Heather Lewis - Notice

I didn’t know how to do this without going back to last night. I knew she didn’t want to and I didn’t either, but I couldn’t see another way. I said, “Ingrid’s not who you think she is.”

And I felt Beth immediately pull back from my having uttered this name, so I pressed on quickly. “To me, I mean. She’s not who you’ve made her out to be. Can’t you see this? And you’re not who I thought you were either.”

And I’d said this badly, too. Struggling on, I said, “That wasn’t you last night, that was me. That’s who I’ve always been. Can you understand I know this now? Can you understand I don’t know who I am when I’m with you? When we’re together? That you’re no one I’ve known? Do you know what this means? What this means you mean?”

I’d become bogged down in my own swampy earth. Unable to explain something I’d only just happened on to. Unable to understand it myself, and now asking her to.

But, however ineptly, I must’ve given her some piece she needed. She came back to me in her comforting way. Hushing me. Saying, “Shush, shush now, sweetheart. I do know. I’ve always known. It’s all right, now. Just be still.”

She began to kiss me instead of just holding me and I kissed her back. And things began to dissolve then – my thoughts did, the stiffness left in my body. And with everything about me more fluid it was so much easier to become absorbed in her – my body going first and then taking my mind there. My feelings seemed to have been there all along.

She was partway on top of me, but I couldn’t feel her weight. I had to shift in order to, and by doing this I realized she’d been holding off me. In this physical way, she protected me. Everything about her tonight seemed to treat me as fragile. And my typical aversion to this gave way to its sweetness, to a larger thing of being cared for. Of letting her care for me. Believing she cared for me.

I didn’t want to think anymore about the why of this. I didn’t want to be brought back again to the night before, or to anything before. I wanted us to start over. To begin here and for it to change us, to change me.

I still believed the way to this was through my body and hers. I shifted again. Slid fully underneath her and then I could feel her weight. The whole of her giving in and pressing me down. And her lips pressing me too, first at my neck and my cheek – this way until I turned my head a little and opened my mouth. And when she put her tongue inside, I opened more.

The way she kissed me put me somewhere I couldn’t recognize. It was too familiar. Familiar as something I’d wanted for ever but never quite had. My arms were holding on to her. First around her back, but then I moved a hand to her neck, and then my other hand. I held her so gently.

She held fast to me, turning so I was beside her and then I’d wrapped around her. My legs first, then my arms. And she was wrapped around me, and this felt all at once rare and too close. I pulled away enough to kiss her neck and then her shoulders, and now she loosened and fell back. Lay before me in such a way it made me unable to move.

I don’t know what I must’ve looked like, but what she saw made her move toward me in this hurried, comforting way. She began murmuring and it quieted me. Murmured more in sounds than words, and her hand went inside me with the same lilt as her voice. She seemed to know this always would soothe me.

And it eased me more this time than the others. For a while it made me feel wholly all right. And with this, too, the familiarity was one of wanting but never having.

She was so near to me but not so close I couldn’t look at her and I did look. Maybe this was what made me go shaky again, the look on her face, which was both sad and gentle. Like she was still keeping herself back, keeping the things inside her away from me.

Her carefulness, I couldn’t fathom it and so I closed my eyes. And when I did, I felt some last part of me giving to her. And now that I couldn’t see her I could feel so much more of the things she felt. And maybe she knew this because she seemed even more to be staying away from me. Was still straining to stay off me and so I pulled her closer, wanting to be in that place where I couldn’t tell us apart.

Her other arm came around my shoulders and she kissed me again. And I let her. I guess I’d always done this. She’d become one of the people allowed to have whatever they wanted of me. Do whatever they wanted to me. Maybe she was the only one left like that.

She began kissing my breasts and then sucking them. She lured me further and further under. And her hand stayed inside me that same soft way until a fullness came into my chest, but of a different sort than I’d let myself know before, even with her. Something very old and tired roved around in there.

I didn’t try to stop it. Not then, and not when her mouth moved lower. First to my belly, and then nearer her hand. And I went lower, too. Deeper into myself when she let her hand come out of me, leaving only her mouth. I turned a little, and she helped my leg curl around her. She slipped just her finger into my ass and then what I recognized became beastly – wildly howling and ancient.

I don’t think I made these sounds. They stayed lodged inside me, echoing there by themselves, alone, and so I felt alone or began to. Or maybe it went the other way around and the loneliness began this, tapped this place. A place so far inside me she couldn’t get there, could only get me there. And now that I was – was there and alone – I most wanted her near me.

I knew she’d brought me here before. Taken me in this way, to this place. And that each time the same need was there – the one to crawl away. Each time exactly the same and not quite. Altering me by degrees. And this time that blackness, that dark sleepy thing besetting me. A sleep able to dampen that big baying mass, but somehow the same as it. Or the back of it.

This time I was trying to crawl away from me but not her. And when I couldn’t, I tried to pull her in here with me, but I couldn’t find my hands. I didn’t know where they were.

I woke to them holding her hips. Woke because for a time I wasn’t awake. Not asleep but not conscious either – in someplace where only my breathing mattered. Someplace between the baying and blackness. Suspended between them in half-light. And from here I could feel her but I didn’t quite feel myself and so I couldn’t know what had happened, not then, not fully.

I woke up to her stroking me, to coming in this huge, quiet way that made me want to cry except with all her carefulness, crying seemed too messy. This nearly put me back to sleep but instead I felt this other thing too, habitual, all about touching her, giving her something back.

I felt unable, though. Completely unable. She seemed content with this. Content with having had me and that I knew it this time.

If she left I didn’t remember it. I did wake up alone, though. Alone and afraid and wanting her.

At least I began with wanting her until I remembered where she’d taken me. Remembered that leviathan thing I’d met inside me. That baying thing she’d let up and that black sleepy thing opposite. And, worst, that lost space between them. I could remember going there, being there, but had no memory of what happened outside it.

The fear of this led me to do something I knew not to. Something I knew should scare me, too. And, in any case, wouldn’t work. Not the way I wanted it to, not anymore.

I called Ingrid. I tried to. I got her husband instead and so, of course, I hung up. Hung up wondering if he’d know anyway. Wondering somewhere in me always how much he knew, and why was he waiting because it felt that way all the time. Not that he’d let off me but was biding his time.