Page 147 - In Five Years

I get the last button undone and I shake the shirt off him—one arm then the
other. David is always warm. Always. And I feel the prickle of his chest hair
against my skin, the soft folding my body does to his.
“Bedroom?” he asks me.

I nod.
He kisses me then, hard and fast, right by the couch. It catches me by

surprise. I pull back.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Do it again.” And he does.
He kisses me into the bedroom. He kisses me out of the lingerie. He kisses me

underneath the sheets. And when it’s just us there, on the precipice, he lifts his
face up from mine and asks it:

“When are we getting married?”
My brain is scrambled. Undone from the day, the month, the glass-and-a-half
of wine I had to prepare myself for this little stunt.

“David,” I breathe out. “Can we talk about this later?”
He kisses my neck, my cheek, the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”
And then he pushes into me. He moves slowly, deliberately, and I feel myself

come apart before I even have a chance to begin. He keeps moving on top of me,
long after I’ve returned to my body, to my brain. We are like constellations
passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels

impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy.
And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the
acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes

it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.
But there is something I cannot shake. Some reckoning that has burrowed into
my body, through my very cells. It rises now, flooding, probing, threatening to

spill out of my lips. The thing I have kept buried and locked for almost five
years, exposed to this fraction of light.
I close my eyes against it. I will them to stay shut. And when it’s over, when I

finally open them, David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before.
He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.