And Also With You (2 page)

I start to cry before the homily is over. By the time the priest begins the Nicene Prayer, the wetness is leaking silently down my face into the collar of my coat. I keep my head tucked against his shoulder. I do not make a sound. If I am very careful, it is possible he won’t even notice.

I’m not sure why I am crying, except that it’s after midnight on Christmas Day and I am sitting in church with a complete stranger, slowly sobering up. None of these things would be my first choice. Somewhere, there is a bottle and a warm brownstone condo. I meant to drink and sleep and sleep and drink, maybe wake up on the twenty-sixth. Or not.

The man beside me doesn’t move, except for the rising and falling of his chest with his breaths, and his fingers smoothing my knuckles.

“God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God…” His voice is quiet and a bit raspy, more of a mutter than out loud words. I wonder how he came to be here tonight. Does he have a family? Is he alone too? I wonder how much of what he’s saying he actually believes.

His hand squeezes mine extra hard on the last bit of the prayer, and out of curiosity, I look up. There’s a flame in the depths of his dark eyes, wildness, as he recites it. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

He notices me looking, and his free hand comes around to thumb away my tears at the same time that I am wiggling my other hand out to pat his hand that covers mine.

“Let us pray to the Lord.” The lector up front, a balding man in a black and red checked shirt, wears high-waisted black pants.  “For all of our active military, serving away from home, we pray to the Lord.” The crowd echoes him, a single voice from many, saying here and across the world right now, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

That perhaps is the beauty of Catholicism, if there is any to be found. She used to say that when you pray as a Catholic, God hears because so many of you are praying at the same time. It’s religious strength in numbers. I think of how I used to ask for her to be remembered in these prayers when she first got sick. So many people prayed with me. I don’t know if she was right. I don’t know if it matters if five hundred are praying or just one. If He doesn’t want to give in, will anything change His mind?  Ask with faith and you shall receive, she said. I didn’t ask. I begged, but for naught.

The balding man stops. “Now, please take a moment to silently speak any personal intentions you may have for the Lord.”

It’s only a few moments, maybe twenty or thirty seconds all told, but at the end of it, I know. While the others close their eyes, bow their heads, bounce their children on their knees, this man watches me and I watch him. Our eyes are open and we look, look, look deep into one another. By the time the man up front breaks the silence with another “Lord, hear our prayer,” I know the truth.

I am alone. And he is alone. But tonight, tonight we are together.

I do not take communion, although I might take a little peace and mercy. I just can’t walk that far. We’re on the kneeler again, and he is holding both my hands while the others make their way down the center aisle.

“When did you last eat?” he says, low, into the dark curtain of my tangled hair. I think about it.

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like to get a bite? I can drive us somewhere or–” It might be my raised eyebrows that stop him, or maybe just the horror on my face. I don’t go out. Not anymore. I go to O’Reilly’s and Brady’s, but that’s it mostly.

I try to trust my words, but it’s tough. “There’s, um, there’s nothing open.” Around us, the organ music is swelling and dipping, crescendos of Christmas beauty. People are happy. It makes my stomach clench–the hunger I’d forgotten till he brought it up, and the happiness, too.

“Waffle House?” He’s trying to read me. His heavy brows are up as well, pushing wrinkles into that Irish looking forehead. I think he must be a little older than me. Up close there are crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.

I whisper at my hands, unable to look at him for long. “That’s a long way. I mean you’re not that much better off than me.” I sneak a look at him because his fingers are in mine. He’s distracting from any angle. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

His lips quirk. The Mexican family is coming back so he lifts us both a bit to let them pass, and as they do, he pulls me against his shoulder again. The sound of the bells in the rafters, the beauty of the voices singing, the well of the organ, the smells of his skin and clothes, the sandpaper of his chin against my cheek, it’s all so much. After unknown months of nothing and gray, I am drowning in a sea of sensations. His lips are at my temple, and he says, quietness and simplicity of warmth near my brow, “I’ll get us a cab.”

“Let us pray.” The priest is winding it up in the front, and as all the heads bow, he pulls one of his hands away from me and sends a quickly thumbed text. The Waffle House is way out there, by the Holiday Inn on I-78. The scar on his neck is thick. I can see here, with his coat falling off his shoulders a bit, how it’s so thick it looks like a braid of flesh. He could be a killer. He could take me out to Saucon Park, have his way with me, and dump me in the creek.

I look up at the Stations of the Cross, and I breathe through my mouth as he briefly bows his chicken fluff head. Supposing he is a killer, he seems like he’d be a merciful one. Maybe he’d do it quick. Maybe he’d understand.

The priest is extending his hands and offering us peace, which most return. He is talking again, but the excited chatter of children and parishioners muffles his voice as it all descends into a jubilant Christmas party. My redemption or my silencer is tugging me to my feet, and leading me, one of his arms wrapped firmly around my waist, to the great double doors through which I earlier stumbled.

“The mass is ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” says the Father.

We go.

“What do you want to eat?”

He’s lovely looking even under the shitty lights. To my profound shock, he whisked me into a cab, rapped on the glass to ask the cabbie to turn up the heat, and held my hand in total silence all the way here. He hasn’t asked me to take a walk with him into the frigid night toward Saucon, and he hasn’t asked a single personal question. He’s like Robin Hood or something. Arthur slaying my dragons with the sharp point of his…rough hands over mine.

I shrug. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to order. I don’t really eat solids, apart from canned biscuits and Pringles. Well, I eat Hormel chili sometimes, but only if the shakes are bad.

“Eggs?” He’s tapping one hand on the menu. The other swaddles mine on the tabletop. To say I haven’t felt a connection like this in forever would be a truth in the most literal sense, and yet, I can’t bring myself to shake him off. “Hash browns? Toast?”

I nod at all that. Whatever.

He’s chewing his lower lip and tap tapping his long fingers on the laminated menu. Our waitress is slim and black, her face a raisin, laced with age and experience. I imagine her a grandmother with a smile for the family waiting for her when this crazy overnight Christmas shift ends.

“Gravy?” She asks as he gives her our orders. I feel his eyes on me but I don’t look up. These tables are vintage, or they would be vintage if they were worth a damn. As it is, they are just like me, and I mean worn, tired. Out of place in present company.

He must nod because she is gone and shouting at the wide-hipped line cook, “Two egg plates, over medium, wheat toast. Drop a hash brown, scattered and smothered. You ready? Times two.”

He pushes a mug of coffee at me and I push it back.

“Drink it,” he says. “It’ll warm you up.”

“You got any whiskey for it?”

His thumb momentarily stops its exploration of the veins in my hand, but he recovers quickly. “No. No, I don’t, and anyway the night’s over. Drink your coffee.”

I blink at him. “No, thank you.”

“Do you do this often?”

I yawn. “Do what?”

“Shut down anyone who tries to help you?”

I’m shaking my head. The lights and the table and the bedraggled assortment of customers do not spin or fade, but remain fixed, immobile in their utter disappointment.

Sobriety is overrated.

“No, see, I agreed to food. Not this.”

He cocks his head and I think of the RCA dogs, and immediately, though I don’t know why, of As Good As It Gets. What if this is as good as it gets? Sobering up in a Waffle House under bad lighting with a man who looks like an archangel in a Steelers jersey?

“Why are you alone?” he says, and now all of his hands are at it, running above my hand to the bones in my wrist, and smoothing the tender paper white flesh beneath.

“Why are you?”

We’re locked up in one another again. I expect him to tap out, but he doesn’t. He leans forward so he can reach up my forearm, and I cannot help but sigh. A skittish colt will calm under the right hands. I am melting in his.

“When did they die?” he says, and I flinch. One, two, three. His fingers sweep up my forearm, down the underside of my arm, smooth over the blue veins, cradle my palm, lace through my fingers, squeeze, and repeat.

“Today,” I say finally. “She died a year ago today.”

He nods, and I look at him, waiting for the pity or the horror or the recoiling of the threads. All I see is deep brown and belief.

“How about you?”

He picks up the coffee with his right hand. “They died a few years ago. Christmas Eve.”

Our food arrives. As we begin, he offers me bites of gravy-soaked hash browns, and I take them. He offers me bacon, delivered by mistake, which I eat. He lifts eggs and toast smeared with strawberry jelly to my mouth and I just keep eating it all, and watching him. He asks me if I am from around here, and I say no.

“We came for the cancer center,” I say and my admission stands there between us until the next bite of egg. “It’s so cold here. I’ll never get used to it.”

He laughs. I want to box that sound and pull it out later when things are bad so I can hear it again. “You will.” He’s smearing more toast. “You just have to stop comparing it to what you knew before.”

I swear he speaks in proverbs. I am drawn to his fingers on the knife, and the way he licks the jam from one digit, and the way he leans forward when he speaks as though he is sharing a secret with me not meant for our waitress or the other passers by, or even the confines of this restaurant.

“Maybe,” I say, and sigh.

“I like the cold,” he says. “Football. And people move along. They don’t wait around, checking up on you, you know?”

I don’t know. There is no one to do the checking. He can see this. I realize as he looks at me that he knows what I am thinking as if I had spoken it aloud. He smiles. “But not everyone, huh? Some of us dilly dally.”

“I guess you do.”

He feeds me more hash browns. “Coffee now?”

Yes.

“Yeah, okay.”

He has a dimple when he smiles. It’s fetching. It also strains the scar a little, tightening and whitening it against his neck.

The food has disappeared. I think I ate most of it, but I don’t know how. “You fattening me up for the slaughter?” I say, and he laughs again.

“No.”

“So now what?” I pass him a napkin and point to his chin. There’s a bit of egg, just there.

“I’ll take you home. See you on safe and warm.”

The big bad wolf maybe. “Tuck me in?” Where did that come from?

His fingers press into my wrist, a little hard. He breathes in once and out very slowly. “If needed.”

I don’t know who is ensnared here. There’s so much noise in my head but very little sound.

“Okay,” I say, my fingers finding his and squeezing back. “Fine.”

The cabman waits for him as he takes me up to my door.

“Thank you,” I say. “For everything, you know. You didn’t have to–“

“I wanted to.” His fingers are in my hair, against my neck. He’s so warm. My chin drops against them, leaning into the heat.

“You could come up. I mean, for water or something. If you want.”

He pays the cabbie while I punch the codes into the door. When I look back, he is coming up my walk, backlit by the golden glow of Christmas lights reflecting off snow. They are a halo around him in the darkness, an ethereal haze. I swallow because I want. I never do, but right now, I can almost taste how much I want. I want to be normal, to live, to love, to take a breath and not ache inside. I want so much.

He holds my hand on the way upstairs. Two flights. I know my place is a mess. There’s nothing to be done for it. The keys echo in the stillness when I drop them on the table beside the door.

“The TV is over there.” I motion toward the living room and point a finger at the remote on the back of the sofa. “You could see what’s on?”

He nods. His coat is a foreign heap against the back of that couch when he takes it off. For a few seconds, I’m stuck, just sort of staring. I can’t do this, whatever this is. I shouldn’t have asked him up. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know.

I spin toward the milky light from the oven hood I always leave on, and for a moment I feel the drinks that had started to leave me. My feet are tangled among themselves but I make it to the kitchen. The empty bottles on the counter and in the trash look like more than I remember. Did I really drink all those? And how long did it take me to drink them? Cool stainless steel refrigerator handle, cold glasses under my fingers, and water icy like the air we just left. It wakes me. I throw back my shoulders and I resolve…to try.

In the living room, he’s turned on my mother’s crystal reading lamp. The TV is on with no sound. It looks like “It’s A Wonderful Life” because it’s black and white and George Bailey is getting serenaded by Bert the Cop and Ernie the Cab Driver on his wedding night in a downpour.

He’s not watching television. He’s standing in front of the mantle, studying the photographs of her and me. I put the water down on the coffee table because I cannot hold it and look at him standing next to those pictures. He runs long fingers over the front row: she and I leaving to trick-or-treat back home; she and I on my graduation day from college; she and I walking in the Making Strides race. He runs his fingers over her face. His thumb covers the pink handkerchief on her head.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

“She was very beautiful.” He turns and in the low, warm light I can see the sadness in the lines around his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

I motion to the couch. He follows me and we drink the water, almost greedily, because alcohol always makes you dehydrated and I need to be drinking something so badly to get through this. His hand finds my wrist again. We watch television for a bit with the sound on low, and I notice the woodsy smell and ask him about it. He likes a good fire going at home. He gets wood from a man out in the county that lets him cut his own. He works on cars when he’s off work, small time mechanic stuff. He does jobs for people that need work done faster and cheaper than a dealership. Now and again, he buys a cheap car, fixes it up, and sells it for a profit. He loves the Steelers. The Eagles, too, if the Steelers have lost. He likes to go out to the park and throw the football with his dog when the weather isn’t too bad.

I always wanted a dog, but when mom got sick, it was too much. I didn’t need anything else to take care of, you know? What kind of dog? I hate little yip-yappy dogs. I wanted a big one.

“I’ve got a greyhound,” he says, and I nearly choke on my water.

“Aren’t they just, you know, enormous? How does anybody just have a greyhound in an apartment?”

“He was a rescue.” His fingers are on the tender skin at the bend of my elbow because I’ve pushed up my sleeves. It’s hot sitting next to him. He’s a furnace. “They get pretty much abandoned after they can’t race anymore. There’s a rescue place up state that rehabs them and adopts them out. He’s old, but he can still go after a football.”

I blink. “Jesus complex.”

“Excuse me?”

“You. You have a Jesus complex. Savior of the world, right?”

His fingers still. “I like to help. I always enjoyed fixing things. I never…I don’t have all the answers.”

There’s something in him that I recognize. It was there in his templed fingers and shiny eyes in church. I’m a madwoman, but I reach up and run my fingers over the knotted skin on his neck. Behind his ear, it spiderwebs into a patchwork of hardened scars. His eyes close.

“What is this?” I say. “Who did you lose?” He opens his eyes, but he doesn’t speak as I work my fingers down into the neck of his jersey and start to feel how the scar runs down over his shoulder on that side. It’s so late that his beard has come in enough to scratch my fingers as I finally, truly touch him.

I’m leaning in to reach, and he’s watching me. Maybe I’ve stepped over a line. I don’t know. I can’t stop myself. I dig my fingers into his shoulder and there’s so much tension there where it feels blistered under my hands, not smooth. He turns his head to me and we’re nose to nose, and then he’s kissing me. No pretense, no warning, nothing cute or soft. All of the gentleness of his hands on my arms is there, but his mouth is a brutal reminder of the strength and taste of a life I have not been living.

I shift to get a better angle, my hand still on his neck, guiding him as he licks my lower lip until I open like a door with a trick lock, just shake me and finger me until I let loose. His tongue is warm and relentless. Some people fall into a first kiss and some people claim them, the brass ring, the prize they knew they’d win. I am falling, and he is claiming me from the inside out.

He pulls me onto his lap, and I push him back into the cushions of the sofa. His fingers are running up and down the sides of my waist in time with his tongue on my neck and my jaw, my ear and my chin. I cannot breathe. I have to breathe so deeply. I nip his ear and he gasps and his hands clench against my waist, and I squirm and writhe against his jeans, and bite his earlobe. Harder.

“Fuck,” he says, and I smile, because he said it but I was thinking it.

My shirt is knotted in his hands, and he is squeezing it and I am pulling him forward and shoving his face into my chest. He pulls at it, pops a button, licks at my collarbones, and I moan, practically keen, because this is life. This is living, only I had forgotten, but it’s all coming back now. He’s nuzzling the top half of my tits through my shirt and he’s so warm, everything is warm. It’s so damn hot in here all of a sudden.

“Take it off,” I say.

He does.

My hair is a tent around us, and his hands are the poles holding me up because everything he is doing with his mouth on me feels so amazing that my bones have liquefied inside of me. Warm, wet tongue against my neck, hot fingers at my waist, firm lips trailing as he pulls down the cups of my bra with his teeth.

My fingers reach for his hair and I pull him up and plumb his mouth, trying to taste his secrets. He sticks his tongue way into my mouth and I hollow out my cheeks and suck till he’s the one moaning. I know what he’s thinking and I’m thinking it, too. It’s a poor substitute but it’s early yet. I reach for his belt and his shirttail and he lays back against the couch and waits while I peel his jersey off like the golden ticket on a Willy Wonka prize-winning candy.

He’s hurt.

I mean not now, but he’s been hurt, badly. The scar doesn’t stop at his neck. It crisscrosses his bicep, which looks malformed, and it runs, a river of hurt, all down his side and across part of his chest. It’s pitted and chunky in places, like badly applied spackle. It’s mostly white now, but just looking at it, at the spread and the scope, I can imagine how it must have bled, how he must have, must have almost died?

I try but fail to stop the gasp from spilling over my lips. I reach out and touch him, and he flinches a little but relaxes as I imitate his motions from earlier, smoothing the flat of my palm over him, open and even, across all the places that once were raw.

“What–?”

“IED.” 

My eyes close. When I open them, his are tracking me in the dim light, and behind me, George Bailey is saying, “I don’t know how you know these things but if you know where my wife is, you’ll tell me… Please, Clarence, where’s my wife? Tell me where my wife is.”

I lean up and lay a kiss on his arm, on the misaligned part of his bicep where the muscle flexes and fades to nothingness. He’s a million miles away but he’s here, under my mouth and my hands. I know because I am this lost every single day.

“We had patrols. We had a few of them mapped out and were waiting…on guys to disarm them. We set up a perimeter around the ground there and then there was some contact, and we took off and these guys in my battalion, my friends, they set off one we missed when we were running…”

I keep touching him, running my hands over and over him, across the ruined skin, across the good skin, across the places they meet and meld.

“I was lucky. They got the worst of it. But I didn’t know, not till after Christmas, that they didn’t, you know, make it.”

It’s not pity that makes me stand and unzip my jeans. It’s not shame that makes me avert my eyes to roll down and kick off my panties. It’s want and need and connection. I stand between his open knees and I wait. He leans up and drags a finger from my hip to my knee.

“What is your name?” I say, because it seems important that I know before we do this.

He laughs a little laugh and his eyes are bright. “David Brooker. What’s yours?”

“I’m Robin Lloyd.”

His hand is wrapped all the way around my knee. “I want to touch you, Robin. May I touch you?”

He’s asking now? His middle finger dips into the skin behind my knee.

I guess he is.

Yes.

“It’s going to be really awkward if you don’t.”

He leans up and both his arms come around my legs quick, and I fall on top of him, and he is laughing. It’s wonderful, so wonderful. And then he’s kissing me again, and I can’t get him out of his jeans fast enough, and we both laugh but leave on our white socks because these are hardwood floors in here and it’s chilly.

His cock springs out at me, and I lean up without thinking and swallow him halfway down, and he’s holding my head, fingers in my hair, and muttering, “Fuck, oh my, fuck. Oh…God. That’s– oh, ohh.”  I suck hard and roll his balls in my hands, and when I look up at him, his hips buck and he almost gags me. I never liked to do this much but right now, it seems just right.

“Stop,” he says. “Ooh. I mean, wait. Robin, wait.”

I turn him loose with a pop and he kisses me like he’s trying to lick all of himself off of my mouth, and he says, “Your mouth is all stretched out,” and I smile big, and then his fingers are on me, sliding back and forth along my way-too-furry folds, and when he sinks a finger in to the knuckle I groan and shiver and bite my lip to keep from screaming.

He bends me at the waist and arranges me on my back on the couch I have sat alone on for months, and he worships me with his hands, his fingers, his lips, and his quiet words. When I am quivering and shaking with need, I reach for him and guide his cock to where I most want him to be. He is kissing me as we line up and our foreheads touch as he sinks in and in, deep down to parts of me long forgotten.

When he moves, I move with him, and when he groans, I moan. When I scream and shake and sink my nails into his back which is slick and rough with sweat and scars, he lifts my hands above my head, pinning me to the cushions and drives and bucks until everything is white hot and blinding. When we come, I throw back my head, and he roars into the stillness of this room. We are alive.

We live.