Page 58 of The Maverick
I had not eaten in bed with a woman in—I genuinely could not remember. I'd had women bring me food in beds that weren't mine, and I'd brought food to women in beds that weren't theirs, but I had not sat against someone's pillows in someone's actual apartment and that someone's actual buttered toast on her actual plate, with my legs stretched out under her actual blanket, drinking coffee she'd actually made from her actual coffee maker. I hadn't done this. I hadn't known you could do this. The men I worked with didn't do this. The men I'd grown up with might have done this, if their wives had let them, and I'd come up out of a generation of brothers who'd pictured this and never said it out loud.
The toast was good.
The jelly was raspberry, which her mama had made and sent down in mason jars. She told me that without making a thing of it, the way she told me everything, and I tasted it and tasted it again and decided that my mama was going to want thiswoman's mama's recipe, which was a thought I noted and put in a folder for later, alongside theI would have to take her there.
I wondered, with a clarity that felt new in my body,Is this what happiness looks like?
I thought,Maybe. I would not know.
She finished her coffee before I finished mine and glanced at the bathroom door.
She didn't say anything.
She just glanced.
I was so far gone for her by then that theglancehit me like a hand on my chest.
"Go on," I said.
She slid off the bed and held out her hand for me.
I took it.
The bathroom was small the way old Charleston bathrooms were small—black-and-white tile so old it had its own character, a clawfoot tub with a curtain rod that ran full circle, a cast-iron sink that had probably been installed when her grandmother was a girl. She turned the water on. The pipes coughed once and then ran clean.
She pulled my t-shirt off over her head.
She stepped out of her panties.
She climbed into the tub and held the curtain back for me, and I followed her in, and the water came down hot and the small space filled with steam.
She got the soap.
Then she did a thing I was not prepared for.
She started to clean me.
Slowly. Carefully. With both hands and the kind of attention that did not match anything I'd been given by another human being since maybe my mother on the back porch with a washcloth after I'd come in from the pasture covered in something I couldn't be allowed to bring into the house.
Her hands moved over my shoulders. Down my chest. Slow circles over the parts of me that had been used hard. The flat of her palm on my sternum where her ear had slept all night. Her fingertips at the base of my throat. Her thumb tracing the seam of an old scar without asking me about it.
Every place she touched, I got a kick of current up under the skin.
I'd beenfuckedin showers. Plenty.
I had not beenbathed.
I stood there with my eyes closed and let her have me.
She washed my arms. The insides of my elbows. The rough place on my left palm that had a callus. She turned each of my hands over in hers and washed them like they were something that had come in dirty from work and needed to be made clean again.
She washed my stomach. My hips. The line of my back, slow, fingers spread, pressing in just enough to remind me I had a body.
She knelt down in the tub.
She washed my legs, one and then the other. Calves. Knees. Thighs. She did this without looking up at me, which was a kindness I felt in my throat.
She stood back up. Rinsed her hands. Rinsed me.
