Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“I’ve done a lot by myself in the last few weeks.” She grimaced a bit, and Richard added, “I’m sorry.”

“No. That’s fair.”

“I probably could find a nicer way to admit that I’ve missed you. But I have. I do.”

“Of course. Me too.” Their hands were touching.

Richard said, “I’m not quite ready to leave.”

“I’m not kicking you out,” she answered.

Richard reclined against the back of the couch, and Cadence came over to him, sat in his lap facing him, half on top of his body. He pushed some of her straying hairs behind her ear.

“I didn’t think you were. But I don’t want to leave, period. I was hoping I could stay.” Cadence was quiet, and Richard started to say something more, whatever his anxious mind could come up with, but instead Cadence smiled and pressed her finger to his lips for a moment. Their faces were nearly together.

They kissed a few more times before Cadence stood and slipped her shirt over her head, then led Richard by the hand to her bedroom, where they fell together out of what Richard hoped wasn’t habit, convenience, or, most of all, pity.

Cadence let herself collapse facedown onto the mattress; Richard straddled her, reached for her arm, gave it a gentle twist. But the angle was awkward and she yelped a little, so Richard eased up on the tension. She rolled over underneath him, laughing, and said, “If you’re going to go for the pain, we might as well get out the handcuffs,” and Richard smiled because this was a woman with whom he had shared just about every kind of bedroom adventure; he took her wrists together and raised her arms up over her head, moved in on her unprotected mouth and neck. He let go of her arms, and she eased out of her bra, pulled his shirt over his head without undoing the buttons.

Richard knew what was going to happen.

He knew what was going to happen because he was returning to familiar territory. There was no need for any posturing or ritual storytelling and especially not the negotiations that had reduced most of the sexual contact he’d had in the era between his divorce and Cadence to sad transactions. He liked that when he had told Cadence about his slight dominant streak, she’d only laughed and said, “Maybe because you are a man,” and when he asked what she meant, she added, “It means that you like fucking.”

Through her actions over time, Richard had learned to translate that discussion. It meant that Cadence enjoyed ceding control occasionally, which, given the mildness of his own proclivities, was enough. He’d suffered enough awkward and mechanical lovemaking for a lifetime. He always dreamed of being a libertine, but what he realized with Cadence was that he did not dream of opportunities missed or strange and exotic behaviors or newer and less inhibited partners. He dreamed of intimacy, of not just doing everything with Cadence, but of telling her everything as well.

Her mouth tasted of beer and bar nuts, and he swore he could discern the thin and inoffensive film of xylitol, the sweetener in her omnipresent sugarless gum. He was thinking of the past too, how in the first days of their relationship, lunch had meant sneaking home to frantically immerse himself in her, the kind of fucking performed by a man grateful for the opportunity, who still sees all things female as somewhat exotic and on the verge of extinction.

On a good day, they had ninety minutes. In that block they would manage to fuck, inhale some insubstantial snacks (he particularly enjoyed when Cadence’s mouth tasted of a sliver of a Granny Smith apple smeared with peanut butter), and fuck again—the second time always more like a thrill ride, if only because Cadence could let go. Any of the residual shame that either of them felt, those mutual fears at letting out whatever secret things either desired, those passive and desultory ways in which lovers endure the uncomfortable, all of that was gone. Fucking her meant adrenaline, and there wasn’t a bar across his lap to keep him from being ejected from the ride.

During intermission, he knew that Cadence would slide into the nook made by his shoulder and upper arm and, contented by the sound of his breathing, allow her hands free purchase across the expanse of his chest. He thought of it as a miracle—not that humans did these remarkable things to each other in the privacy of the dark, but that he in particular had been invited to participate in love’s wild gift. He knew too the difference between men and boys and that to boys (or even to the childish version of himself that persisted well into his twenties), the eye always searched out any imperfection, sought to enumerate it, to add it to the list of potentially disqualifying attributes. Now that he was a man, he could say honestly that he relished imperfections; equally he knew that Cadence would never believe him if he attempted to articulate his appreciation. Richard chose to love the small scars on Cadence’s breasts from a late-childhood battle with the chicken pox; he chose to love the tiniest archipelago of moles that arose in the center of her back, each no bigger than the stray dot made by a pen. He chose to love the irregular bumps around her areolas, and the hairs that found their way into his mouth, and the rough edges of her fingernails as they dug into his shoulders, and the way her left breast was maybe 5 percent bigger than the right; he loved every part and needed no further evidence of her body’s exquisite and purposeful design than the way it felt in relation to his. He had learned these thrills early, in the era of concealed secrets of lingerie and the decadence of mussed hair and smeary mouths and the satisfaction of watching her return to her office wearing different underwear than she had worn that morning.

She had been an ambassador sent from a faraway land to teach him how to be human again, and his greatest pleasure had not been skin on skin or even watching her ecstasies but the fabric of the intimacy they built; he loved how she could laugh and make love concurrently, and the way in which she used his boxer shorts to clean both of them after the act. He loved the long stray hairs that took purchase in every crevice of his body and that he found hours or sometimes days afterward, or even the way in which he made himself late for whatever appointments he had in the afternoon by the simple act of lacing his fingers behind his head and watching Cadence move around his apartment. What else was love if not the recognition that we were all deformed, scarred by our pasts, and chose to love each other anyway?

There was passion fueled by the added gas of grief.

He knows what is going to happen. He knows the way in which this woman’s finger fits to his lips, telling him not to speak, because she has asked this of him before. He knows too the way her lips fit his, an embouchure with the gentlest suction and glide, and how preferable this particular sensation is to the sensation generated by the other women who have kissed him, or who have allowed themselves to be kissed. He knows this kiss because it has been repeated without number, because the uncountable repetitions coincide with the placement of her hand on his cheek.

Being present requires that Richard no longer think of himself and Cadence in the past tense, because he looks now at the immediate future, and the immediate future is the merging of their breath, the galvanic rhythm of the two of them together, his hands on her hips and the litheness with which she steps out of the remainder of her clothes, the shy fumblings and the more aggressive ones, the thrust and parry of fingers and, yes, the darting of tongues and the chime made by his brass belt buckle as it falls to the hardwood floor and the pleasing sound of his hands as they smooth across the shoulders of a woman who is incontrovertibly beautiful. Richard is grateful again, because he has arrived at the moment wherein the two of them cleave to each other in the darkness, steady hands and the ship no longer rudderless, this is safe harbor, and the voice in his head relents for once and does not need to speak, does not need to predict what will happen next, and when it is over, only Cadence will sleep, his Cadence, and the light is out.