“You want to tell me about it?”
She turned over on her side with her back facing him.
“I’d rather hear your stories. You’re better at telling them,” she said, though she’d always thought she might have many she would tell if she had found the right listener.
And then she felt his sanded fingertip, cool and light, along the length of the scar where the knife had entered. She let out a slight gasp.
“There’s a story here, too, isn’t there?”
Her skin tingled along the length of her spine.
“Did you notice it right off? Most men do, but pretend they don’t.”
“I noticed it. It’s not something you ask about right off the bat. But it doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“No, not at all.”
“You seem more ashamed about the kiss.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything,” she said.
Her back still facing him, she felt him lean close, and he exhaled deliberately with his mouth inches from her spine, and then with closed lips moved his mouth over the scar, stopping every quarter inch to leave a light kiss. Finally, she moaned, and he reached around her shoulder and pulled her back to the bed, and then kissed in the same way the slightly shorter scar that rose above her left breast. She felt a current run through her, and she arched her feet.
“God, it must have hurt,” he said, but she was still feeling her body respond to him.
“Did you fight back?” he asked.
“Of course I did,” she said, her breath thick. For a moment, that other dark room loomed, and she swept the image away. “Why would you think I wouldn’t?”
“I don’t think that,” he said. “I can tell by the way kissing it brings you alive.”
And at this she pushed him away, pushed his chest hard so he lay flat and so she could mount him, and even with him deep inside her she still could see his eyes moving over her body, fixed briefly on the scar, and then trailing down over her breasts and belly, as if it ran the whole length.
Afterward, she collapsed onto him, her head on his shoulder, and with the same measured, light pressure, he touched each vertebra in her backbone as her breathing eased.
She put her mouth to his ear, flicked her tongue at the peak of it, and whispered, “Do you still dream of opening a little hotel someplace where we can love the beautiful summers?”
He shifted away from her to get a better look at her face.
“We’ve had just this one night.”
“So?”
*
She had passed into Nevada, remembering. They hadn’t moved from Nebraska as quickly as she wanted; she’d had to work double shifts at the diner to raise the money, and he was reluctant to leave home, to shake the hands of friends and farmers whom he’d known most of his life who wouldn’t say so, but thought he was crazy. And then they’d driven this very highway west, and they’d stayed in the motel they eventually bought because the proprietor had said to them at the front desk, “You just made it under the wire. We’re closing next week,” and they’d decided the coincidence was too profound, and why not here, anyway, though there was no beautiful lake or even mountains closer than half a day’s drive away. And then she’d become a manager, an accountant, and a maid; she was nothing she had ever been, and was grateful. And Jack had become a handyman who repaired the motel’s plumbing and tacked up new paneling and worked odd jobs in the evening to make ends meet. And then she’d become a mother, and Lucy looked like Jack, she had to admit, even those mornings when they sat in the little kitchen closed off from the motel lobby and drank coffee, and she thought sometimes that she loved Jack like a brother, which was good enough, and at other times she’d stare at him and think, I hardly know you. Why am I running this dilapidated dump with you? After everything, you’re still a stranger to me who is not at all strange, by which she realized she meant uninteresting.