by CD Reiss
Half-dressed, he propped me against the wall outside my bedroom and peeled off my pants. I unbuckled and unzipped him, feeling the throb and heat of his arousal in my fist. I’d never imagined how much I’d want it, and I’d never imagined I’d ever feel so empowered to take it. My boldness shocked and freed me.
Holding me up by the legs, he pushed toward me and I guided him so he could drive into me with the force of an animal. I grunted. He exhaled.
“I’m having you in the shower too.”
“And on the table?” I gasped as he thrust hard.
“Table’s not for that.”
Angling his hips to put pressure on my clit, he took me faster. I was aroused beyond all thought, but it was hard to concentrate against a wall.
As if reading my mind, he took my hand from his shoulder and guided it between my legs. “I want to see you make yourself come.”
I started to object. That would be too shameful. Too embarrassing.
“Show me,” he said, deep inside me.
My reaction to his intensity wasn’t in my mind or heart. My spine vibrated and I nearly came from his command.
Any thought of shame was drowned and washed away. I rubbed my clit as he fucked me, letting my orgasm wash away any idea of shame. With him, I was fully myself.
“Yes,” he hissed and thrust harder, grabbing the flesh of the backs of my thighs, slowing as if savoring every thrust. He buried himself in me, pinning my hand between his body and my clit. I felt his pulsing as he filled me.
When he was done, he gathered me in arms that never seemed to get tired and carried me to the shower, where we made love again.
* * *
Chris pulled our one comfortable chair in from the living room and placed it at the center of a long side of the table. His hair was slicked back and he smelled of spicy soap.
“Stay here,” he said before kissing my forehead.
“Okay?”
He was already on his way up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
He wouldn’t discuss where we were going or what we were doing. He had some kind of future for us on his mind, but had made it clear he wasn’t interested in bringing it up yet. I was relieved, because though I wanted to discuss our future, I feared I wouldn’t like the results of the conversation.
Because how could this work?
I needed to find a new life, and he already had one. He was based in New York, and though I might travel, I didn’t know if I could ever really leave Barrington.
Chris came down more slowly than he’d gone up, taking his steps carefully, looking around the three boxes stacked in his arms.
The boxes of his letters.
He placed them on the table and pushed the stack to the center. “Our story is here.”
“Oh, Chris. Didn’t you see? I’m so sorry, but most of them are impossible to read.”
He slid off the top box. It landed on the table in a poof of dust. “I’m here to fill in the gaps.” He opened the box and grabbed a handful of envelopes. “Upper left corner is the day I left. Bottom right is the seven hundred and forty-nine dollar check. We’ll go horizontally. If I calculated it right, we should have enough space for all the letters folded into thirds.”
“I don’t get it. You want to…”
“Lay it all out. My entire story.” He plucked a letter off the top of the pile and took out the paper. It was water damaged and all the ink had run. “This is on letterhead.” He flipped the envelope over so he could see the postmark. “Right. So it goes about…” His eyes flicked from one edge of the table to the other. “Here.” He laid it two thirds of the way to the right, letter tucked under the envelope flap.
I picked the next one off the pile. The postmark had crumbled away. I slid the letter out, unfolding it. Letterhead again.
“‘—time I moved to Park Avenue.’” I read what hadn’t been washed away. “‘—aller than I’d like for Lance, but zip—’” I scanned to the bottom, where a few more words had survived.
“Zip code matters,” he said. “I had a place on the Lower East Side that was fine. All the roommates moved out and I just took over the lease. But Brian, my partner, was pretty adamant that I was always going to be a second-rate player below Fourteenth.” He shook his head as if getting the dust off. “Street. Fourteenth Street runs east-west. There’s below it, where the creatives live, and above it. He said I needed to have a Park Avenue address, even if it was big as a closet.”
“How big was it?”
“It had a two-burner stove and a sink as big as that postage stamp.” He took the envelope and laid it next to the first letter. “But I had Lance, even if he was miserable in that tiny studio.”
“How could you tell?”
“He shit in my favorite shoes.”
I laughed. He took another letter off the pile.
I grabbed his hand. “Wait.”
It was my turn to take the stairs two at a time. I rushed to the hallway, threw open the closet door, and gathered up as many of my photo albums as I could carry. When I went up for my second trip, Chris helped. Soon we had them all piled at the foot of the table.
He told me the year and season of his move to Park Avenue, and I located the right photo album.
“Oh,” I said, seeing which era of my life it was. I pressed my fingers against a picture of my parents and me in the town square.
“That the Labor Day Barbecue?”
“Memorial Day. Daddy stopped funding it a few years after the factory closed, but it went on without him. Bernard and his band just set up. People brought stuff.”
He put his arm around my shoulder and brushed his thumb along my neck. “This is a special place.”
“It is. It’s a dead end, but it’s home.”
“It’s our home.”
“Yeah.” The album page’s plastic skin crackled when I pulled it back. The photo came right off. I put it on top of the letter it went with.
“Why isn’t Harper in the picture?”
“She was at MIT.”
“Wait, what?”
“She didn’t finish.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story.”
His arms snaked around me, turning me toward him, my body tight against his. “Catherine, I need your long stories. I need to live them with you.”
“It’s so much.”
“It is, but we have nothing but time and a really big table.”
Could we bridge the years between us? Could we understand each other? Or would the exercise make it worse? Would we see each other’s bad decisions and get disgusted or ashamed?
“What if you don’t like what you find out?” I said. “What if I don’t live up to your expectations?”
“I have more to worry about than you.” He tipped my chin up so he could look in my eyes. “Whatever we did, that makes us the people we became. And I know I loved the girl you were. I’m pretty sure I’m in love with the woman you grew into.”
For a split second, he looked like the old Chris on the day we were caught in the office, face cut into stripes from the afternoon light coming through the blinders. His skin folded into Ws at the corners of his eyes and his voice had grit in the corners, but he was that same boy with that same raw love.
I wanted him to love me again, because I was sure I loved him.
“Let me make you some tea and I’ll tell you what happened with Harper when Daddy got sick.”
Chapter 37
chris
I didn’t have a timeline to complete the boxes of letters. Good thing, because there was no way we would have made it. That afternoon bled into the night. Harper came home, stopping to look at the boxes and the new table.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” Catherine said. “Have you eaten?”
She hadn’t. Catherine fed her, then me, and Harper went upstairs.
“You were telling me about the subway.” Catherine tapped the letter in question. Half a page of the most boring narration in the world
. She sat in her chair and put her hands in her lap.
“It’s a little dry. We can skip it.”
“Nope.”
I told her what was in the letter, as far as I could remember, expanding on it as necessary, and she told me about her life at the same time. She’d sold the paintings off the walls to bail Trudy out of jail for a DUI. She’d posted bond for half the town at some point or another.
When we realized it had gotten too dark to read my writing, we turned on the lights, laughing at the obvious solution. Morning came and went. We ate sandwiches and drank homemade iced tea.
We were tired, but we couldn’t stop. She was fascinating, creative, driven to keep the people she loved above water. The table was crisscrossed with photographs and paper scraps when we got to the point when Errol Dannon went off to college. She beamed, eyes glittering with tears.
“He was having such a hard time with math in eighth grade. He thought he was dumb, but he wasn’t. And when he went to Duke, he said it was because I drove Harper to tutor him that he made it.” She sniffed, wiping away a tear.
My handkerchief was damp, but I used it to wipe her eyes.
“Thanks.” She shook off the sobs. “I think we should take a break.”
I tipped the box. A single envelope slid along the bottom. “There’s one more.” I handed it to her.
“This one’s in good shape,” she said, flipping to the front. Her brows knit. “No postmark? No stamp?”
“Might have been stuck in another envelope?”
She shrugged and opened it. When she unfolded the page, two tickets fell out. I put my elbows on my knees, leaning as close to her as I could without crowding her.
“What is this?”
“Read it.”
She met my gaze for a second, then went back to the page and read.
* * *
Dear Catherine,
This time, I’ll come with you wherever you want to go.
I’ll stay where you want to stay.
I am at your service from this point on.
All my love,
Christopher.
* * *
That was the shortest letter yet. She looked on the back of the crisp, white page. Blank.
She picked up the tickets and read them. “The Sistine Chapel?”
“You like paintings on the ceiling. Figured it was a good place to start.”
She was still confused. “The date—”
“Enough time for me to get you an expedited passport.” I reached over to wipe her eyes again, but she took the handkerchief and dabbed her eyes herself. “The tickets… it’s just one thing. There’s more. Paris is beautiful.”
“I don’t know,” she squeaked.
“What don’t you know?”
“They need me.” She swung her hand toward the front door as if the entire population of Barrington could fit through it.
“Let them decide that.”
“This is my home.”
“You can still let me take you to Europe.”
Her head was bent over the last letter. A teardrop fell on the paper with a heavy tick. She rubbed it into a gray streak.
“Catherine.”
“I don’t know how I feel.”
“You don’t have to.”
She swallowed thickly. “I’m tired of crying.” She sniffed, not looking up. “But I keep doing it. It’s like a habit. I keep thinking everything’s just going to be bad forever. And I think because if things got good, no one would need me. I wouldn’t have a purpose. I’d be just…” She looked up, past me, to the ceiling, the morning light, the bare walls. “Nothing. Useless.”
I gathered her hands in mine. “Your work in the world isn’t done.”
She tightened her fingers around mine. We sat like that for a long time. I’m not a praying man, but I prayed. For me. For her. For the possibility of an us.
It was her decision. I’d already made one for us. It was her turn.
The effort involved in shutting up was monumental.
Her hands loosened, but I didn’t let go. I wouldn’t. Not until she spoke.
“So…” She cleared her throat when the word caught, looking at me with eyes clear of sadness. “Is it cold in Rome this time of year?”
“You’ll go?”
“I’d love to go. I’d love to be with you.”
I leapt off the chair and held her. “Thank you,” I said into her neck.
She laughed. It wasn’t a reaction to something funny. No. It went on too long for that. It was a laugh I couldn’t kiss through, though I tried. She laughed because she was happy, and I laughed with her.
I’d replaced her tears with laughter. I’d done much without her, and I’d done much for her. But I hadn’t achieved anything until I turned her sadness into joy.
Chapter 38
CATHERINE
August was hot and sticky in Rome, but somehow, with the fountains and carless plazas, it was bearable. Maybe Chris made any kind of weather seem perfect.
I looked at my watch.
“She’s going to be late,” Chris said. “You know Lucia’s always late. It’s an Italian thing.”
Something strange had happened between Chris’s ex-wife and me. She’d had us and a few others over for dinner the day after we arrived in Rome the first time, six months earlier. We chatted over wine and I helped her shell peas. We didn’t have a single thing in common except for Chris, which should have inspired me to steer clear of her. But I didn’t.
I liked her.
Apparently she liked me too. The next morning, Chris got a note at the hotel, respectfully requesting permission to be my friend. I felt as if she were asking for my hand in marriage.
“I’ll tell her no,” Chris had said, rooting around his pockets for a pen.
“Don’t you dare!” I snapped the letter away.
“What? Why?”
“She’s different than anyone I ever met before.” I folded the paper and put it back into the envelope. “And she thinks I’m interesting.”
“If it would make you happy…”
“You make me happy.” I slipped my hands under his jacket, circling his waist. “Lucia is entertaining, and I’d like to be her friend. But if it makes you uncomfortable…”
“No, no, no. It’s fine. Just don’t go shopping with her.”
“First, shoes! Then, bags!”
Lucia and I hadn’t bought anything but wine and pastry together, and yes in the six months I’d known her, she’d always been late. You could set your watch to it.
“We have to get moving early if we want to make it to Lake Como.” He tipped back a tiny cup of espresso, finishing it in a single gulp, as expected in Rome.
Across the cobblestone plaza, flower and fruit sellers had set up tables. They did brisk business in single carnations and little, sealed grey boxes. A heavy door into the side of the church was chocked open. A stream of people came in and out. Some went in holding the flowers and boxes and left without them.
“But I want to go to the catacombs,” I said before finishing the last of my pizza, which was a completely different thing in Italy. Just a piece of flatbread with sauce and a dusting of cheese. A snack. “And that apartment in Trastevere feels like home.”
“You want to stay then?” Chris reached across the table for my hand, and I gave it to him.
Behind him, as people passed on the sunlit plaza, the pigeons fluttered up in a wave, cooing and dropping back to peck between the cobblestones. He’d let his beard grow in. I loved running my fingers through it when we kissed.
Chris would go wherever I wanted. He’d show me places he knew or discover new things with me.
“Harper’s coming home from Stanford for break.”
We’d been traveling for two months this time. Our first trip to Italy was a week in Rome and six weeks in Tuscany. Then we went home. I took care of the Barrington house. He took care of business in New York. We were separated for two weeks, and we decided never to do that agai
n. That was nine months ago.
“We can come back, or we can skip the Citta Della whatever festival in Como.”
“Chee-tah. Dio mio, Christopher.” Lucia’s voice came from behind me.
I stood and we double-air-kissed. That had always looked phony to me, but when you actually kissed the person and touched them in some other way, it meant you liked them.
I was surprised how much I liked Lucia. I’d known Barrington and Doverton women who kept their hair and nails perfect like she did, and I knew women who put on fussy airs and cared about status. But none of them were as grounded about it as Lucia. She didn’t gossip, and she didn’t look down on me for my short, unpolished nails or quick ponytail. She liked that I didn’t care about my social station, even as she made no excuses for the fact that she cared deeply.
“Chee-tah, then,” Chris said, double-kissing his ex-wife, who now spent half her year in her home country.
“It’s not a cat,” she said, sitting next to me.
“Whatever. If I need a translator, I’ll hire someone.”
“You can look right in front of you.”
The waiter came before she could explain. She ordered lunch in Italian, I did the same, and Chris ordered in a halting patchwork of syllables that I explained to the waiter.
“Excuse me,” I called to the waiter before he left. In Italian, I asked, “What’s going on over there? With the open door?”
He answered, and I thanked him.
“What was that?” Chris asked.
“It’s the feast day of Saint Monica.”
“From Friends?”
Lucia rolled her eyes and nudged me.
“They’re bringing offerings,” I continued. “Silly man.”
“How is it that you’re at your woman’s mercy?” Lucia asked. “What would you do without her?”
“It was worse in Iceland.”
“Everyone speaks English there,” I protested.