Chapter 6: Ours

The night before her birthday I went up to her window instead of through the house. The sleepover was tomorrow — his idea, the whole night, the thing he’d been building up to; tonight was just me, needing to see her, no plan in it but that. I couldn’t take his face that night — the warmth in it, the waiting, there’s my girls — and anyway his face wasn’t at the front of the house. The studio light was on across the yard at near midnight, and his shape moved around inside it, unhurried, setting the room to rights for something. For tomorrow, I told myself. A birthday thing. I went up the porch roof faster so I wouldn’t have to watch him do it.

Cass had the screen off before I was halfway up. She always heard me coming. She pulled me in over the sill by both wrists, and we stood in the dark of her room breathing at each other, and below us the studio door shut and his tread came up through the house and the TV went on — that was him, down there — and up here was us.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

That was all we had at first. Just the two of us in the dark and the thing pressing down out of tomorrow, and neither of us named it, because we never named it. But it came off her like heat off a road, and I think it came off me the same, and we did the only thing either of us knew to do with it.

I kissed her like I was starving, and I was. She made the sound into my mouth, the small one that had always been only mine, and I went after it — after all of them, every sound of hers I had a claim on. I got her shirt over her head in the dark and put my mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the top of her breast, and I felt her go still under it for a half-second, the way she went still in the studio now, a flinch that had learned itself into her this summer. I stopped. I put my forehead against her sternum and waited. Then I did it slow, the way I knew, my hand flat over her heart, until the flinch went out of her and it was me again, only me, my mouth on her the way it had been a hundred times before there was a summer, before there was a chair pulled up beside the daybed. I took my time putting myself everywhere he’d been. I don’t know another word for what I was doing. I was trying to paint over it.