Chapter 25 – Help Me With This.

There's a specific kind of intimacy in being dressed and undressed by someone who knows your body. Not the dramatic kind not the movie version where clothes come off in a frenzy. The quiet kind. The kind where you turn your back and lift your hair and say help me with this, and they do, and there's something in the ordinariness of it that is somehow more intimate than anything that comes after. We'd had another argument. Smaller this time the kind that burned hot and fast and left us both slightly singed but not seriously damaged. We'd talked it out, or talked around it, which was often the closest we got to the same thing. He'd come to get me. We'd gone out, eaten somewhere, let the evening smooth the rough edges of the afternoon. When we got back to his place I was changing I always kept things there, a whole quiet accumulation of my presence in his space that neither of us had ever formally acknowledged and I reached back for the hooks of my bra and my arms weren't quite getting there at the right angle. "Help me with this," I said over my shoulder. He came over. His hands found the hooks, and I felt him working them and then I felt him stop working them. "Anytime today," I said. "I'm doing it," he said. But his fingers had slowed down in a way that had nothing to do with difficulty. Then his lips found the back of my neck. I felt it go through me from the top of my spine to somewhere much lower, immediate and total. My breath caught in a way I tried to disguise as a sigh. "The bra," I said. My voice had changed slightly. I hated that. "Mm." He kissed the same spot again, slower. "You were supposed to be" "I know what I was supposed to be doing." His hands had abandoned the bra entirely by now. One settled at my waist. The other traced up my side, and I made a sound that was meant to be a word and came out as nothing at all. I turned around. He was looking at me the way he looked at me sometimes that look that made me feel simultaneously seen and undone and I had approximately three seconds of thinking about the argument we'd just come back from, about the cycle, about the things still unresolved between us. Three seconds. Then I stopped thinking about any of it. What followed was slow in a way that undid me completely. He had always known how to take his time in a way that made me furious and grateful in equal measure never rushing, always finding the unhurried route when I wanted to get somewhere faster. His hands knew me by now with a thoroughness that should have felt ordinary by this point in our relationship and somehow never did. At some point, in the middle of everything, I pulled back just enough to look at him. "I'm still annoyed with you," I said breathlessly. "About earlier." He looked up at me. His expression was incredible, honestly, how he could look that patient in a moment like this. "I know," he said. "This doesn't fix it." "I know that too." "So" "So we'll talk about it after," he said, and pulled me back down, and I lost the thread of the argument completely for the second time in as many days. After, we lay in the particular quiet that follows. The room had gone dark without us noticing. Outside, the city was doing its nighttime thing. Inside, neither of us was in a hurry to move or speak or let the world back in yet. His hand was on my stomach. Mine was on his chest, feeling the slow return of his heartbeat to something normal. "Okay," I said eventually, to the ceiling. "What were we arguing about." A pause. Then, with the energy of a man trying very hard not to smile: "I genuinely can't remember." "Me neither." We lay there for a moment. "That's a problem," I said. "Probably," he agreed. "We need to be able to fight without" I gestured vaguely at the room, at us, at all of it. "Without what?" "Without this happening every time." He turned his head to look at me. "Does it happen every time?" I gave him a look. "Fair," he said. We did talk, eventually. Properly about the actual thing, in actual words, with less sharpness than usual because the sharpness had gone somewhere else and left us with something softer underneath. It wasn't a perfect conversation. We were still not good at the direct kind of honesty, still navigated around the hard centres of things instead of straight through them. But it was something. And when he pulled me back into him at the end of it, and I let him, I thought not for the first time and not for the last that this was the thing I couldn't explain to anyone on the outside. How we could be this broken in some ways and this whole in others. How the same thing that kept failing us kept saving us. How I was furious at us and grateful for us in exactly the same breath.

Forbidden Love Story

Contributor Points

Points-to-Coupons

Referral Earning