Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

Wade is patient and kind and does nothing wrong. After a few minutes, he reaches for her naked back, leans to whisper something soothing in her ear, and she hears a shrill pantomime of her normal voice snap in the air.

“Don’t touch me.”

Tina feels the warmth of his body retreat, hears his breath, still patient, on the other side of the bed. The tears swell into body-wracking sobs. She pulls her knees up to her breasts. Whenever she closes her eyes, a different image of Bobby appears: playing basketball as a teenager, at the bar of the Leaf ordering a round, holding Alyssa in the hospital, in his gear at the firehouse. She opens her eyes, focuses her gaze on a spot on the wall. She tries to banish all memories from her mind. Before she can be with Wade, she has to be alone, has to be without Bobby.

Leave me alone, she thinks, for a little while.

She releases her legs, straightens them. She thinks of nothing but the physical reality of the moment: the slight chill in the room, the softness of the pillow, the fabric of the bedsheet draped on her nipples, a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth, the scratchy soreness of her eyes from all the crying.

This is a physical act, she tells herself, nothing more. Like going to the bathroom or eating.

No, it’s not, she thinks. That is ridiculous beyond words. It is something more, has to be, or else you would have done it a lot sooner. You waited for a reason, Tina. You waited for the right person and you’re lying in bed with him.

She thinks of Wade: the tensile rope of his runner’s thighs, his spare chest with ribbons of thin hair, the surprising thickness of his penis, a pleasant contrast from his leanness everywhere else. An impulse to compare Wade and Bobby, to line their naked bodies beside each other in her mind’s eye and catalog the differences, arises; she has a vision of Stephanie asking scandalous questions of comparison. She fights these thoughts off. She will not do that here. Everywhere else but not here.

She thinks of Wade again: the smell of him, his way. She visualizes their kissing episode in the car earlier, his hand finding the curve of her ass through the dress, the moistness between her legs as he fondled her. She feels the moistness returning. She reaches her hand backward across the bed, searching for his groin. He slides over to accommodate her reach. His erection has dwindled, but it responds to her trembling fingers.

When he swells solid in her grip, she turns and straddles him, pushing down on his chest with her free hand. Her other hand is still holding his cock, fully erect now, and she lowers herself onto it. She stops, her body clenching as it adjusts to a distantly familiar sensation; the pain lessens in spasms. When he’s fully inside her, she starts to ride him. He reaches around the middle of her stomach, his fingers nearly touching across the small of her back. The physical dynamics are awkward — he is tall and she is short and this is their first go — but they settle into a pleasurable rhythm. Tina’s tears return involuntarily and Wade stops moving when he notices. He starts to say something, but she kisses him, urges him on, takes control of their fucking, because she wants this, she needs this, needs to feel alive again, to sweat and to thrust and to fuck, to feel him throbbing inside of her, to cry and to scream and to come.

And she does. She has a ferocious orgasm that sends shudders up and down her body. The intensity of it sends her nails digging into the wiry muscle of his biceps, drives her teeth together in a jarring gnash. She remembers to breathe and the feeling expands and she puts everything into it and lets go. It crests and slowly descends; she feels like she’s floating backward through a door toward humanity.

Her orgasm surprises Wade too, who comes in response, his fingers tensing as they slide down and grip the cheeks of her ass. She feels his stiffening spurt and slithery retreat; even after he’s gone soft, their groins are still joined in sticky, wet congress. Tina feels an urge to hike her sex up to his face and grind her groin over his mouth, to have his hands on her ass as she careens toward another orgasm. She doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t want to start thinking again.

“Jesus Christ,” Wade says, breathlessly. “Holy shit.”

She feels the world returning.

“Holy shit,” he says again, reaching a hand up for her tears.

Her crying becomes a wet giggle. She leans down and kisses him, then lays her head down on his chest. The room has a fecund stink, the smell of sex. Tina yawns, suddenly exhausted.

“Tired?” he asks, half jokingly.

“Long day,” she says and then, through a hazy euphoria, she remembers how it started, with her telling Gail and the heartrending look on Gail’s face. Then Bobby is back in her head and Stephanie is asking her questions in the bathroom and Alyssa is frowning at her smoking and Bobby Jr. needs something. So before the whole crew can get properly started and ruin this moment, she tucks herself under Wade’s arm, closes her eyes, and falls asleep.

* * *

Tina wakes with a shiver. She feels Wade’s body coiled behind her. They fell asleep in a loose spoon, his hand is still draped over her shoulder. She’s still naked and the thin bedsheet isn’t much cover. She lifts his arm gently, slides out of bed, and retrieves her underwear off the floor. As she’s putting them on, she spots the shirt he was wearing earlier, draped over an easy chair in the corner. She slips it on, like she’s seen in movies but never actually done herself. Bobby almost never wore dress shirts. The shirt is comically long on her, like a nightgown; the hem sits below her knees. She closes a few buttons and pads into the kitchen.

He has the fridge of a wealthy bachelor: a six-pack of Stella, a bottle of half-empty white wine with a French label, a few hunks of cheese in the crisper, and a white bag holding restaurant leftovers. She wants cold pasta, a handful of rigatoni with gravy. Maybe a sliver of chicken parm and some almost-stale bread. She closes the fridge.

It was pretty damn good. One romp has awakened a hunger almost ten years in the making. Part of her wants to go back to bed, wake Wade, and do it again, but another part wants to be alone for a bit, to enjoy this nothingness, this leap between two lives.

She looks around the apartment. She didn’t get the grand tour earlier. It’s modern, a little austere. Lots of clean lines and sharp edges. She doesn’t want to be nosy, but she has a restless energy that defies the hour. She walks through the living room to the second bedroom. She opens the door and flicks on a light.

The room is a mess; cardboard boxes lie scattered on the floor. A desk sits under a window that looks out onto Jersey. A sliding glass door next to it leads to a terrace. The white wall across from Tina holds three swaths of paint: robin’s egg blue, a deep yellow, and a barely there gray. The room is stuck in a transitive state; it sits heavy with the weight of unfulfilled expectations.

A daybed sits against the wall opposite the window; a solitary box leans precariously, one corner off the edge, frames of pictures jutting above the rim. Tina walks over and sits on the daybed. She lifts the open cardboard box onto her lap. It’s filled with pictures of Wade’s dead wife, Morgan. Tina’s seen Morgan before — she and Wade had shown each other pictures of their deceased spouses on their third date — but these pictures are more intimate.

Here’s Morgan and Wade at a fancy ball of some sort: Wade next to her in a tuxedo, she in a stunning red dress. Here they are in a restaurant: she’s hoisting a glass of red wine in a jokey toast and Wade is rolling his eyes. She’s beautiful, an athletic blond girl from Northern California with a touch of mischief in her eyes. A Stanford grad, an architect.