Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(71)

“Yeah,” he says, and it should be so awkward, dry humping, my hand helping us both, his hands softly thumbing my nipples while his fingers play with the goose bumps on my breast, now trying to kiss between breaths like an army is at our door, but it’s beautiful.

We’re beautiful.

This is what was always underneath.

What was over us, concealing, was beautiful in its way—dramatic and endless feeling.

But what’s underneath are the matchbox cars you forgot you left in the grass, the wild violets, the chalky seashells ringing the flowerbeds.

I always love the small things, the wild things, the things that change and adapt, the things you don’t see at first but were always there.

The things I could lose, the things that are most precious and dear and telling.

I come away from our kiss again and rest my forehead on his shoulder. I’m nearly there, and I pull up on his T-shirt more, want him as exposed as I feel.

There’s a tattoo on his rib, on his side.

A black, lowercase f. A number next to it.

I buck out of rhythm, shock like a riptide of cold blood through the chambers of my heart, but I’m already nearly there, his mouth and his hands and our friction are finally enough. “Open your eyes,” I stutter, and he does, and I look and look, desperate, even on the very worst edge of coming all over him, and he looks back, sees something, maybe some of my utter incomprehension, and we try to keep looking at each other, until we can’t, because it’s too good, too awful, because it’s all come to the surface.

I pant against him.

The look on his face when he held C’s picture.

His picture. Evan’s picture.

You’re so beautiful, C wrote to me last night, Evan wrote to me last night, after I sent him my picture.

I keep myself from tracing that f.

I come, shuddering, my arms around him, looking at him, bewildered.

Trying to understand.

Trying to trust my body as it falls.

My heart, beating painfully out of time.

This man I believed never withheld a thing from me.

Now we’re just holding each other, supertight, I let him hold me.

He doesn’t know he’s comforting me.

The snow’s picked up, I can tell even through the fog on the dark windows. Even when I ease next to him, his arms are tight.

We watch the snow accumulate over the windshield, one snowflake at a time.





Chapter Eight


Inches, Drifts, Storms


Dr. Allen is doing her thing, making me look into her instruments and click my remote when I see the wiggling lines, measuring with her string.

“How’s therapy?” she asks.

“I changed therapists, and I’m working with Allie Gould. She took me out in a trainer car yesterday to learn how to use the extended mirrors.”

“You’re going for a daylight license?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She sets down her ophthalmoscope after testing the movements of my eyes. “I think that’s great. Allie’s good.”

“She is. She likes going where I am. She set up software and headphones and a mic for me at work, and she spent a couple hours with the lab tech to learn about the ESEM so she can think about how my bench work would be adapted, if I would need it.”

“That sounds like Allie.”

Dr. Allen looks at me for a moment. “Look, Evan told us in a chart review for you that he excused himself as your OT. You two developed feelings for each other?”

“Yes.”

She looks like she wants to say something, so I give her the permission she needs. “He was always totally professional.”

“I know that. He did everything like he was supposed to, it’s just that I know what he was thinking, and I’d like to ask you your perspective if you’d like to talk about it.”

Not really. I don’t really want to talk about it. Evan and I haven’t talked about it, what I saw on his skin, that C had shown me in pieces. He did everything like he was supposed to except say, that day in my office when he discovered I was Lincoln—I took these pictures.

Which, of course, meant I should be able to say I’ve seen this tattoo, though that choked and lodged inside my throat.

Before, it seemed like the only thing unspoken between us was a kiss.

Now it’s two whole other people who are supposed to be strangers.

“I guess,” I hedge, “I don’t have a perspective, not yet, it’s new.”

“Look, I probably shouldn’t say anything at all, it’s just that you’re special. You’re a special woman. Now, I know Evan, and he’s special, too, and I don’t actually have any theoretical reservations, but you’ve had the most dramatic few months I can imagine.”

I laugh, kind of. “I can. Imagine I mean. And the thing is, with Evan, there isn’t anything to worry about.”

Which feels empty, in my mouth, to say.

We have C and Lincoln to worry about.

“Will you—talk to me about it? If you need to? I don’t want to presume, but you and I? We’re in it for the long haul. Or, at least I am.”

Oh. I feel the tears.

I never had any reason to sit at home in the dark, I’m finding.

None.

None.