Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(77)

I sink into it, way, way down.

Every time he thrusts, his thumb presses, and I say, “just like that,” or I think I do, but I must because he doesn’t stop, and it’s so big and perfect, his glide, his press, the sound of his breath in my ear, it’s something like when he was rocking me in the courtyard, all comfort, all physical presence and attendance.

I fight against coming until I know he can’t, when I realize I can hear his belt buckle ringing as it hits the floor with each thrust.

“Evan,” I say, and then we’re kissing, and I’m coming, and it feels so good, but it’s mostly my heart I can feel pounding, making my chest tight, and then I understand that I’m crying, that coming with Evan inside of me somehow shoved everything I’ve been holding back out of the way, and so I’m taken up with all this pleasure, but unrelieved, sobbing with every pulse of this orgasm, Evan’s cheek rough against mine, and he’s coming, too, and he says my name, Jenny, over and over.





Chapter Nine


It’s Christmas Eve’s Eve


What’s so astonishing is how much I can see.

I have two monitors in front of me, and I’m taking measurements from images the ESEM took a year ago of E. coli and as I click and drag I’m kind of overcome with the same excitement I always have.

Numbers add up, at least for a while, and what’s tedious starts to collect into something I can understand, something I can start to talk about and think about.

I start to feel the way that I do when I’m losing track of time, and it’s been so long since that happened it’s like how it feels turning the last corner home after a long time away—gladness and relief and permission to be whatever it is you are, to let out whatever it is you’ve been keeping in check.

It’s all working. These are images I didn’t capture, but they were prepared well, done well by a visiting researcher I’ve already exchanged long emails with, and I feel my place in a part of something bigger.

After the New Year, I’ll start the work to prepare my own time with the ESEM, and that’s another good thing. In our meeting this morning, my proposal for assistants was accepted, and I’ve already talked to the graduate students I know I want to work with.

The campus is so quiet, in this space between terms. Only the main paths are cleared and salted each morning, for those of us who work here, and the snow has continued to fall.

When I made it home, that night after we had been together in his office, my email had notified me that C Ford, that Evan, had posted pictures, and when I looked at them, they were family snapshots.

Him with a woman who had to be his mom, her eyes as blue, tall.

A picture of him with more family, or friends, laughing in a canoe.

A graduation picture, with a doctoral hood, and one of him running, with a number pinned to his shirt.

His avatar was lit, which meant he was there, but I looked through the pictures without comment. I could still feel the soreness from my fall, from crying, from our lovemaking—I was sore inside and out.

Not just physically.

I looked through the pictures, and his avatar stayed lit, and I imagined Evan sitting the way he does, all long limbs but somehow graceful, looking at my lit avatar, the lines deep in his forehead with worry, and it was enough to have his vigil.

I clicked through his pictures and looked at his grins, I measured them, like I am clicking and measuring now, the microscopic changes on a common bacterium.

I have his measure as a man who tries to do what is right and who wants others to do what is right.

Between us, is everything.

It’s like one of these pictures on my monitor of a bacterium, the details so intense your mind tries to make sense of them with what it already knows—that looks like a hole, a hair, a tail, an eye, the surface of the moon—all the possibilities actually completely improbable because it is just itself.

This is what this bacterium looks like.

We want to compare it to what we know, but it is incomparable. I can see.

I can see so much, I can’t begin to know what it means.

That’s the most exciting place to be, in an experiment, or in life.

I told my mom when I looked at the world I saw everything at once, the view and the small things.

That I loved the small things.

The big world has a way of not letting you see everything at once, but it’s actually made of small things.

Like loss.

Like love.

*

“I thought, maybe, we could walk there together.”

Evan is on my stoop, a paper bag in his hand, snow on his shoulders and in his hair. He rang the doorbell, the first person ever to do so, and now he’s on my stoop.

“It’s Christmas Eve’s Eve,” he explains. “It’s almost eleven.” I squeeze the handle of the door. “I know.”

“Were you going to come?”

“Well, I was putting on my coat and boots, and had my hand on the door when you rang the bell.”

He grins and looks down. He’s nervous.

He puts the bag down. “So, ah, I started my way there, on my own, and then I was thinking it was only three blocks from your place, and they haven’t cleared the sidewalks. It would be nicer, I thought, if I took you there?” He closes his eyes. “Fuck.”

“You were afraid I wouldn’t come?”