Page 57 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Oh, extremely,” she said, and then laughed. “You’re the weirdest, Aldo.”

She said it so sweetly he almost thanked her.

Then, on second thought (third, technically), he did. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, and rolled onto her back, closing her eyes. “Anyway, I’d say don’t take it personally, but I guess you never do.”

Not always, he wanted to say, but it was close enough to the truth that he didn’t argue. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

That prompted one of her eyes to open. “What?”

“Well, you wanted me to make things easier for you,” he said, “and I didn’t.”

“That’s—” She sat up, bristling with a different energy now. One he couldn’t identify. “Don’t.”

He sat up, too, mirroring her. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t… think that. I don’t know.” She was agitated, shaking her head. “They’re the ones who are wrong, you know. And anyway, Madeline likes you.” She smoothed her hand over the comforter, seeming to want to repair the damage her unexpected friction had caused.

She implored him, silently, and he took a long look at her, just looking. He had drawn her eyes a few more times than he’d planned to by then, and he was pleased to see his estimations were correct, geometrically-speaking, if lacking in execution. Those eyes in real life were weapons, or possibly anti-weapons. They had kept her out of prison, he was sure of it. Wide-set and oversized and almond-shaped, little picture-boxes of innocence. Frames that made a mockery of everything concealed within.

“And me,” she said, so delayed he’d forgotten what they were talking about.

“And you what?”

“I like you.” She rubbed her cheek. “I mean,” she said, hurrying to obscure what she’d said with coquetry, “thisisour seventh conversation, so that must mean something.”

“Does it?”

She was quiet for a moment, wrestling with the truths she reserved for herself. He sensed she needed a push, a nudge. A mirror-motion. He leaned towards her, pausing before they touched, and left room for the reverberations inside her to echo in him. He could feel it again, the buzzing she’d come into the room with vibrating there in that empty space, now occupied by the tremors of possibility. She could fill it with herself, she could shove him away, she could pull him closer. She could pry apart his ribs and leave him there, gutted, doe-eyes wide with,I didn’t think it’d be so wet.

He waited there, in the gruesome image of himself spilling crimson over her hands, seeping into the beds of her narrow fingernails and forever staining the sheets and the floors—and, if he were lucky, her conscience—when she matched the distance towards him that he’d already undertaken towards her. He could smell her hair, her skin, her lack of hesitation. The other half of her truths was a lie.

She said, “Am I imagining this?”

He shook his head, No, you aren’t, or if you are then I am, too.

“Oh,” she said.

She leaned forward. He matched her distance again, their foreheads meeting like old friends; Hello, how are you, been a long time, how nice it is to be here with you. Their hands, meanwhile, stayed back like tired captives, wary prisoners of war.

“These keys of mine,” she said. “If you could have one of them.”

It was an implied question: If you could open only one part of me for your consumption, for your delectation, for the whims of your carnivorous mind, which part would you wish to see?

The answer, or at least the answer she wanted, was more difficult to guess. On the one hand, there was quite obviously sex. There was no question she had it on the brain. So did he, now. More than now, though it was more unavoidable now, sitting close to her like this. He wasn’t so oblivious that he could ignore how close she was, how tempting. She’d essentially teed up an answer for him, made it easy—Here, let me tell you what you want. In fact, let me show you. Let me be the one to decide for both of us. Let me be the one to want you in such a way as to acquiesce that you want me, and let me save us both the trouble of fumbling through the Do you want to?, Are you sure?, the tiresome little how-do-you-dos of intimacy.

He could imagine the softness of her cheek or feel it for himself, up to him. He could see the flutter of her lashes where her eyes were closed and his were open, he could watch her play the ingenue, he could let her have the starring role the way she wanted this to be. Her hair smelled like flowers because she’d washed it somewhere in this house, under this same roof. Somewhere in his proximity, somewhere within these very walls, she’d been naked; she’d let the stream of water spill down from the top of her scalp, cracking like an egg and dripping down her forehead—the same forehead now pressed to his—and then her lips. Those droplets would have slid along her nose the way he could now, with just an inch to make up the difference. Water might have fallen in the little cracks of her lips, the ones her teeth slid over now with anticipation, and then down from her chin to the floor while the rest of it draped over her shoulders, saturating her skin. Somewhere, she’d sighed amid steam that embraced her with comfort, washing away the tensions of the day, and massaged it free from her limbs—the way his hands could do now, if they wished to. He could slide away the strap of her shirt and discover what, until now, remained only hers.

(Hers, and whoever else had been given permission to see it. Hers, and whoever else possessed some version of this moment with her, touching and not-touching within the shelter of a darkened room.)

“Any key?” he asked.

“Any key,” she said, in the kind of voice deliberately intended to make him shiver.

She turned her head slightly, her cheek meeting his. He could feel her breath on his skin, could sense her fingers tightening in the sheets, could taste the bitter sweetness of her waiting, coiled and knotted and tensed.

How fragile the craving, he thought, and how delicate it was. How easy it would be to snap it between his fingers, to crush it between his palms. How effortlessly the wanting turned into the franticness of taking, and how very, very easy it was to take.

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