Page 88 of Jackie

“Thank you, Dave.” She smiles, tilting her head toward the door. “Please cancel the next few hours.”

Powers gathers papers together and bumbles out, the door closing behind him, and she laughs, that quietly wicked laugh he loves.

She sits down on the edge of the tub. “How’s the bath?” She runs her fingers through the water, her fingertips brush him. “Warm enough?”

“For now. How was your ride?”

“Lovely out today.” Her voice is like soft rope, her eyes focused on the trees visible through the window.

He moves in the tub. The water shifts.

“So now what shall we do?” she says.

She is just beyond his reach. She doesn’t come closer. Or lean in. Only sits there, the horizontal slope of her bare thigh, and the curved white hem of the shirt, the dressage whip in her hand. If he sat up, he could reach out and touch her, but he understands that as long as he doesn’t, she’ll remain a body, not his but at a remove, and for that reason seductive, unknown, that wild light at the center of her he can feel.

“Come here,” he says.

“No, Jack. You come to me.”

—

Through the window of the bedroom, the trees swim.

Silence. Her body, the heat of her breath near his skin.

—

In the white space, the margins and the gaps, that’s where life dwells.

—

“Via negativa,” she will say absently as they lie together, her arms crossed under her head, that bone of her hip, angular, almost defiant, one leg bent, his hand on her body. He could not, would not, stop.

—

He will realize later:

He’ll never want a woman more than he wanted her in those hours.

He does not tell her this.

—

She gasps as his knuckles move into her, back arched, breasts tight, her finger twisting on herself, he gently bites her shoulder, her legs wrapped around him, pulling him down onto her and her hip against his in a way that will bruise, leaving a blue-black design he will watch on her body for days afterward with a kind of crazy secret pleasure as it grows, the bruise exploding slowly before it starts to fade.

Later, she slips from the bed, steps over the husk of sheets on the floor. She draws the curtain back. The sun fires into the room. He starts to get up, then doesn’t. Someone will come. When they need him, they’ll find him. There’s so little time in his life anymore that belongs to him alone.

Stay with her in this alone for now.

She’s walked over to the chair, her shirt draped over the back of it. He watches her body, the naked length of her, angular, the boyish cut of the hips, slim, small breasts.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks. He smiles.

“I’m remembering you.”

It is not the kind of thing he’d ordinarily say.

—

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