Page 13 of The Cabin
His words feel heavy. Like they are freighted with meaning I cannot quite fathom. As if the true depth of what he means is something he could not truly even put into language.
I lie in the silence. “Adrian…” But I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, what I want to say.
There’s something, but I don’t have the shape of it yet. Like someone blindfolded me, brought me to a table, sat me down, took off the blindfold, and in front of me was a two-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, but I didn’t have the box for reference of what it was supposed to look like—I just had to try to fit the pieces together one at a time and get a feel for what it was supposed to be as I went.
He rolls over, curling his arm to pull me closer as he levers himself over me. Gazes down at me. His eyes are full of unconditional love, blazing hotter and clearer than the day we said “I do.” Whatever the puzzle is, I do not have a single shred of doubt that this man loves me. I can rest on that. Whatever is going on with him, he loves me, and more now than ever.
I can taste the truth of that as he kisses me; it’s written in the crush of his lips on mine. I can feel it as he touches his forehead to mine, breathing my breath. Times like this, we need no foreplay. No games. He kisses me, and I kiss him, and we wrap up together as if someone had filmed a braid coming loose and then reversed the flow, so you saw the braid twining itself together. Or, perhaps more apropos: a glass shattering on the floor, breaking into a million, million pieces, into glass dust and infinitesimal shards. Filmed, the flow reversed, so the dust assembles into shards, and the shards into jagged chunks, and the chunks puzzle fit themselves into sections and the sections fuse into the whole.
That’s how we make love, in this moment. He kisses me, and I taste the absolute adoration on his tongue. I feel the fullness of his devotion as he fills me, bare within me, and then our love is joined, molded together in this sacred movement. We writhe together in an everlasting ouroboros, whispering love, worshipping each other by name, and the time it takes to reach our mutual completion is an instant, an hour, I neither know nor care, I only find awareness of him pulsing within me and my own shattering around him and our sweat commingling and lips touching and tongues tasting and gasps mashing into tangled groans.Evening Saturday. Sunset a bloody orange fading to full scarlet.
I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve made love since his return Thursday. We’ve screwed on the back porch with a bottle of wine as the summer fireflies flash orange in the dull heavy suburban Atlanta heat. We’ve fucked in the kitchen, me bent over the island, the marble cold against my bare breasts, his thrusts short and rough. We’ve languorously debauched in the tub, frothy mountains of bubbles revealing our union in brief glimpses of flesh as the water sloshes over the edge.
He’s frantic for me.
Wild.
Rougher than he’s been in a long, long time. Desperate, almost.
As if proving something to me, or to himself.
But after, as he holds me and nuzzles away our sweat and whispers iloveyou like a benediction in the slow silence, his gaze sometimes seems a million miles away, a thousand years away. Then I speak, and he’s with me again, and whatever I saw in his eyes is gone and I doubt I ever saw it.
Saturday evening, and I’m making dinner. Spaghetti bolognese. Easy, quick. A bottle of red uncorked and breathing—Josh, my favorite brand. I’ve been battling my hair, brushing it out of my eyes with my wrist as I knead spices into the raw ground beef with my bare hands, blow it away with a huff, and finally I get sick of it. Wash my hands and head up to our bathroom in search of a hair tie.
I hear our toilet flush, a pause, and then flush again. When I go into the bathroom, there’s a sour tang in the air. Adrian is wiping his mouth with a hand towel. Mouthwash bubbles as it swirls down the drain. I eye Adrian, waiting for some kind of explanation.
“I realized I haven’t brushed my teeth since I’ve been back and they felt fuzzy.” He brushes lips against my temple. “Dinner smells good—I can smell it from up here.”
And then he’s heading downstairs, leaving me in the bathroom wondering if I’ve missed something.
His toothbrush is dry. The bottle of mouthwash is still in the medicine cabinet—where I always put it. In the ten years we’ve been married, he has never one time put the mouthwash back in the cabinet when he’s done with it, he just leaves it on the counter. It’s one of those little things in a marriage that drive you bonkers, but aren’t worth making a big deal out of. I just put it back, sigh and shake my head and sometimes mutter a few annoyed curses. I do things like that which prompt the same response from him, and it’s just how it is.
