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When the River Valley clots and scabs over, varicose ice swallowing the riverbank, Lawrence slips out of his apartment to night-walk the High Level bridge, eighty-eight meters above the great swollen wound that splits the city into North and South. He himself is just another swollen thing, bundled in a thrift store winter jacket, smoothing out the lumps where his sweatpants are creasing underneath his jeans. Constant hypothermia doesn’t make sub-zero winters any easier. No exposure therapy can prepare you for what negative thirty (negative fifty, if you count the wind chill, although at a certain point it’s so cold that it doesn’t matter anymore) does to the psyche.
That’s always the overlooked factor. There are always band-aids for the material consequences; there are always winter tires; always an insulated jacket; fur-lined socks; central heating. There is, however, nothing either curative or palliative once the winter worms its way inside of you. If you find yourself thinking the sun will always set at five P.M., sleeping longer, switching out your folk playlist for dark and grimy EDM with a vaguely European singer struggling through English vowels, it’s over. The only thing left to do is drink your soup and outlast.
Lawrence has always had a touchy relationship with death, to say the least. He misses it in a frustrating kind of way. If he thinks hard enough about how simple and permanent death could’ve been if he hadn’t given it up, the longing distends and presses against his bladder, and while he stands there, wherever the thought seized him, he thinks about how the word ‘can’t’ has less to do with impossibility and more to do with inadequacy - i.e., the itch you can’t scratch. The piss you can’t pee. The X that could be Y-ed, if it weren’t for ‘you’; for him. The X that he , Lawrence Oleander, cannot do. The death he couldn’t die - until he suddenly feels as if he were an impossibly tiny thing fending off the whole of everything else, and then he’s not missing death anymore, he’s just terrified of the stain it leaves.
In the winter, he gets a relief from that situation. He doesn’t miss death because it’s all around him. It’s naked trees and huddled masses, both shivering, and he’s one of the seasonal EDM listeners for whom death is something in the bones. It makes him do things like stand on the bridge at a time when the only people out are those without an in and admire how the frost is kind of like a great, cosmic pause button; a seasonal view into what it would be like if the world were consistent, static. It’s a nice idea. It’s also cold, it’s also biting. His nose hurts when he breathes.
It’s another February Wednesday, what feels like the ninth February Wednesday, half past three, and Lawrence is considering what he ought to do about the girl sitting on the railing, limbs hanging loose on the other side of the anti-suicide ropes, hair curling up from underneath her tuque. She’s unaware of him a few feet away, not in the blissful way. There’s a concentrated purse in her lips, a thought rolling away from her while she sprints through the trail it’s leaving behind.
“Are you going to jump?” He asks, flatly.
“I could’ve sworn I did,” she says without otherwise acknowledging him.
“Jumped? Like, in a dream?”
“No. Like, half an hour ago.”
“... I don’t follow.”
“I don’t think I do either.”
She slumps further forward into the cables, resting her chin on it. A giant cloud of steam floats from her mouth, consuming her head before drifting up and away.
“You said you jumped.”
“I did. I thought I did. I was thinking about it.”
“I’m confused. Did you jump or not?”
She turns to him with a seething ‘are-you-an-idiot-or-is-this-your-idea-of-a-joke’ face. “Does it look like I jumped, smart-ass?”
He doesn’t know if she’s beautiful or not. It’s the first thing he thinks, aware that when a boy and a girl are alone a perfunctory evaluation of their sexual compatibility is in order. But he doesn’t really know what it means to look at something from the outside and say that it’s beautiful. And even if he did, her scowl is so mean, so ugly, it would skew the numbers.
Lawrence is suddenly very interested in his shoelaces.
“I’m sorry. I’m not good at this.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t talked down at least a few prospective jumpers.”
He opens his mouth to tell her that he hasn’t talked down any prospective jumpers, actually, and she waves him quiet.
“I’m kidding. That was a joke. You don’t have to say that.”
“Oh. Hahaha,” he says without laughing.
She sizes him up, considers what kind of man he is, decides he’s probably autistic, and returns to resting on the cables. Lawrence tries to find a comfortable way he can put his arms up on the railing with his height. He settles on propping an elbow up and leaning his weight forward onto it. Their heads are on the same latitude. Looking straight forward, they have the exact same view.
“I guess it was a dream,” she says.
“What was it like?” He asks.
“It was just like real life. I was here, sitting like this, and I was trying to find the North star. I found the big dipper, but the handle wasn’t pointing at anything I could see. And then, I don’t know why, I decided that I was finally ready to do it. I climbed through the ropes. I didn’t even really jump. I didn’t hesitate at all, I kind of just slipped free. And I didn’t really put it together that I was falling. I had that awful feeling in my stomach, and I didn’t have time to figure out that it was because I was really, actually, falling.”
“In your dream.”
“In my dream.”
“And then what?”
She chuckles, wryly. “There was a girl at my highschool who drowned in the River Valley. She and her boyfriend held hands and walked out onto the ice. It broke. They went through. And I’ve always been warned about that. A lot of people die that way, they think the ice is thicker than it is. But… it was kind of the opposite.”
“The science of moving ice is actually very elusive,” he offers. “It can be unpredictable.”
“I was sure I’d go under. I guess I wanted to go under. I would have jumped after the ice melted, cut out the middle man and all, but for some reason I never want to kill myself after the ice melts. I didn’t think the ice would give me any problem. though. I was falling, waiting to break through, and I hit it like solid ground. I… exploded. I don’t think the ice even cracked. I exploded. Like splat. And then I was back up here and my head hurt.”
“I’ve had things like that. Waking dreams.”
“Right,” she says, acknowledging his orange-lit face out the corner of her eyes. “Do you have a name, stranger?”
“Lawrence. I don’t use it much.”
“Then I won’t either.”
They nod at each other the way older men do in passing.
She huddles closer into her jacket and says, “It’s too late to be out here.”
“It is,” he says back, defensively.
She cocks an eyebrow. “You can’t say that to me. I’m suicidal.”
“If you’re suicidal it doesn’t matter what I say.”
She bends her head through the cables to get a better view of the graffiti on the side of the bridge: CONNOR MCJESUS WILL SAVE. How it got there is a mystery.
Lawrence continues, “You shouldn’t be suicidal, by the way. Death isn’t all it’s cut out to be.”
She looks at him, her head upside down.
“Do you believe in heaven?”
Lawrence shrugs. “The idea of heaven is the product of moral equivocation. I don’t think you do much equivocating after you die.”
“You talk about it like you know.”
Lawrence pushes himself off the railing to shove his hands in his pockets. “I don’t. I don’t know anything about death.”
“I’m starting to think nobody does. Theologists, scientists, whatever. They’re just taking guesses. Telling themselves stories to help them sleep at night. And, you know, I’m not claiming to know the truth, but I’d bet a pretty penny that if they learned the truth, they wouldn’t sleep again,” she says through a pointed skepticism.
“Yeah,” Lawrence says, squirming.
“And you don’t look like you sleep much.”
“What does that mean? What do I look like to you?”
“Like you’re wasting away. Like you’re not supposed to be that skinny.”
“Thanks, I guess,” he mumbles.
“Don’t get offended. It’s not an insult.”
Lawrence isn’t offended. He’s more like reeling from the shock dose of self-awareness he just got. He’s remembering that he isn’t just himself, ghosting through the world, but that his body is also something other people see.
“I work a night job. I sleep during the day.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Do you get paid to sort of lurk around here and distract jumpers?”
“If I’m distracting you, I can go.”
“It’s fine,” she says. The curves of her side profile remind Lawrence of a mountain range sanded down to smooth. “I wasn’t gonna try again.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
He takes a chance, crosses the huge chasm that separates being near and being next to somebody, and climbs the railing to sit beside her. There’s nothing balletic about it. She stifles a laugh, pretending not to see the way Lawrence is blindly navigating through his long, stiff limbs. He manages to get up without incident. The polyester shells of their down jackets rub together and it’s deafening.
“I work at a warehouse,” he says. “And I come here every night for the view.”
“The view is still here during the day.”
“It’s loud during the day. And busy.”
“Everywhere is loud and busy during the day. I don’t blame you for being nocturnal.”
“It’s three in the morning for both of us. Are you not also nocturnal?”
“I’m an insomniac.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“No, they’re not. Insomniacs don’t have a schedule. Sometimes I sleep when the sun’s out, sometimes I go to bed at ten and wake up at seven in the morning. Sometimes I don’t sleep for three days straight. And sometimes I do.”
“A routine can help with mental health issues.”
She rolls her eyes so hard, Lawrence thinks she’s going to keel over and die. “I don’t have mental health issues.”
“You said you’re suicidal.”
“That’s a perfectly logical way to feel given current affairs,” she says. When she turns to him, they’re so close her breath melting the thin layer of ice on his skin. “You never said whether you believe in heaven.”
“It’s not as simple as heaven… but I believe that there’s something after, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Same.”
She crosses her arms over the cable and digs her chin into her forearm meat.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
“Of what comes after?”
She nods. “I have this horrible fear that I’m gonna die one day and wake up in a cubicle and my boss is gonna come by with my onboarding papers and tell me the afterlife is actually a nine-to-five data entry job I can’t kill myself out of.”
“It won’t be like that.”
“You don’t know. Nobody knows.”
When she leans into him, Lawrence lets her. She breathes out another cloud of steam, and the tendrils curl away like gnarled tree branches. Lawrence lowers his voice to match her whisper.
“It isn’t like that,” he says. “You can believe me. I can’t tell you how, but you can.”
She turns her head to the side to get a better look at him. The bags under his eyes pull them open wider, revealing the reddish-white underneath his irises. He looks terrified and distant, far off in a memory that’s become hazy and film-burnt along the edges.
“Do you promise?”
“Yes.”
She smiles from the corners of her lips.
“Thank you.”
“I think I’m a ghost,” she says once Lawrence is in earshot. The section of railing next to her is wiped clear of snow, waiting for him.
“What makes you say that?”
He doesn’t hesitate to climb up next to her this time.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what happened, and it definitely wasn’t a dream. You know when something was a dream, even if you don’t know it while you’re dreaming. When I jumped, that was real life. I really died. Except, I’m still here. That’s what a ghost is, no?”
She’s staring straight down at the spot she would’ve landed, the clean sheet of snow where she made contact.
“Sure, but it’s not like everybody becomes a ghost. Why you?”
“I don’t know. My working theory is because I didn’t leave them anything to bury. Like maybe the afterlife is down, deep in the earth, and so you need to go under to get there. And before you say it, I know that would mean cremation is the single most sacrilegious thing humans have ever come up with. I’m still figuring that part out.”
Lawrence listens to her talk herself in circles, parsing out the logic, and he doubts she’s anywhere near figuring it out if she still thinks logic has anything to do with anything.
“So, a ghost then. How do you like it?”
“It feels the exact same as everything else,” she says absent-mindedly. “I don’t know if it’s burial in particular. But it has to have something to do with hitting the ice, right?”
He knows what it’s like to be that close to the river and somehow never be inside of it. He knows wherein her obsession lies.
“Probably.”
She slouches into herself. “You think I’m crazy.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But…?”
“I don’t think you’re a ghost.”
“Right,” She says, disappointed.
“Ghosts make too much sense. It’s cause and effect. I don’t doubt that you jumped, I don’t even doubt that you died, I just have a hard time believing the aftermath would make sense.”
Lawrence strikes a sorrowful chord. Her eyebrows pull together, her forehead wrinkles, and the hissing light above them calls the shadows out from the creases.
“Nothing makes sense right now. It’s all blurry, and all I want is to be underwater.”
She points down towards the river, her arm draped and hanging limp over the cable.
“That’s what you think until it actually happens. Then all you want is to be on dry land again.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
That he’s made up his mind, and he thinks she’s beautiful the same way the river was, beautiful like tempting, beautiful like shrouded, beautiful like something you could crawl into and stay inside forever.
There’s so much he isn’t telling her. If she were ready for it, he would tell her everything. Past the confines of the social, a world left behind after near-misses and things that happened but didn’t, he wants to spill open in her lap and let the words run.
“I fell in once, a long time ago, when I was still a little kid.”
“Really?”
“I dropped something in the water, I don’t remember what it was anymore, and I was trying to get it out. It was a total accident. I leaned over really far and put my hand in the water, and it was colder than I was expecting. I pulled my hand out too fast, I lost my footing. I had that feeling in my chest that you get when you trip, when you realize that you’re tripping and there’s nothing you can do to stop it anymore, and then I was in the water and the cold was all around me. It hurt all over, like being crushed, and I couldn’t think. I was trying to breathe and sucking in water, I was trying to find which way was up but I was spinning. It was like that for a while, and then I fell asleep, and the next thing I remember is opening my eyes and somebody was giving me mouth-to-mouth.”
“I think I read about you in the news.
“Yeah. I was in the hospital for a while after that, and then… it was back to the same old. And now I’m here.”
Of course, the most important part of the story is missing. The guilt of lying comes back for Lawrence with poetic justice at its side. Omission for omission, he feels a gaping hole open up in his gut, big enough to swallow him up, and he’s teetering on the edge, caught in the moment between falling and having fallen.
“I guess that’s what the river does. Draws you in just to spit you back out,” she says.
“Sometimes it’s you,” he replies. “Sometimes you’re the one who denies it.”
The muscles in her face twitch, the last prelude to her total loss of control, and then she grabs her head and lets out a frustrated shriek. Lawrence digs his fingers into the railing to keep himself from running.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she says, crying out into the valley. “I’m running in circles. My life is, was, one big fucking circle, everyday is just another circle, I’m never moving, I’m never going anywhere. I really, really thought, and maybe I’m stupid, but I thought if I jumped something would change. But it’s all the same, just… I don’t know, emptier? Like I’m getting emptier, and people can see right through me, they can see there’s nothing there. And you know what the funniest part of it all is? The only solution I can come up with is killing myself.”
Lawrence watches the energy from her outburst run dry, and puts a hand on her back to keep her from hitting the sidewalk with the way she’s slumped down now.
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” she says, tiny and dwindling.
Lawrence experiments with rubbing small circles into her spine.
“I wish I could help you. This is one of those things you have to do alone though.”
She straightens up and out of his hand, clearing her throat.
“No.” She speaks in a level tone, devoid of any feeling, but she’s glaring at him with a look he recognizes as betrayal. “I’m fine.”
“I—”
“I’m just being crazy. I mean, what am I even talking about? Ghosts? I’m not fucking dead, that’s just ridiculous. I’m just… I’m probably sleep deprived.”
She swings her legs to the other side of the railing and pushes herself onto the ground, bundling her jacket tighter around her chest while she walks away.
It’s not two weeks this time. She’s there the next night, not sitting on the railing but leaning back against it, staring at the empty car lanes. Lawrence doesn’t feel the hot cancer as he approaches, he feels the heavy swell of shame that’s been with him since she walked away. And as shame does, he feels it turn to anger, that it wasn’t what he said that was wrong, it’s her insistence on pretending to still be human, as if there’s anything worth holding onto.
“How many times are you going to come back here before you actually jump?” He asks, taking the same stance as her with his arms crossed over his chest, albeit with a few feet between them.
She startles a bit at his voice, looks up at him with glassy eyes, and lets out a small sigh of relief.
“Oh, it’s you.” The jovial lilt in her voice is gone. Without it, she sounds dazed. She turns back away from Lawrence, and up close, he can tell that she’s not actually looking at the street. It doesn’t seem like she’s looking at anything at all. Her eyes are half-closed and unfocused.
“I can’t jump. I already tried.”
The anger is gone the moment she speaks. He drops the act, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. Her eyes are pointing into his, but she still isn’t looking.
“What are you talking about?”
The worry makes him sick, it always has. The only thing Lawrence has learned with age is how many ways you can lose a person, and he can’t stop himself from thinking her catatonia is going to be permanent.
“I tried,” she repeats, slowly. “Twice. I’ve been trying to kill myself all day. Nothing will stick.”
“Did you sleep?”
She shakes her head. “I did everything I could think of. I just fall asleep and wake up alive.”
“You need to get some rest.”
“It hurts all the same. Do you know how hard it was to jump the second time? After I knew how it would feel?”
He cups her cheeks and winces. “You’re freezing.”
And in his hands, her face crumples like paper, and she breaks out into huge, gasping weeps. She takes hold of his wrists to keep them close. He uses his thumbs to wipe her tears away, afraid they’ll only make her colder.
“I don’t want to do this forever,” she howls.
Somebody at the far end of the street shouts for her to shut the fuck up.
Lawrence wraps his arm around her and starts walking her—still struggling to breathe through sobs—away from the shouting. She goes along with it without question, grateful that he’s taking control. And he can feel it, the way she’s pressing into his side, the weight of being needed.
He warns her, before she steps into his apartment, about the plants, in case she takes the sheer abundance of life as some kind of taunt. She’s still crying, as in there are tears coming out of her eyes, but she’s exhausted herself back into dumb silence. It’s Lawrence who has to take her winter layers off; her best effort just ends up with her fumbling for her zipper and not finding it.
“Can I?” He asks, taking the zipper. She nods and sniffles.
Towering over her feels too much like a metaphor for what is hovering in implication now. She’s in his home, out of her mind, with a track record of suicide attempts. The kind of person begging to disappear.
He takes a knee, and starts pulling the zipper up slowly. The motion, dragging his hand up the torso, isn’t unfamiliar to him and the resistance isn’t unlike skin. If he isn’t blushing from the cold, he certainly is now.
She exhales some of the tension in her face, her temples releasing, when he slides the jacket off her arms. It lands on the ground behind her with an unceremonial thud. Lawrence undoes the laces on her boots, and when he looks back up at her, she’s broken through the static. She’s looking, like, really looking back at him, almost into him. He shudders.
“When you were a kid… and you fell in… you died,” she says. “Didn’t you?”
She sniffles again.
He stays on his knee. “Yes.”
“Are you also… different now?”
“Yes.”
Her bottom lip curls in. “I feel like I have a fever. Muggy on the inside.”
“That goes away.”
“And what else? I need to know what’s gonna happen to me, please.”
The view from below is perfect. It kills him to stand up, but she’s blue at the fingertips and the space heater isn’t doing much to help. He sits her on his bed and wraps a duvet around her before settling down behind her, running his hands along her biceps. A tangle in his chest pulls taut when she leans her head back on his chest and looks up at him, waiting on his word.
“The brain fog will go away,” he says. “And not much else, if you’re anything like me. Your body starts to get bad. Stiff. Poor circulation. You get a lot of headaches. It’s not all bad… sort of. People don’t really… see you, I guess. So, you can get away with a lot. The worst part is being lonely. Was being lonely.”
“... you’re not lonely anymore.”
“Um. Well. I don’t know. I hope not? Or, you know, like, I’m not trying to… I sort of assumed that… because we’re both… but that doesn’t have to mean… I don’t know. Were you… you weren’t gonna stay?”
“I’ve been trying not to think about the future.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
There’s an infinity of things he could ask and offer, and it’s not the time for any of them. With every blink, her eyelids are opening less and less until they’re shut completely and her breathing levels out to a uniform rhythm.
He lets her sleep for the night. He lets her sleep for three days. She becomes a sort of constant. Normalcy is a subjective thing and Lawrence finds it collecting like dust in small pockets of his life. The ride to work. The bruise on his abdomen from carrying boxes with hard edges. Watering the plants. The lump in his bed pressed flat against the wall. And after a difficult few hours of pacing back and forth, tearing cuticles with teeth, the knowing sense that the other body in his apartment is shaped by the same laws as his too becomes normal.
The sun goes up just to come back down. Lawrence clocks in just to clock out. He comes home and does a passable job of rolling himself a joint. He tries once to blow the smoke out the window, but the sour, floral smell retaliates with wind chill as reinforcement, so he resigns himself to hotboxing the apartment. The influence comes over him. The grinding pain in his joints disappears. The inside of his nose dries up. Time is a glacier, slipping down the mountain in imperceptible increments.
The lump on the bed stirs and rises. With sleep, the saturation in her skin is back. She looks to where he is on the floor and she’s a stark burst of color within the gray bed sheets and eggshell walls.
He holds the joint out to her like he’s asking a question. She crawls free from the blankets and takes it from him, closing her eyes in meditation through a long drag. The rolling paper fizzles and the embers glow brighter.
“How are you feeling?” He asks.
She chokes on the inhale and, biting off a coughing fit, makes a face closest to disgust. “Better.”
Fingers brush when they pass the joint between them again. There are cursory glances towards the floor, like teenagers paralyzed by uncertainty, save for the surefire fact that rejection is a fate worse than death. At least in their case, there’s good reason to believe it.
“You were right about the brain fog,” she says. “I’m thinking a lot clearer now.”
“What are you thinking?”
Lawrence hates having to ask. He should just know. That he doesn’t makes him feel like he’s failed her in some way.
“I’m thinking of how to make peace with this.”
Somewhere along the joint, Lawrence also lost his object permanence. Now he can’t piece the constituent parts of his vision together. There’s the corner of the ceiling, which is somehow in a separate world from the hallway to the bathroom, and the foot of the bed, and the shoes by the door; and at the center of all the little worlds he can see, she’s there, shrouded in smoke and cosmic. Coughing into her fist. Holding it all together.
“Come up with anything yet?”
“Ride out the storm. Wait for the sun. I don’t know how much my actions can change anything.”
“They can do something, I’m pretty sure. Not change, but like shuffle the order of things around, or stave things off for a while.”
“Like a dead game of tic-tac-toe. When you realize nobody can win and you can either call the game or keep putting marks down anyways.”
“Exactly.”
“Huh,” she says, like it really is interesting, and laughs a little bit. “I think I’m too high to philoso… philosophicate… what’s the word? Philosophize?”
“You got it.”
“This is really strong.”
“I grow it myself.”
“I like that. I like your plants.”
He’s bashful, shaking his hair down in front of his face. It’s the first time somebody has complimented him outside the context of survival, so it’s genuine, it’s recognition in a way that makes him itchy.
“I’ve never been good at gardening,” she says. “Don’t have the instinct for it. This is really impressive.”
“Instinct isn’t super important. You just have to pay attention to them. They tell you what they need if you listen.”
“Lawrence?”
The way she says it, gentle and pleading, she returns the name to him in a shape he can really own. Something he can respond to without cowering. Not forever, one day he’ll forget it, but just for now it’s more than enough, bordering more than he can handle. At this moment, he is unforgivably Lawrence. Her Lawrence.
“I want to know more about you.”
“What do you wanna know?” He asks, eager to give.
“Anything.”
The influence permits him to giggle. It rumbles deep in the floorboards. “It’s kind of hard to just dive right in.”
“Tell me about your plants.”
His plants. She’s doing magic with grammar, making things his without him having to fight tooth and nail for them. He realizes how long he’s been walking with fists at his side. It’s nice to be delicate, he thinks.
“That one,” he says, pointing to the windowsill, “is a year old. Monstera Deliciosa, the delicious monster. I like the leaves, they get these holes in them when they grow. It’s pretty cold for them up here, so I can’t get it to its full size.”
“You don’t have any flowers.”
“No.”
“On purpose?”
“Yeah. I have a reason, but it’s kind of stupid.”
“What is it?”
“Something about appearances being superficial. I’m just not a flower person. You don’t have to read into it.”
“I wasn’t going to. I wanna know how you see yourself, not, like, analyze you.”
“Oh. I… Thank you.”
“How do you see yourself?” She asks, inching closer.
He pulls his knees into his chest. “Right now?”
“Sure, if that helps.”
“Scared. I think.”
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared of telling you the wrong thing.” The words are waiting to be spoken, he doesn’t need to search for them. They’re things he’s always wanted to say to someone, but he’s never been able to. Never found the right person. “I’m scared you’re gonna leave me. And I think I like you. A lot. I don’t want you to leave.”
The wind howls outside. Somebody in the hallway drops their keys. The dishwasher, k-thunk, k-thunk, k-thunk .
“Come here.”
She gives herself away, eyeing his lips like that, arms outstretched, waiting to hold his face. He pushes forward onto hands and knees. Crawls into those waiting hands. Takes a chance, crosses the chasm that separates their hungry mouths.
She kisses him like she’s done it a hundred times. He kisses her like it’s his first ever; clumsy, overenthusiastic to the point of reticence. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he never has, he lets her show him. Follows her lead. Dances to the tune she’s writing.
There’s nothing about control in the way she coils his hair around her fingers. Like sex is a language and you can say whatever you want and she’s saying control is a tiny idea for tiny people compared to knowledge. You can take power or give it. Or, you can learn the intricacies of touch, if you pay close attention. She can learn how he whimpers when she pulls a little bit. He can learn how her lips are soft like moss.
He climbs up onto the bed, over her, hands planted on either side of her head; she wraps her legs around his waist; he fumbles out of his shirt and then fumbles to take hers off; she’s merciful and undoes the clasp on her bra for him; two people with all the time in the world, hasty like they have none.
There are things in life that really make Lawrence understand what ‘too good to be true’ means. He can look at her, the valleys and plains of her abdomen, and touch them at the same time in theory, but – too good to be true – he thinks if he does, he’ll wake up alone. He’ll wake up on the riverbank. It’s her who takes his hands and places them on her chest.
“It’s okay,” she says.
“I haven’t…” he replies. “It’s been a long time.”
“You worry a lot.” She’s flushed and moving his hands for him now. “I like you too, Lawrence. I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”
Words are nothing. Sounds redirected through different shapes. It’s her letting go of him to unbuckle his belt that makes him believe her.
He leans down and takes light hold of her neck with his teeth, still touching. She’s malleable. She’s gasping and writhing. She’s trying her best with his belt, but the angle, the shaking, she keeps losing her grip. He doesn’t mind it.
They shed their clothes. Limbs get tangled, for which there’s laughter, and heads knock against each other, for which there are apologies. He kisses her on the jugular, the collarbone, the sternum, baby steps down. One kiss on the stomach and she’s trembling. The hip. He presses his lips in to feel the bone.
And then he’s using his mouth to coax her undone, looking up at her wide-eyed, pleading for her approval. He knows the motion, the anatomy, from experience. Reaction, movement, warmth, that’s all new. He’s never had to wrap his arms around somebody’s thighs to keep them still. He’s never heard it, the change of resting pitch in her whining.
She says his name over and over, grabs onto his hair again for support, harder this time. He doesn’t have enough hands to hold her in every way he wants to.
She reaches up behind her and readjusts the pillow to keep eye contact. He looks like a wild animal between her legs, and she does too, hair sticking to her sweaty forehead. Hands in hair and around legs, they’re taming each other. They don’t want to be wild. They want this to mean something more than biology.
It means something to Lawrence, something poetic and gushy and sappy. He’ll find the words later. It’s hard to think straight. He’s so hard it hurts and she’s still saying his name like she has to say something and it’s the only thing she can remember.
When she cums, she drops her head back, out of his view. The sound she makes is strangled. Her grip tightens until it stings Lawrence. She’s coiled up like she’s seizing, locking him in without the option of pulling away. For now, he’s more than happy watching her chest shudder and arch.
She says his name again, in that same choked voice.
He could give her the world.
He comes up for air, wiping the sheen off his mouth with the back of his hand. She looks apologetic about it, starting to sit up. “I can do something for you.”.
He pushes her back down with one hand splayed over her heart. “Stop.”
“Please? I want to-”
“No,” he insists, pulling her legs back up around his hips.
“I want to show you,” she says sheepishly. “I can make you feel good too.”
“You are.” He kisses her neck again, leaving a hickey behind this time.
She still isn’t sure, reaching for his cock. He grabs her by the wrist and pins it down on the pillow. This he knows like the back of his hand, how to force a body. He won’t take it that far, even if she can take it without consequence, but he allows himself to indulge in small doses of it. Just enough for confidence. Not so much to scare her.
“You wanna make me feel good?” He asks, lining himself up. “Tell me how you need me.”
Not a command. An honest request, dripping with pitiable desperation.
“I need-”
He hilts himself in one fell swoop and she loses track of the sentence. He’s still, adjusting to how warm she is, while she stammers, and then he starts picking up in small motions, too small to get him anywhere in good time. He hopes she’ll notice this, how he’s drawing it out so she can cum again, how he is selfless and kind for her.
“I need you.”
Lawrence moans at the way her face softens. He’s getting crossfaded off how genuine she is, honest and almost naive. The room is spinning and she’s the point of rotation. If he looks away, he’ll get dizzy.
“God, I need you more than I’ve ever needed anything,” she says, struggling to get the words out. “I can’t… I can’t be alone again. Not without you.”
She tries to pull her wrist free, and he presses down harder out of instinct. He’s too far gone to even notice that he does it.
“You’re the only real thing I have.”
He drives into her hard and breaks the record. She repeats it, “you’re the only real thing I have”, until the words all blend together and she’s just making noise.
Lawrence wants to say something, but he doesn’t know what. Nothing feels quite monumental enough to capture what he’s feeling. It’s like a black hole, huge and getting bigger, tearing him up, bending the world around into unrecognizable rings of light. That’s how he feels. Like she’s gravity, like she’s singular, like, at a certain point, it became inevitable that he’d fall into her.
“You’re so good…” she says in a spacey babble. “So, so good. So pretty. You’re perfect.”
“Thank you,” he huffs. It’s humiliating how much her praise gets to him. His arms are shaking, threatening to give out. She clears the hair from his face and he preens into her palm.
“I’m gonna-”
And she does, squeezing her legs around him and crying out. Lawrence commits her face to memory: her eyes slam shut, her eyebrows draw together, her mouth hangs open, her cheeks are red and shiny, her eyelashes are wet with tears. This, he thinks, like his name, his plants, it belongs to him now. Nobody will ever see her make this face, other than him.
She will be private and safe. She will be potted. She will sit on his windowsill and wait for him. And when he comes home, she’ll tell him how good he is while she’s writhing underneath him. She’ll tell him how much she needs him while she’s cumming on his cock.
He finishes inside of her, digging his nails into her wrist. Compared to her, he’s silent. The only sound he makes, a drawn out groan, barely makes it past his gritted teeth.
They’re both heavy pants and closed eyes. He collapses next to her on his back, lazily pulling her into him.
A satisfied lull floats through the room.
“Are you falling asleep?” She asks.
“Maybe.” His voice is getting distant.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
She plants a soft kiss on his cheek. He closes his eyes.
Behind his eyelids, there is a river, flowing slow and steady. It could carry him, if he could put one foot in front of the other.
In the great big schema of all that has been and will be, there are more things he can’t do than can. Like a tapestry, woven with metal cables too cold to touch, he can’t keep his hands on anything without losing his grasp. Things are always happening, and yet, somehow, he’s never doing anything. He’s been screaming like an animal into the sky, he’s used his dirty hands to make offerings out of blood, and the 5 P.M. sunset has answered the same way every time: try again later.
The winter is unforgiving and eternal. He knows he’s becoming the same.
Whatever , he thinks. I’ll see her in the morning.