“What.”
“We can’t do this,” I said. “I should have stayed on the floor. No. You should have stayed in the lobby, or caught your bus. We can’t have this be the way we get back together. Jerking each other off? I can’t do that.”
She held her pajama bottoms in front of her. In the watery glare of the bathroom light I saw they were orange.
“We were just helping each other, David. Like old friends.”
“Helping each other what. Go to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to be with you. It’s been a while, right? It’s been a long goddamned while.”
“I couldn’t sleep and I need to,” said Jade. “Think of me for a change.”
“I do think of you. All the time.”
“I wonder.”
“No, you don’t. You know I do.”
“I want to end this day, David. I want to pull the plug and let it all go down the drain.”
“We’re naked together,” I said. I stepped forward, reached for her. My cock was absolutely erect. I remembered there was come all over my belly. Too bad. I reached for Jade’s hand and got her wrist. The gesture seemed much too aggressive. Only her coming toward me, throwing her arms around me could have salvaged it.
“Please,” I said. “Come back to bed. Don’t put your clothes back on. Don’t go to sleep yet. Be with me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
I put my arms around her, kissed her hair, her forehead, the sides of her face. They were the most adulterated of all my embraces: I wanted to make her want me. I pressed myself against her, some distant surviving remnant of mating ritual. I presented myself to her.
“Go into bed,” she said, as I tried to kiss her mouth. She put her lips onto mine, briefly. “I feel like you’re forcing things. I want to think.”
“Come with me,” I said.
“In a minute. I’m scattered all over the place.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. My knees puckered with impatience.
“In a minute. Just let me think. I want to decide. OK?” She moved out of my embrace, back a step.
I got into bed and turned on the lamp. I waited for Jade, but I don’t know how long. It seemed like quite a while but there’s no reason to trust myself in this. It could have been thirty seconds. It was its own time, separate, like the inestimable durations of dreams. I was at the bathroom door again, having spliced away those instants of consciousness I would have used for reflection. I opened the door carefully. Jade, naked, sat on the edge of the undersized tub, her head in her hands, weeping.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I’ve got too much to feel right now. I can’t let myself go too far.”
She looked up at me. There were white fingerprints on her face.
I thought: We must be out of our minds. Haven’t seen each other in years. Standing naked in a hotel toilet, weeping, shivering, cock pointed straight up.
“It’s all right,” I said. “We can just go to sleep.” I stepped forward, put my hand out to her. She took it, brought it to her moist, flushed face.
“I have this voice in me,” Jade said, “and it’s a very small, simple voice. It keeps on saying, ‘My daddy’s dead.’ It doesn’t even sound like my voice. I never called him Daddy.” Her voice broke; she tried to smile but that broke too. “And I keep thinking of Keith and Sammy and what they’re going through. And Ann, too, damn it. Ann, too. All of them are with me and I can’t handle it. I’ve done everything to get out of this family and the smaller we get, the more I’m in it.” She paused, covered her eyes. “I just wish my father were still alive,” she said, sobbing.
I brought her to bed and kept my arms around her. She was trying not to cry. I could feel her impatience with herself, her exhaustion with her own grief. Soon she was quiet.
“I wonder what time it is,” she said, just when I was wondering—with a certain dread—if she’d fallen asleep.
“I don’t know. Late, I guess.” My arm was beneath her shoulder and it had fallen asleep but nothing could have made me want to move it.
“Everyone knows all about you, you know,” Jade said.
“Who?”
“Everyone I know. I tell everyone about you. What it was like for us. You know, stories about the house and Chicago and being like we were.”
“I don’t know that many people,” I said.
“Everyone in Stoughton knows you. I’ll bet—well, you look a little different but not that much—I’ll bet if you walked across campus, all by yourself, a lot of people would know you were you.”
“Honestly?”
“And I don’t have pictures or anything. It’s all from talk. Sheer description. I talk about you and remember, and when I want to I let myself feel what it was like to be me with you. But God, David, this is something I never thought would happen. It just never seemed like it could. Even when I was in the elevator coming up here, I didn’t believe I’d actually see you. Do you know what I mean?”
“But I saw you yesterday.”
“A dream. So fast, then poof. It didn’t count. It seemed impossible to be with you ever again. And wrong.”
“It’s not, though,” I said. “It’s really not. I don’t know why it’s been so hard for us, everything going so wrong all the time. But I know we can’t turn back. That’s true. I’m sure of it. Whatever is being put in front of us, we have to walk through it.”
“Everything’s so different,” Jade said.
I didn’t know what to say. Jade didn’t say anything and the silence continued. Jade took the lamp off the table and placed it on the floor, still burning. It toppled over and threw long flat shadows across the room like railroad tracks.
A little later, Jade sat up and pulled her Tampax out and dropped it beneath the bed. I stayed on what had become my side of the bed and she sidled next to me, pressing herself against my hip and squeezing my chest as if I had breasts. For some reason I tried to lift myself on my elbows but she pushed my shoulder to make me lie flat. She seemed to be looking down at me from an enormous height.
“I want to do this,” she whispered. “But I don’t want it to…” she trailed off.
“It’ll mean whatever it means,” I said. I reached up for her.
“Or nothing. It’s just this night. Seeing you again on top of everything else. I don’t want us to hurt each other, David.”
I knew I didn’t much care if we hurt each other. No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her. But I didn’t want to frighten her away. I nodded.
We kissed and stroked each other for a while. Jade straddled me and I thrust up to enter her, but missed. She took hold of me and guided me in. She felt a little dry and her discharge was thick, viscous—the result of her period, the blood mixed with her normal secretions. She winced as I entered her—it’s awful, really, how stirring men find those small signs of pain. She lifted herself up a little and I popped loose of her. She came back down until the knobby bones of our hips touched and the bow-shaped curve of my cock pressed into the cushy heart of her genitals, sinking until it hit a ridge of cartilage. I pressed her at the small of her back; her hips were locked around mine now and I felt her pubic hair brushing against me, as soft as breath on my belly. I pulled her down, made her bend from the waist and crushed our chests together.
I whispered her name and when she didn’t respond I felt a moment’s panic.
I held her face and kissed her mouth. Her tongue felt huge, soft, and unbearably alive in my mouth. I breathed her breath. It was the night’s first real kiss. Precise, enormous.
She was up on her knees, her small breasts dangling a little, the light on the floor illuminating each strand of down. I put my hand between her thighs and cupped her vagina and Jade opened herself to me, posing for my fingers. She was open at her center and it was at least ten degrees warmer there.