Belinda McKeon - Tender

“You know it makes sense, Citóg.”

“Oh, fuck off, would you, Moran,” she shot at him, turning pointedly back to the soup cans, and he laughed again, and he walked away.

“Give him a kiss from me,” he said, as he went.

James was coming home early. He had planned to stay in Berlin until June again this year, and possibly even over the summer, but he had not made it that far. He had made it up to Christmas, and he had made it through January, but a week ago Catherine had had a letter from him, telling her that he had had enough. He had had enough of Berlin, and he had had enough of working for Malachy, and he missed Dublin, and said that he wanted to take photographs there again, and because he missed the flat on Baggot Street, and missed Amy and Lorraine, and because he missed Catherine. He missed Catherine most of all, and most of all he was coming home because he missed Catherine. Catherine knew that. James told her that in his letters; he had told her that in every letter since the end of August. I miss you. I miss you so fucking much. I miss you all the time. I miss your voice. I miss your company. I miss your God-awful jokes. I miss your obsessions with ridiculous men. I miss talking to you and listening to you and sitting with you and bursting like the Milk Tray man into your room like I did that very first morning. I miss you. I mean it. I miss you. I miss you all the time.

And Catherine said the same to him. All the time, she wrote in her letters, every single day —and that was not lying, because every single day, Catherine thought about James, and every single day there was at least one moment when she wished he was with her, and almost every single day, she added to her latest letter to him. There were weeks when she sent him more than one letter, and there was one week, soon after Christmas, when she got three letters from him, each as long and detailed as the next, but it was still not the same as actually having him with her, and she told him that; she told him that all the time. Email was more immediate, but James did not have much access to Malachy’s computer, so they did not tend to correspond that way — and anyway, with email you did not have the heft of the pages, the life of the ink woven tight into the paper, rushing across it, a thing that had come directly from the other person’s own hand. Or from the pen in their hand, which was almost the same; which was almost like touching them for yourself.

In her letters, Catherine described everything that happened to her, putting a net over everything she had seen and heard and read and experienced, so that she could capture it for him, so that it could be as though it was happening, just for him, a second time. Because she did miss him; I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you was how she closed her letters to him often — she loved the rhythm of it — and then she would sign them, and add a line of kisses, the x ’s so easy to lay down, so much easier than the reality of his kisses and hugs. Writing that she missed him, actually, was also so much easier than the thought of saying it face to face, and easier, indeed, than the experience of reading the same words when they came from him; the admission, the declaration was still too emotional for Catherine to be entirely comfortable with it, too nakedly open in its affection and its need. James and she were just different on that score. He was so much more able to express himself emotionally; it was for him so much more natural to be verbally and physically demonstrative in that way.

Or at least, it was so much more natural for him to be like that with some people. With others, Catherine knew, it was another matter entirely — with guys. Because there had been no guys for James during his time in Berlin this time around, either; there had been no expressions of affection, verbal or physical or of any other kind. They had been a failure, these six months, he had written to her; they had, he had said in more than one letter, been a torment. Lonely: that was the word he had written, over and over. Alone: that was another. Never: that had been another, and whenever Catherine read him using that word, looking with it grimly into a future the nature of which he had already decided upon, she had known it was her job to argue, to reason, to come back at him with words that were softer, and sweeter, words like Someday and Someone and Soon . Telling him, once again, that everything would be OK. That everything would turn out OK, turn around, turn into the kind of life, the kind of lightness, that he deserved to have. That this had happened, after all, for her; this was how she had built her argument, using as a comparison the way things had turned around for her so brilliantly this year. The previous year, she reminded him, she had been so so scared, so awkward, so shy; the previous year, nothing and nobody around her had seemed like they could belong, in any way, to her. Her college subjects had intimidated her, and this year she was mad about them; this year, she spent hours every day in the library, devouring novels and essays and poems. Her love life had been nonexistent, and now it seemed never to have a dull moment; there had been Rafe, and there had been others, just kisses, or in some cases just flirtations, but great kisses, fucking great kisses, and flirtations that had set her whole body tingling with giddiness and a barely containable impatience, that had charged the air, hard, with the hugeness of possibility, the sense of her own fresh power. The first of the guys had been Aidan, the older guy from one of her tutorials — a mature student, for Christ’s sake, thirty-one years of age, constantly talking a blue streak about Chaucer: in other words, the least likely candidate imaginable for a snog. But when he put his hand to Catherine’s cheek at the Visual Arts Society party, and said her name, and pulled her to him, his hips square against hers, Catherine had felt like she had never felt before, the shock of her own skin, of her own body and its hunger. So that was what all the fuss was about, she had realized, as Aidan’s tongue had pushed through her lips. That was the point of kissing someone you actually knew, as opposed to a random stranger in a club with whom you were only going through the motions: the jolt. The surge. The way you could stand, pressed up against them, kissing them, laughing with them, and not notice that hours were passing, that it was two in the morning, that your friends had gone home, that the wall behind you was damp and was cold. Someone’s hands in your hair, and someone’s hands moving up and down your back, under your top, under your waistband, and someone’s lips and someone’s tongue, and someone’s smile, when the two of you stopped — when the two of you paused — and the things someone might say to you, the things they told you about yourself, about how, maybe, they had watched you for so long, liked you for so long, about how you were this and you were that — none of it true, Catherine thought, all of it too flattering and too idealistic, but still. And the taste of someone; the smell of them; the feeling of their frame, of their flesh, of their bones. With Rafe, months after Aidan, it had been more complicated, because with Rafe there had been sex, and shagging someone was not like kissing someone — shagging someone was not, it seemed to Catherine, something you just knew naturally and automatically how to move through, how to build on, how to do — but Rafe and the responsibility of sex with Rafe were over now, and they were not things about which she had to worry anymore. Dusky dick?! James had written to her in that letter after her and Rafe’s first time, the letter which had made her laugh so loudly that Amy had called down the hall, demanding to have the passage read aloud to her. Dusky dick. I’ve heard them called some things, he had written, but that’s a new one on me. And he had gone on: praising Catherine, and congratulating her, and ribbing her, and making her snort, and making her blush. She had not used the actual phrase, of course — she had been trying to find a way to describe the lovely color of Rafe’s skin — but that did not matter; James liked to take something and to run with it until it had become something else entirely, and Catherine loved to watch him, loved to read him — she could always hear his voice saying the lines, see his eyes full of mischief, sarcasm, delight.