my head. Rachel had already done the same. We looked across the crumpled pillows at one another. There was a stretch of light from the streetlamps outside across her face. There was a shadow across mine.

We never agreed to close them together, our eyes. Nothing at all was said between us save what Rachel had already said: Now we close our eyes.

I mean, we weren’t little kids anymore. It would be stupid to count down. To say, “Let’s close our eyes on three.” To laugh when neither of us actually closed our eyes like silly teenagers who wouldn’t hang up the phone as they whispered in the cover of dark, racking up the phone bill in secret, “No, you hang up.” We weren’t even the old us, the Vegas us, who struggled against exhaustion to keep our eyes open just a few minutes more. To keep talking a few minutes more. To keep running our hands along each other just a few minutes more. To know that the other was real and not just a dream to be gone in the morning just a second or two longer.

In those times I never even remembered closing my eyes. I just remembered waking up and not believing she was there, still there. Not even when I breathed in deep the scent of her hair. Not even when I wrapped my arms around her. Not even when I pressed into her as she murmured softly and snaked her arm back to tangle in my hair.

But as Rachel and I looked across each other, not as children, but adults, not as frantic lovers, but as scarred humans, I was conscious of her fluttering eyelashes. I watched intently as her blinks grew heavy, dreamy. I paid attention to the focus of her pupils like she was participating in a sleep study and I needed to take note of everything. Every little detail of Rachel. And how Rachel, not anyone else, but only Rachel closed her eyes.

Like the comforter rolling back, like our bodies slipping beneath the sheets, like the lights going out, I followed Rachel as she closed her eyes. Like I’d never done it before. Like I needed teaching. Like if I didn’t close my eyes when she closed hers that I would never be able to. Never ever again.

I would lie awake all night. Eyes glued open. Nothing but the darkness of the ceiling to see.

The darkness behind my eyelids was warm. Soft. Comforting. The brush of Rachel’s pinkie against mine didn’t startle me. Because I had been moving toward her, too. Seeking hers as she had been seeking mine. Just the same. At the same time. A reflection. A perfect reflection of her.

“This is…nice,” I murmured.

Rachel hadn’t guided me to say that. I heard the echo of those words nonetheless in the easing of her breath. Heard it in the stillness of her little pinkie against mine, callused, rough, stained from ink. Heard it in the soft rustle of sheets as she scooted just a little closer.

I did the same. I liked the idea that this was what husbands did with their wives. I liked the simplicity of it all. How ordinary it was. Liked that I could paint in the years we’d spent apart with nights just like these. I’d learned a brush stroke that night. And I could fill the empty canvas of Rachel and me with it. In darkness. In quiet.

“What do we do now?” I whispered.

“We sleep.”

Rachel wounded her arms round me. I enveloped her, drew her close. We breathed against one another. But my breaths, as first like gentle waves were gaining in height, building in speed, as Rachel’s proximity caused a surge of energy through my body. I tightened my grip on her. Rachel’s fingers curled against the skin of my back like there was something to grab ahold of.

“Fuck it,” she said, abruptly tugging her arms away from me to undo the buttons of her pyjama top. “We’re married. We’re not dead.”

It was a good thing, too. I was as hard as a rock.

“What do we do now, dirty girl?” I asked with a smile as Rachel caught herself in the arms of her shirt.

Her eyes found mine. They sparked deliciously.

“You know exactly what to do now…sir.”

Rachel

Sweat prickled my back as I sighed against the pillow.

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