Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“You know my life is those useless papers, right?” she says.

“Oh. No,” he says. “You’re not like that. You’re not one of those teachers who’s just here to publish and get some useless appointment.”

“Some would consider that one of my problems.”

“But it’s so absurd,” he says. “To want these accolades that mean nothing to the world.”

“And Hunts Point? Means something more?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s actual engagement. I can see it, you know? What I’m giving every day.”

She stares at him: of course, she knows. Her students, reading; it’s the one thing she’s felt capable of giving properly.

“Well, I guess then you should do that.”

He nods. “But I have to finish, you know. It’s been too many years of my parents patiently awaiting my arrival at an Actual Career .”

“Where are you from?” she asks and can’t believe she doesn’t already know the answer. She has an image of a pear-shaped mother somewhere in Ohio. She angles her knees farther from him in her chair.

“The Bay Area,” he says.

“Far,” she says. “They must be proud.”

“Maybe,” he says. “They like to say Columbia . They like to say PhD . The fact that it’s in literature, I think, they keep to themselves.”

Maya laughs. “I’m sure they’re proud.”

He’s so close; she could reach her hand out and rub it slowly back and forth over his head.

“Maybe,” he says.

“I tell them about you,” he says.

Both of them look straight ahead.

“How much your help has meant to me.”

He turns toward her. She can’t look at him. If she looks at him, she’ll cry. “Thanks,” she says.

His hands hold tight to his knees.

“You should be easier on your parents.”

“Maybe,” he says. “They’re just not very interesting.”

“Interesting or not. They must have done some good things, making you.”

“You say it like I’m a loaf of bread.”

“Of all the analogies.”

“I like to bake.”

“You bake,” she says. She laughs, holds up her hands, acknowledging defeat.

“We make ourselves,” he says.

“And some of us make bread.”

He smiles. “They loved me as well as they could.”

“And it wasn’t enough for you.”

“It was fine.”

“I wonder if there’s ever more than that.”

They’re quiet a long time and she looks out the window. She watches the cars out on the street, people walking, talking on their phones. His eyes are full of too much expectation. He leans toward her, but she stays far enough away that they’re touching only at the knees.

The television plays on low and Jeffrey leans in toward Ellie, who holds Jack. He loops his arms around Jack’s waist, the back of his hand and then his forearm brushing Ellie’s waist. He smells like the wine they’ve shared throughout the evening. The second bottle he opened silently, refilling the round thin globe of Ellie’s glass each time it got below half full. Besides a lamp lit in the far corner of the room, the lights are off. They’ve been watching a movie, a movie Jack chose and to which Ellie has stopped paying attention. Jeffrey leaves the room, carrying his son and smiling at Ellie, smiling at her in a way that she thinks might be different than each time he’s smiled at her in the past.

She should leave, she knows, sitting here alone, no matter the sort of smile he just gave her, no matter what she might do once she gets to her room. Whether the smile was meant to be more intimate, or meant to simply thank her for being so in love with Jack, she should get up, walk out to her slatted door, and close it. If she turns her head in just this instant, she could see the door, and that might be enough to get her to get up.

She wonders if he’s ever wondered what she does when she leaves them.

When she leaves them, the three of them are nearly all she thinks about.

He’s slow returning. Waiting, she thinks, hoping she’ll be the one to decide to keep things as they are. Let it stay just a thing that happens, moments that pass between them, that they can keep without losing anything of what they already have. Him: the family, the whole grown-up life he’s built with Annie. Her: the pieces that she gets when one or more of them is somewhere else.

She doesn’t leave, though. She’s too young to walk to her room and close the door behind her. She’s too desperate to be touched. She’s too hungry for the looks he gives her — the looks that have become more and more frequent, have begun lasting longer, that she thinks about when she can’t sleep at night — to be made manifest across her skin.

Perhaps, though, she thinks, he’ll simply sit and ask her what’s happened in the movie since he left. And she won’t know and she’ll have to mutter something about nodding off or she’ll just pretend to know and make it up. And he’ll give her an easy out. He’ll say, You must be exhausted, Nor . And then, chastely, she will leave him, unfolding her legs from beneath her and folding the blanket that now sits atop her and placing it back on the couch. She’ll walk toward the door that now she cannot bring herself to look at. They’ll nod at one another. She’ll say, Good night, Jeffrey . She’ll go to bed with one of her mom’s books.

What happens next: They’re sitting, both of them facing the window, and then he turns toward her. His hands, which up till now have sat chastely at his sides, reach around her waist; they’re both lying on top of the covers, their legs still hanging awkwardly over the edge. He’s slow and careful, silent. His size seems to disallow him the use of all his strength.

She wishes she were slightly less sentient as it happens. She wishes she were able not to notice the way he fumbles too long with the condom, the way he squints as he comes close to her, his glasses set on the table by the bed. She wants to stop him to ask him what he’s gaining from this. If he could teach her something. If he could promise her when this is over something fundamental will have shifted from either him to her or her to him.

What happens next is far less formal, far messier, far more terrifying, and the whole time she wishes she didn’t already know that only bad things will come in the end. Because even during and then after, even when the first intimations of what must be pre- and then present and then postcoital bliss settle in to dull the sharp edges of her brain, she still knows what she’s done.

They fall slowly into one another. He slips underneath the blanket with her. He — by more degrees than her, with more deliberate force, though she also comes toward him — reaches up to touch her face. His hands aren’t as warm as they’ve been in all the moments leading up to this one. They create in her a sharp intake of breath; her limbs loosen. His hands climb up under her shirt and she gasps as they reach under her bra and latch onto her breasts.

The whole thing happens in the same room where they’ve just sat with Jack, where they’ve been eating, where soon Annie will sit when she comes home. All the windows are still open and the rain pounds on the roof, the AC pumps. Outside, a palm frond cracks free of its tree and slaps hard against the window, and Ellie startles underneath him and Jeffrey doesn’t stop to ask if she’s all right.

He’s less gentle than she expected. He’s quick and as he comes she wonders if he hasn’t timed the whole thing perfectly, to be sure his wife doesn’t walk in, to be sure he still has time to shower. To be sure that he has Ellie fucked and safely put to bed before his wife comes home.