I close my eyes and can almost see him pulling off his sneakers with his feet and tripping over them as he flops into his favorite chair, the leather one by the window.
I take a breath and step out of the shadow to cross the street, but curse and step back. I shouldn’t drag him back into my mess, but I can’t help it.
Love is stupid, I suppose.
A neighbor is going into the building and holds the door open for me, perhaps recognizing me. He does a double take at my appearance, but like a true New Yorker minds his own business. With surprise I realize it’s only been a few weeks since I left him.
It feels like so much longer.
So much has happened.
I stand outside Clark’s apartment door for another ten minutes trying to gear up the courage to knock, wondering how it’s possible that being in front of his door was completely common not so long ago and now it seems like a different reality entirely – one that I ache for but am also somehow simultaneously glad to have put away, it feels good at least to be honest in my life, about who and what I am. But that honesty doesn’t make me yearn for him any less. I listen to his breathing through the door, to his sighs and movements, the scratching of his temple with his left hand the way he does when he finds something funny or perplexing. I can hear Joan jumping around on the hardwood, playing with shoelaces or toys or dust in the air, mewing happily. Clark says ‘no’ to her twice, gently, and I can hear him trying not to smile in the word. I knock softly, breaking the spell of happiness that is just listening to them.
“Coming,” Clark says through the door. I feel the heat of him through the door and inhale sharply. The lock and chain tremble as they come shooting off and he flings the door open as if afraid I’ll disappear. I have this whole sentence prepared in my head, this whole thing I’m planning to say, but he moves so quickly pulling me into him that I don’t even have a chance to start. He kisses me and I can’t do anything but kiss him back, fall into him and everything he stands for. I don’t want to mislead him, but I can feel that he doesn’t care about any of that, and suddenly neither do I.
We’re a tangle of arms and legs all the way to the bedroom – hands pulling at zippers and buttons, flashes of flesh being exposed in fits and starts. One of us manages to push little Joan away with a sock-covered foot long enough for the other to shut the bedroom door. Clark reaches to pull off my t-shirt and suddenly realizes it’s covered in blood and bullet holes. He pauses momentarily and my mouth is still open, waiting for a kiss.
“Um, are you okay?” he asks, looking me up and down and really seeing the horror of my clothing for the first time.
“Uh, yeah. It’s not my blood, well, not all of it,” I stammer.
“Oh, okay, good,” he says, before kissing me again. We fall together onto the bed and it’s like he’s devouring me, and I wonder how it can feel so wonderful to be devoured.
Afterward, we lay together, his body against mine, the flush of our hot skin pressing together, fitting perfectly, like the puzzle pieces I never quite believed in. I whisper to him. “You know I can’t come back, right?”
“Yes,” he breathes into my neck and hair, barely audible. Maybe audible to only me.
“But you know I love you more than anything, right?” I half ask.
“Yes,” he breathes again. I turn around to face him, making our puzzle-piece bodies fit together differently, even more perfectly. His eyes look different than I remember. “You look different,” he says, kissing me before and after the words.
“So do you,” I say.
“A lot has happened,” he says. I smile, not knowing if he means for me or for him or for the world, and not caring.
“Yes,” is all I say. I fall asleep there with him, not for long, just long enough to remember how delicious it is. I have a small, sharp dream of my mother. It’s unlike dreams I have had before. This one is insistent and pressing, fast and blunt. She says only five words and it feels like a vision beamed into my head more than a dream. I sit straight up, startling Clark, who had drifted off too.
“What is it?” he asks, looking around the room as if there is something with us.
“I just had a dream, or something,” I say, pivoting my legs off the bed and plunking my feet on the floor, his warm arm falling away from my hip. I reach for my t-shirt and remember it’s a mess. I go to my old drawer – which is blissfully still full of my clothes – and pull out new jeans and a t-shirt.
“What was the dream?” he asks, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, reaching for his glasses on the table.