“The very fact that you’re saying that is enough to tell you—”
“That I would never, I know. I would never and yet. . .the terror of it is always with me. His shadow is always over my shoulder. The wound has stopped bleeding and everyone says it looks okay, but the scar is the problem. I have a scar in me three feet deep.”
Only when he’s finally quiet do I realize I’m crying. I have no idea when I started—maybe when he said about feeling responsible? I don’t know, I don’t know, but I do know this: it gets so much worse the second he says about the scar. I have to cover my mouth before I make a sound. It doesn’t seem right he should have to hear my pain, after spilling so much of his own. It isn’t about me, I think, don’t look, don’t listen; it’s okay, it’s okay, but of course he knows. He just told me he’s the best at knowing.
How could he not?
“Why are you upset? We can still be friends.”
“That isn’t why I’m crying.”
“Then why?”
“You really don’t know? I thought you knew why people are the way they are. I thought you understood what made me like this.”
“I do and yet. . .I think I want to hear you say.”
“I’m crying because that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard and it’s about you—this is something that happened to you, even though you’re so kind and lovely. You just tried to help and paid too high a price. That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“It isn’t so bad really. At least, I’m now at the stage where I can actually feel again for another human being without picturing their nightmarish death.”
“That doesn’t sound a whole lot better.”
“Believe me, it is. It feels like progress at least.”
“Well, I’m glad. . .I’m glad they’re helping you.”
“Who is helping me?”
“The person—the one you can feel for now.”
He laughs, so sudden it makes my heart stop.
But then he speaks, and it starts again.
“The person is you, Beth. I’m talking about you. Unless you would like it if I wasn’t, in which case I’ll pretend that isn’t what’s going on at all. The last thing I want is for you to feel obliged to me or like you might need to do something to make me—”
“I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel obliged.”
“Do you mind if I ask how you do feel?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you feel it?”
“I do. I felt it when your knee almost brushed mine and your hand definitely did. I felt it when you looked up at me with those eyes like a shadow and put your soft hands on my shoulders and my throat and every little tiny inch where you have touched. I feel it now so strongly that I want to say it will be okay. If you want to do this it will be okay—but the truth is I can’t guarantee that. My heart may be beating again, but I know I’ll probably never want any kind of sexual contact. Can you live with that?”
“I can. I want to. Yes.”
“Can you live without being with someone in a physical way?”
“It’s never mattered to me. It won’t matter to me,” I say, and I believe it, too. Why wouldn’t I? All sex has ever done is bring me pain. My whole life has been about evading sticky, groping hands greedily grasping at me through the darkness. Memories flash up in my head the second I say it—of the excitement at the idea of losing my virginity in the back of my father’s sedan, followed so swiftly by the realization of what sex actually is.
One long disappointment, punctuated by pain.
Like the taste of coffee, I think, after the anticipation built by the amazing smell of it brewing. It should taste rich and sweet and instead is so bitter, so very bitter. That’s what sex has been for me—so it takes almost nothing to say yes. How hard can it be?
Oh, Lord, I wish I’d realized just how hard something like this was going to be.
Chapter Four
AT FIRST, I don’t really think about it. He’s so endlessly fascinating, I hardly have the time. I lose entire days to his descriptions of giant mechanical spiders and how to make them, or the bookshelves he has in an otherwise empty room of his rambling house. One Saturday, I come out of a daze and find I’ve just been trailing my hand over the spines of his battered books, their titles dancing and dancing through my thoughts.
Most of them are made up of words I barely understand—to the point where I have to create new definitions that mean absolutely nothing. I sit in a shaft of weak winter sunlight, and turn neuro stimulation into something psychics do to their lovers and contraindication into a thing that happens when you fail to indicate your preference of ice cream, marveling at how he can know so much and so little at the same time.
After our third day spent together—sprawled on the floor of his attic, both of us wrapped in old furs from a box marked Grandmother, he seems to still. His eyes fog over with confusion and he turns to me and says:
“This isn’t a normal thing to have, is it? This is why people think I’m weird. Because I have old furs that used to belong to an elderly woman in my attic, and persuade girls to try them on with me.”
And of course he’s right. He’s absolutely right. Serial killers keep their grandmother’s old things in their attic. Psychopaths don’t understand that this isn’t the kind of thing you do with your possible girlfriend. But he’s also wrong in all the ways a person can be wrong. He has no clue that five minutes spent with him doing this is better to me than a million years on dates with ordinary men.
I could genuinely sit here forever and look at him pretending to be a bear in a coat three sizes too big for any normal person. Modeling this mothballed thing for him was the most fun I’ve had in years. I let it hang off one shoulder and gave him a sultry look, and felt almost no fear at all. Joy would be the word I’d use to describe my emotional state—and he must know that. He can read it on my face. I know he can.
Yet somehow he isn’t sure if this is what we’re supposed to be.
“We should probably go out,” he says. “I’m meant to take you to a decent Italian restaurant and pull out your chair for you. Then I order a nice bottle of red even though you hate wine and you inquire about my day despite knowing that I no longer go to any kind of work and just spend my days fixing broken machinery and occasionally selling it. We make awkward conversation that has nothing to do with forensic psychiatry or mothballs or any of the other things we keep accidentally talking about. And then I walk you home and say goodnight. Is that right?”
“It sounds right, and yet I find myself wanting to say no.”
“Not really interested in Italian restaurants?”
“That could be the case. Yeah, that could be it.”
“Maybe you have something against awkward conversation.”
“That’s never seemed to stop me before.”
“So what would stop you now?”
“The relief of not having to with you,” I say, and when something like bliss blooms in those somber features—that’s when I realize how much trouble I’m in. That’s the moment when it starts to matter, because more than anything I want to slide across this dusty floor and lean against one of those sturdy shoulders. I ache to touch him, even though it could well be that he doesn’t want to be touched at all.
In fact, I’m certain he doesn’t want to be touched at all. How else to explain what happens when we go for a walk with Trudy some days later? I finish work at four in the morning, and there he is actually waiting for me on his porch, like some long-lost friend come back to me. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, like a river in the desert. My heart lifts at the sight, even though I know it’s weird.
I know that I should be disturbed.
So how come I’m not? How come I just want to run to him? He stands when he sees me and raises a hand, as though he isn’t sure if he should be this person. He can’t tell if it’s okay to be waiting for me in the freezing darkness, and d
oesn’t want to press the issue. But I want him to press the issue.
I want to be wanted like this—I deserve to be wanted like this—without worrying about what it might mean. No jumping at shadows, no terror of too much need from someone else. Only a kind of relief that I can live like this and be okay. More than okay, in truth—when I take a step forward and beckon him over he crosses the street to me, and I swear I swoon in ways I’ve never swooned before.
He has the collar of his great coat turned up. His hands are in his pockets and his gaze is just this side of hesitant and when he gets to me he says, “Any time you want me to go away, just say and I’ll go without question.”
Is it any wonder I want to put my arms around him? Anyone would want to put arms around him. There are monks in Tibet screaming at me to do just that, but instead I simply tell him that I would never want him away from me as forcefully as I can. I make my words the hug I want to give, and just hope that he can feel it.
I think he can. Every time I say a word that lets him further in, he gets that blissful look all over his face. One side of his mouth curls up; his eyes fill with a soft light. And most important, he relaxes enough to suggest things, little things, loving things that we can do together. “I thought we could take a walk across the fields, see the sun rise, walk your dog,” he says, and I agree wordlessly.
I have to agree wordlessly. He just asked me to do something from a ridiculously romantic movie about things I’ve no experience of. I can hardly form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. I just get Trudy and follow him to the fields behind his house—the ones that are dotted with tiny pools of rainwater that glint in the first rays from the sun. The ones that are so thick with grass and wildflowers you could paste them on a postcard.
And I’m walking through them with a man, an amazing man, a man who looks so unbelievably good bathed in breaking sunlight I could cry. I have to look away from him for a second, but it doesn’t really help when I do. Now all I can feel is the space between his bare hand and mine, so heavy with the hint of the thing we should do.
We’re supposed to lace our fingers together now. We both know we are. We stand in silence watching Trudy bound through the grass, everything so beautiful and so ripe for some kind of affectionate gesture, and that space between us crackles. I’m almost afraid to look down in case I see his fingers twitching with a need to close the gap, but worse is the idea that they won’t be.
Maybe it’s just me.
I think it’s just me. If he wanted to hold my hand, surely he would. The tension is so unbearable that he has to know it’s okay to do. I can tell he knows—and yet nothing actually happens. And naturally the longer nothing happens the more intense this feeling gets. It starts out as a tiny flicker, then gradually builds into a bright flame, before finally finishing in some kind of terrible inferno.
By the time we make our way back to the house, my entire body is ablaze. All I can think of is my hand, as though my hand has suddenly grown a vagina. Every nerve ending is right there on the surface of my skin, and they all want me to just take hold of him. I even start imagining how rough or smooth his palm would be, in a way usually reserved for my innermost and deepest sex fantasies.
But I can cope with it, I swear to God I can.
I’m absolutely sure that I am fine with all of this.
Until the movie theater, that is.
WE GO TO a ramshackle place just off Main Street, showing a movie we each were startled to learn the other loved—him startled because it was a little before my time and me startled because of the violence. He should hate the violence, I know, yet somehow he agrees when I list it in my top ten of all time. He tells me he has dreams about Clarice Starling coming to save him, and I’m so startled he would cast himself as the girl in the well that for a moment I can’t say anything.
I’m too busy imagining myself with a gun drawn, telling him that everything is going to be okay now. Just stay quiet, the other agents are on their way, I see myself saying, and by the time I come back to the conversation he’s already halfway through plans to see it at the Tennenbaum. “I haven’t been to the movies in years,” he says in this wistful sort of voice, and after that I can hardly say no.
But once we’ve sat in that sultry darkness, I sort of wish I had.
For a start, the film is much sexier than I remember it being. The conversations between Lecter and Starling take on an oddly seductive note that I’m sure wasn’t there before—though if I’m honest, it might not be there now. My radar for this sort of thing has just been fine-tuned; I’m so aware of everything even remotely erotic that I see it in a serial killer casually chatting to a rookie agent.
And then there are the seats in here. Were they so close together before? I’m absolutely certain they weren’t, when I last visited with the guy from accounting. At the very least the seats had arms, yet somehow they don’t seem to now. There is nothing between us but empty air, and that empty air is starting to crackle again before Clarice has even gotten to the disembodied head in a jar.
God knows where I will be by the time the third act hits. My whole body feels alive to his every move, even though his moves are all utterly tiny and insignificant. He scratches his elbow. He shifts a little in his seat. He checks his watch.
Oh, and he also presses his leg right into mine.
There I am waiting for another miniscule movement, and suddenly I have the entire length of his right thigh pushing into my left one. I can feel the seam of his jeans and the place where muscle gives way to bone, and absolutely none of it feels like an accident. If it was an accident, would he keep the limb there long after we’ve both acknowledged that this is going on? Would he keep staring straight at the screen as though nothing has happened?
I glance at him for some kind of confirmation, and I know he feels me doing it. Yet he won’t look in my direction. And he doesn’t move away. Quite the contrary—after one long agonizing minute of this new kind of contact, he shifts his leg up and down in a way that only makes things worse. It presses his thigh so tightly to mine I probably couldn’t get a penny between us, and when he does so something else happens.
My skirt ruffles up.
My skirt ruffles almost all the way up. Another inch and he could probably see panties, if he happened to glance down. Suddenly I can feel denim against the bare and far-too-sensitive skin of my thigh, and I have almost no idea what to do with the sensation. My body wants to process it as exciting and arousing, but my brain keeps reminding me that I’m not supposed to. He doesn’t want me to.
So why is he rubbing his leg against mine?
Because that is definitely what he seems to be doing. He has exposed an expanse of skin, and is currently stroking that skin in the most casual way possible. His leg just sort of rocks in this slow, maddening circle, until that one point of contact is pretty much all I can think about. All thoughts of being restrained and respectful of his wishes fly right out the window, and I can’t blame them.
The whole thing just feels too good. It feels good in a way nothing has ever felt good before. I thought I could cope because sex has never really meant that much to me, but somehow it means absolutely everything in this moment. It consumes my body, from the neck down. My nipples have stiffened, even though it’s hardly cold in here and he isn’t touching me anywhere rude. And as for that void between my legs. . .
It definitely isn’t a void anymore. Everything there feels heavy and swollen, as though every drop of blood inside me has rushed to that one place. My panties are suddenly tight, to the point where moving seems impossible. When I shift just a little the material nearly suffocates me, and in a way that makes me feel far too hot all over.
If the movie doesn’t end soon, I’m going to wind up doing something very bad. I can already feel the bad thing blooming inside me, like a fevered infection. Pretty soon I might try putting a hand on his knee or a hand on his thigh, or maybe I might do it higher—Oh God, what if I do it higher? I cannot under any circumstan
ces let that happen.
I bite my fist just to stop it coming on, and when the film finally blessedly finishes, I practically run out into the lobby.
But the weird thing is—it barely seems to help at all.
The fresh air feels good against my overheated skin, true enough. And the relief of not having him so close to me is a wonderful thing. For a moment I even bask in it a little, sure that I got away with my crafty feelings of overwhelming excitement. Then I turn and see him coming through the doors, face as flushed as mine feels, perspiration gleaming on his forehead and in that little groove just above his collarbone, eyelids as heavy as if he just awoke from some heated dream. . .
And it all just floods through me again. Only this time, I don’t have the darkness to cover me. The lobby is practically lit by floodlights. My T-shirt is probably see-through under that glare, and even if it isn’t my stiff nipples will still be visible. My lips won’t close, and I’m reluctant to move in case it somehow gives away the fact that it feels kind of good when I do, and all of this gets worse when I realize that he maybe feels the same way.
He looks so dazed. He seems unable to form words.
“It was good to do that,” he finally says, but I have no idea if he means watching the movie or touching my leg. It could be that he doesn’t know, either. As he leads me out of the lobby I feel his hand just ghost against the small of my back—like he’d love to put his arm around me, but isn’t sure how. And when we walk down Main Street and over to Grover Close, I get that sensation in my hand again. That urge to close the gap between his and mine, ever crackling between us.
Intrusion Page 5