He nuzzled his long strange feet against hers. She’d already stolen moments to peruse the pale second toes nearly double the length of his big ones. Now she imagined prodding and prising the elongated proximal phalanxes with her mechanical pencil, imagined her own renewed interest in modelling body parts with her softwares. But he just stuffed his hands beneath his head and pursed his lips. Pitted scars on his face and chest suggested volcanic kid-acne. Who, what hatched him? Story short, he said. I was adopted, grew up happy, the end.
She recalled her mother sporting a happy birthday hat, sundress straps askew. Father’s eyeglasses bristling with reflected cake-candles. She nudged around for the recently familiar feelings—anger, ashes—and drew a blank on which the morning’s wavy motion of the water soon teetered. She gripped the edge of the mattress with one hand. Funny, she managed to say. I’m kind of an orphan as well.
He dislodged the cover and nudged her to his side. You okay? he asked, a blued sweat pooling in tender droplets on his temples.
Soon he was crusty where his penis drowsed against her belly. She got up to pee, flushed. She splashed water in the sink and drew the bathroom curtains apart. Night now. Lit by a single streetlamp, fog foundered in the motel parking lot amid drifts of leaves. She shivered. Pressure in her ears. A drop formed on the faucet and hung like a sac. From the bed, an impatient mattress creak.
Too soon again they packed into his truck and rode out beneath an overcast dawn strung with trances of migrating geese. An hour of dun fields and he pulled over. They were miles still from the nearest checkpoints. Wind gasped pebbles at the truck’s undercarriage and razzed the windshield. He roughed his stubble with his thick-jointed fingers and a predatory beat invaded her head—water-borne bacteria scaling her canals and tympanum, who knew? Infection and appointments and permanent hearing loss.
Stay with me tonight? he said.
Can’t. Early meetings tomorrow.
He knocked the truck back into gear. Right, he said. I get it. Too far, too fast.
Not what I meant, she said, mind skidding toward tomorrow’s mirror-skinned towers and similitudes of corridors and parking lots, the nodding and rictus-smiling as she laid out her wares. And then the rush-hour armadas of oncoming headlights, possible curbside immolations backdropped by six-story digi-boards promising the latest administration’s RenewalWorks! campaign. All this near-life she’d been ungrateful for since her parents’ deaths.
But once upon a time—the summer she was fourteen—time had stood still. She’d followed her best friend in breaching a newly discovered gap in the chain-link fence behind the convenience store and descended a honeysuckle dripping, thorny realm to a hidden creek forbidden throughout their childhoods. She and her friend returned daily but what was a day then? Cicada-time, girl-time of cigarettes filched from parents turned statues by coursing girl-hormones, of hash brownies and baked-baby brownies and other sundry legends. Wild dominion of fast friends who traced freckles on each other’s backs and told fortunes that turned into toads or jumped ship hands clasped and never let go. Glorious escape and then no escape when, just before school started that fall, Works! Workers razed and landfilled the ravine for BestBet Towers soon ringed by SureBets and SafeBets.
In the truck beside her, her date stage-coughed. Verdict still out? he prompted. There hope for me yet?
Early-season flakes melted through the gusts outside. She laughed and squeezed her eyes shut. Retinal noise lit up behind her closed lids. Floaters and fireworks, her optic apparatus peacocking, she knew. But still. She opened her eyes again. The urgent stare on him. And that blue oddly still at his temples. Charmer, she said.
He shipped to attention then lashed back against the seat. He raised both hands high as if under arrest.
3
A third consecutive morning she woke freezing in his bed. Her new normal. He was turned away with his face buried in one of the king pillows. A miracle he wasn’t suffocating. Rain frosted the tall windows in his upper-floor suite. She wrapped herself around his warmth as if he might tug her to wherever he was afloat in his own slack unconscious, one that ran at a higher temperature than hers. Water ticked from the tap in the next-door bathroom. She pressed her nose harder to his back, eliciting a grunt. The best response, she decided, to her handset’s unreturned messages from her friend—where r u? u alright?—ghosting on the bedside table. Because how account? At least she’d dragged through most of her work these past days—as had he, for that matter. No harm done. No harm! And if she got up soon and got dressed and to her apartment on the district’s far side, plunked at her desk and last-gasped through her latest project, she’d crank it out on time. She would. Or else. Still, she touched him now above his buttocks and along his outer thighs. He mumbled awake, turned onto his back and lifted the sheet for her to mount him.
An ugly man. Raw-knuckled, raggedy-nailed. Accretions of muscles on his torso like carbuncles on a powerful creature’s hide. That blue by his temples now an efflorescence like pin-dot schools of fish. Here and not here. Here, over here. Come here.