by Hugh Breakey
‘That was the other thing.’ She licked her lips. ‘You still taste good sober. That’s true love right there. You could put that on a Hallmark card.’
Back home, Julie blinked at the white glare of the kitchen’s fluorescent light. ‘Where are your candles?’
‘In the kitchen cupboard beneath the sink. How did you know I had…?’
She grinned and started to rummage, then raised a slender hand triumphantly holding four long white candles. ‘Mwah-ha-ha. You have no secrets from your grocery deliverer.’
She melted the bases of the candles with her lighter and stuck them on saucers. ‘That’s better,’ she nodded as the candlelight kissed her face with its flickering glow. ‘Now, where were we?’
She leaned back against the table’s edge, pushing her hips forward. The dim light turned her eyes from emerald green to coal black. Our mouths met, and the rest of the world faded, trapped outside my locked door as I pressed her body against mine. Her feet had left the floor, but I barely felt my muscles flex.
The bedroom. The thought had hardly touched my mind and I was carrying her through the doorway, knees dipping at the edge of the bed. I lowered her onto the mattress and slid alongside her.
‘Hold up,’ she said. ‘I haven’t waited this long to fumble around in the dark.’
She rolled away from me and slipped into the darkness, then returned with the candles. Their butter-yellow light and dancing shadows washed the room with warmth and life. She turned to me.
‘Do we need, um…’—the question had to be asked—‘you know, protection?’
Julie shook her head. ‘I’m on the pill.’ A sigh. ‘Have been all this time. Hope springs eternal, I guess.’ She looked me up and down and grinned. ‘You always stretch when you’re nervous.’
I looked down at my arms. One hand had wrapped around the other wrist, its thumb pressing hard against the joint, twisting it anti-clockwise. I hadn’t noticed I was doing it.
‘It’s a dancer’s habit.’ Julie walked over and sat beside me on the edge of the bed. Our knees bumped as we turned towards each other.
‘Do you know everything about me?’ I released the stretch, trying to keep a tinge of bitterness out of my voice.
Her crooked smile broadened. She grabbed my shoulders, gripping the shirt as leverage, and straddled me. ‘You have no secrets from me. But that’s a good thing, right?’ Her hands left my shoulders, and she slipped off the straps of her dress. It tumbled about her waist.
A lace bra hugged her breasts, almost but not quite see-through in the dim light. ‘Wow.’ My voice had become no more than a husky whisper. ‘Nice bra.’
‘This one’s your favourite.’ A wry smile creased her lips. ‘Not ideal for dancing, structurally, but it’s important to plan for the possibility everything might go spectacularly well.’ Her hands grazed over her sternum and began to track down and sideways. My eyes locked on her fingertips. The way they meandered across her breasts, and then pressed down hard on the soft lace, pulled tight by her arched back. ‘You see what I mean? Sometimes it’s good when someone knows all your secrets.’
She was right. This seized me, electrifying every nerve ending in my body, animating desires hidden from not just the world but my own mind. But she knew. She’d had years to learn. I lay exposed before her.
‘Umm.’ The harder I tried to grasp at rational thought, the faster it slipped away. ‘I mean, stop, God, please…’ I grabbed her wrists. ‘This isn’t fair. You know me completely and—’
‘Isn’t fair to who exactly?’ Her fingers entangled mine.
‘There’s no balance between us. You know how to drive me crazy, but I don’t know anything about you.’
‘I’m crazy enough.’ Her hips tilted forward, grinding us together. ‘And I’ve been waiting a long time for this.’
The action going on below my waist only highlighted my point. Julie was playing me like an expert musician, sending a humming feeling all through my body.
‘I’m serious.’ I sat upright to keep myself out of range of her lips.
She sighed and drew back. ‘Okay. How about this?’ She reached up behind her to the clasp of her bra. ‘How about you act like you’ve never seen me naked before? Like you’ve never touched me before.’ The bra slipped off. ‘That’s something I might like.’
I swallowed. ‘I could work with that.’ Maybe for once my lack of memories could serve us both. My hands met her skin, tracing the curves of her waist, the swell of her breasts. She wore a thin silver chain to replace the gold one she’d snapped on Monday. The wedding ring hung there, its green jewels dark and glittering in the candlelight. I folded my fist around it and Julie stiffened. Wide eyes locked on to mine, suddenly open and vulnerable as my hand twisted in a flash of movement and the thin chain snapped.
Julie’s breath shuddered, and the broken chain spilled on to the bed.
I took her hand and slipped the ring on to her wedding finger, feeling it nestle back into the tiny groove she’d showed me only a few days ago.
As if it had tripped a switch, she brushed aside my grip and closed her fist around the scruff of my neck. ‘I always liked that shirt off you,’ she said as her arms flexed and the shirt tore open, its press-studs rattling.
Her mouth met mine and she tasted of heat and fire, and there was no surprise in any of it. The deepest parts of my soul knew this was how kisses should taste. Her hands moved from my neck, by turns grazing and grasping their way down, past my chest to pause at the base of my stomach.
Her fingers scrambled at the top of my pants as my body arched towards the intolerable sweetness. I grasped her wrists and pinned them up and behind her, rolling my body on top of hers. Our lips seared to each other’s mouth and neck as, piece by piece, the clothes somehow found their way off. Soon nothing remained between us, and everywhere skin pressed against skin.
Then she reared back, her gaze darker, suddenly serious. Eyes locked on mine, she reached down and brought us together. The taste of her mouth became the salt of the sweat on her neck. My hands ran through hair that sprang up under my fingers as if alive with electricity; a buzz of pleasure ran through my whole body. We twisted until I lay beside her, her hips angled towards me, my hands everywhere, and every movement smooth, effortless. I moved inside her. Her back arched and for a moment everything turned to heat.
Then something deeper and older took over. Back at the hall, I’d recoiled from the waltz but we were dancing now, each alternately taking the lead and feeling the other follow. The dance pulsed between us, capturing us in its beat, playing us like a melody.
How much was instinct? How much learned from long-forgotten encounters? And how much honed to Julie herself, to this singular person, through our years together?
This was muscle memory, a shaping of flesh. And Julie’s body moved as if she was the mould that shaped me: what I was made for.
We drew closer again, our bodies moving harder and faster, arching above the bedsheets and a transcendent feeling swept over me. I felt, finally, completely safe. At that moment, in her arms, it was possible to feel like I had a place in the world. A life and a home in Julie.
We were kissing as we came, lips open and pressed hard together as every other part of our bodies convulsed and my mind was still.
I collapsed back onto the mattress, and—
Oh crap, the bed.
‘Wow.’ Julie sat up. ‘I thought I felt the earth move.’ The bed was destroyed, the mattress warped over a landscape of valleys and hills. ‘I’m impressed. How is this possible?’
We must have popped the old ratchet strap: without its firm hold, all the bed’s structural integrity had collapsed. The empty boxes were crushed. The solid ones remained, but askew. The two of us lounged among the wreckage, with the mattress draped across the whole structure, the empty boxes curving under our weight.
Julie rolled over, reached down and rummaged beside the bed. She flipped a cigarette into her mouth and her lithe curves stretched as sh
e reached out to light her smoke from one of the bedside candles. Then she rested back, almost cupped in the strange glove of the bed.
I watched her throughout it all. Something had changed. As my limbs hummed, my gaze wandered over her body. It felt like looking at the sun in eclipse, the beauty unencumbered by the dazzle. How could the possibility of all this happiness lie within a single person?
She shifted to nestle in the crook of my arm with her head on my shoulder. Her fingers toyed with the thin hairs on my chest. The warmth of her breasts pressed against my skin.
‘This is what you meant.’ My voice sounded deep to my ear. Foreign. I ran the back of my fingers along her neck. ‘When you spoke about knowing the good and the bad. This…’ I searched for the word. ‘This happiness.’
‘I didn’t necessarily have bed-crushing sex in mind, although a girl can dream.’ She pushed herself up a little, and the cigarette flared as she took a long draw. ‘It was more wanting you to know about our everyday life. You were my person. The one person in the world I could be around without feeling awkward, or lost, or caged.’ She smiled. ‘And I was yours. I knew if we could just be together long enough, then you’d feel that again.’
She’d bet everything on it. She’d gambled and won. The smoke from her cigarette etched whorls into the candlelight. ‘Should we be smoking in here?’ I asked.
‘If a single cigarette could trigger one of these old alarms.’ Her lips bent into a crooked smile. ‘I would never have had to mess around with smoke bombs.’
My hand found hers, feeling the hard metal of her ring as our fingers folded together. ‘I meant what I said earlier, about it not being fair. You know me better than I know myself. And no matter what I do—no matter what small words I record in my journal—it’ll always be like that. It will all be stored in there.’ I touched the side of her head. ‘I’ll always be in your power.’ Just for a moment, it was possible to admit it and not be scared.
For a while she didn’t say anything. She just smoked in silence. I began to wonder if she’d heard me at all.
Then she spoke. ‘There’s something you don’t see.’ She leaned away to crush out the butt on a saucer. ‘The first person to fall in love loses all the power.’ She pulled herself up on her elbows and brushed my hair back from my face. Our eyes met. She looked grave. ‘I love you.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s the awful, unmoving truth in all of this. I loved you long before you unlocked that door and I told you my name.’
My lips moved to say something but her free hand cupped over my mouth. ‘You don’t have to say it back. That’s my point. My life with you is one where I lose all the power, over and over again. Forever being the first one in love.’
‘It’s not the same. Everything I can be lies in your hands.’
‘I think if you knew what it was like to be in love—to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you back—you’d see it differently.’ She dropped back down into the crook of my arms, her head on my shoulder.
We lay for a while, neither asleep nor awake, but in some other state. One of the candles burned low, spluttering as the wick drowned in liquid wax. The shadows it spilled around the room started to flicker.
Julie roused as the light finally fizzled out. ‘I don’t want to be tired.’ Her grumble carried a heaviness, almost a low growl, vibrating through her body and into mine. ‘I tossed and turned all last night. It’s not fair. It’s tonight I want to be awake. For the first time, I don’t have to think about anything. I can just be with you.’
She sounded at once victorious and unguarded.
‘What was it like,’ I asked. ‘Having to think up all those plans and put them in action over all those months?’
‘Lonely.’ I’d thought she’d almost drifted off to sleep when she spoke again. ‘Scary sometimes, when it all threatened to unravel.’
‘It’s not scary anymore. You can sleep. I’m right here. You’ve got me.’
Her breath trembled in relief. ‘Goodnight, Robbie.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘I’ve been whispering that to my pillow each night, almost like a prayer, imagining your head hitting the pillow here on this bed, as I lay there at home. The two of us, alone and alone. Wishing I could keep you safe and happy when you were so far away from me. Every night for the last…’ She paused, and I felt her eyelashes tickle the top of my chest. ‘Three-hundred and fifty-six nights. Goodnight, Robbie.’
But who’s counting?
The words tumbled over in my mind in the dark, gnawing away at any hope of sleep.
Julie lay cuddled up in the crook of my shoulder. After her last words, all the effort and thought seemed to be released from her body and soon she was asleep. An arm lay across my chest, a leg on top of my hip, and the soft warmth of her skin pressed into my side. Every inch of me that touched her purred with life. It was no longer desire, but something more like contentment. I nestled in Julie’s arms, as natural a fit as the ring I’d slipped on to her finger.
The universe could just stay like this forever, and it would be perfect.
One by one, the candles burned down and the room flickered into blackness. But only for a moment. As my eyes adjusted, the lights of the outside world sneaked through the curtains. And those three words rattled around inside my skull, tensing my relaxed muscles. Three hundred and fifty-six nights of goodnight prayer. Almost a year: just shy of two forgettings. The amount of time since we had said ‘goodnight’ to one another, from pillow to pillow.
But who’s counting?
My body stiffened. Other conversations at other times. Jumbled memories from days ago. About the length of time since she’d had a drink.
I needed to remember it right. I disentangled myself from Julie’s sleeping form, pulled on some clothes and padded to the kitchen. To the journal, and the entry for Day Seven. Was it really just four days ago? I skimmed through the entry, memory fluttering as the pages flipped, and found it soon enough. The conversation when she’d talked about how many days she’d got back. Of course, I hadn’t recorded the exact number she’d said. Just that we’d been out on the balcony, and that she’d shown me the medallion.
The medallion.
Her handbag lay discarded on the kitchen floor. I grabbed it without a second thought, rifling through it until I found the hard metal disk. Then I was at the wall calendar, counting back six months from the date engraved on the medallion. And then counting back 179 days from the last forgetting. The dates lined up exactly. On the day of my third forgetting, when we were separated, she’d been drinking. She’d been drunk. Alcoholics don’t fall off the wagon with a single drink. And they don’t give up the next day, with renewed determination, because of a single drink. She’d been drunk.
What did it mean? This required serious thought—for once, I needed to be the clever one. I returned Julie’s handbag to its place and lowered myself into the chair. Time slipped and thoughts rolled over in my mind. Piece by piece, a story tumbled into position.
At last I went back into the room. Julie lay where I’d left her, in the middle of a crumpled bed, like an angel who’d fallen so hard to earth she lay splayed in the crater of her impact. The dim light spilling through the kitchen door cast more shadows than light over her, but she was still beautiful.
I was in no doubt about what the numbers meant. What they had to mean. But I could have these last few moments. I padded softly across the room, pulled on a T-shirt and slid in beside her. The haphazard mattress folded under my weight, tipping Julie towards me. Her body rolled over, warm flesh pressing on to me. She half-woke at the involuntary movement, smiling as her lithe arms folded around me, a movement so easy she could have done it in her sleep.
My skin tingled at her touch. She was a drug, and I was an addict. For a moment I thought she’d fallen back asleep, but then she spoke.
‘Why are you wearing clothes?’ Julie’s murmur was heavy with sleep, playfully disapproving. She pushed at the thin cotton of my T-shirt. ‘Your body’s all
tense.’
‘You should probably wake up.’ I sighed. ‘I’ll get the light.’
By the time I’d got up and hit the switch, Julie had sat up cross-legged in the bed. Wide eyes looked up at me, blinking in the light.
‘Here.’ I held out a T-shirt. This was going to be a train wreck, but at least we could go about it with some dignity.
She reached out and took it. I could see her waking up before my eyes, as the great clockwork mechanism behind her eyes began grinding its gears. It didn’t matter. We were past strategy.
Her gaze measured me up and down, the T-shirt lying limp in her grip. ‘What’s going on?’
I took a deep breath. ‘When you said goodnight to me, you said it was the first time in three hundred and fifty-six nights. But on Sunday you were counting the days since your last drink. Three hundred and fifty-one.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘I can read a calendar, you know.’
She stopped short as my voice cut over hers. Her jaw clenched. For a long moment, her eyes drilled into me. Then she pulled the T-shirt over her head and slipped her arms through it.
‘The last time you drank was when the forgetting struck, time before last.’ I tossed the medallion on to the bed beside her. ‘The dates match up.’
For a moment she looked like she was about to make some angry retort, but then her mouth clamped shut.
‘It stands to reason you wouldn’t have been drinking afterwards,’ I continued. ‘Not with me still lost in the system. So you were drinking when it happened.’ I folded my arms. ‘You were drunk when it happened.’
Inside me a voice screamed at her to deny it. I had all my reasons at the ready. Her being drunk explained everything. It explained why we weren’t together at that fateful moment. Why I got lost in the system with her out of contact. Why she’d given up drinking from that moment. And why, this time, she’d managed to stick with it.
Despite all the logic, all the sense, my heart still wanted her to deny it. Yet she stayed silent. Flint-hard eyes glared up at me, but her lips remained shut.