I'm Glad About You(36)

Kyle glanced over at the open doorway. With one fluid gesture he pivoted on his right foot, reached for the door, closed it, and locked it.

Alison lifted her head, startled by the swish of the closing door, or perhaps the tiny ping of the lock falling into place. Kyle looked at her. Her mouth parted open, then closed. She looked down, and ran her right hand along the edge of the bookshelf, a delicate move, no move at all really, except in its direction, which was toward him. He waited. He knew her, still; he knew that she was not going to be able to stand this as long as he could. It had been their pattern for six years.

She took a step, following her hand. “Oh, f*ck it,” she said.

It was impossible for Kyle or Alison, in that moment, to understand how kissing each other in this locked bedroom, unseen and unknown to everyone in their world, might be considered a betrayal. The obstacles to their feelings for each other had been so numerous and complex over time that they had come to identify themselves as the victims of a vast conspiracy which involved America, God, culture, gender, capitalism, Catholicism, parental obligation, personal responsibility, youth, age, reality, dreams, and sex. Sex being the worst betrayal of all, because they were, frankly, the two of them, so good at it. When Alison came to him, it was not with a clumsy rush of despair, but rather with deliberate certainty. Her life wasn’t making a ton of sense. Engaging in physical contact with Kyle, the most irrationally destructive thing she could possibly do, made more.

After yearning after him for nearly two years, having Kyle’s tongue down her throat sent Alison’s consciousness reeling. His hand went immediately up her back, under her sweater, where it had always belonged. Her hands peeled at his shirt with desperation; she could not tolerate any inch of him remaining untouched. He pushed her backward onto the bed and she fell willingly, letting him burrow into her neck while his hands dug underneath her bra, insisting on finding her breasts with an unflinching determination. She knew they would be bruised again, and was glad of it. His erection, pressed up against her, was welcome and familiar. She was only wearing a pair of sheer leggings, which meant that once again he was all but inside her. She gripped his back and gasped, silent, for the shred of a moment left to her before he lifted his head and found her mouth again.

And why not? They both had been so unhappy for so long; they both had fought through months of regret that things had ended so poorly between them, regretting even more the choices they had each made which sent their lives spinning farther and farther away from each other. There was no question in either of their minds that it had never been their destiny to go through life without each other; in spite of the repeated finality of their many betrayals, it was not their intent that things should have ended between them ever. This secret tête-à-tête, hidden from everyone who knew them and had ever known them, felt not like a misstep or a temporary slip into madness. For Kyle, it felt as if he had reentered the world. But that was not what was happening.

Kyle’s fierce determination to finally claim Alison irrefutably led him to do what he had stopped himself from doing far too many times. Holding her entire body under his, he reached down with his right hand, grabbed at his belt buckle, and started to unfasten it. His new willingness to just do it, finally, was met with no resistance from Alison, whose hands reached up and onto his hips, desperate to just get him out of those pants, and into her. But even as he yanked his belt open and leaned back, momentarily, to tear his trousers off, she pulled away. She pulled away. It was so unexpected, to both of them, that it could not be mistaken for an insignificant pause, but Kyle was frankly in no condition to be sensitive to whatever qualms of conscience might be rising out of her primordial cortex. He kissed her again with such total determination she almost succumbed. Why not why not why not, she allowed herself to think for one last moment, although too much of her already had remembered what it was she knew.

“We have to stop. Kyle, Kyle, stop. You have to stop,” she gasped, pushing his chest away from her own. “You have to stop.”

“No.” It was all he could say. He did not have any other words left in him.

“Seriously, Kyle, stop.”

He paused.

“We can’t do this.”

Kyle could not comprehend what was happening. Alison had never had any respect at all for the rules which required them to stop at this moment; she had relentlessly begged him to continue in the face of commandments from too many sources that insisted, irrefutably, that they stop. In his determined innocence, all those years, he had protected them both. Now that he knew—as she had told him so many times—that the laws of God were a lie, the idea of stopping, now, at this moment, seemed so perverse that he had the urge to strike her.

Instead, he stopped. He looked away. Then he looked down at his belt, and once again did as he was told.

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I shouldn’t have done that. This. I shouldn’t have done this.” As if it were your idea, he thought, I came looking for you, and for this, it wasn’t you who did it. You were too much of a coward to do it. You ran away, and you hid. I was the one who came looking. I was the one who was willing to sacrifice everything for you. You who sacrificed nothing for me.

“You need to talk to your wife,” Alison said. “She has something she has to tell you.”

You know nothing about anything, he thought. But he would not speak even to curse her. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it decisively behind him, without looking back.