She’s tracing the curves of his ear with the tip of her index finger. Blue and yellow have been spilled across his cheekbone and he shifts his weight against her body with his eyes closed. A sharp intake of air follows and she adjusts the pillow on her lap as if it would help any. When he settles again, a sound comes up in the back of his throat, rumbling through her like an earthquake. The things inside of her splinter and she wonders why she let herself get in so deep.
She leans forward, resting her nose in his hair, saying, “Christ, what a day…” and just barely kissing him there behind his ear. “You okay?”
There’s a silent moment before he chokes out with his eyes still closed, “Yeah, just a little sore still.”
Her right leg is going to sleep, but she doesn’t want him to move and, anyway, she welcomes the tingling numbness that starts to pulse in her thigh. It’s better than this other feeling that’s burrowed itself somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach. Because this is far from her idea of perfect and she isn’t sure that he’s still hers right now. Or if he’s-
In her mind, she keeps having these flashes of what happened earlier. She can’t get the sound of knuckles against skin out of her mind and it makes her heart speed up and her throat tighten and she has to look back down at him to remind herself that it didn’t turn out so bad. But there’s still some dried blood in the corner of his mouth and she keeps hearing Pam’s voice high and desperate, panicked, saying, “Oh, God, Jim,” and, “Should I- um. Should I call 911?” and, “Oh, God, this is all my fault, all my-”
Jim turns his head then and the top of it presses into her breast, just next to her heart and he mumbles something she can’t hear, but she doesn’t ask him to repeat it. She just smoothes out his hair and says, “I love you,” almost silently and tilts her head back until it’s hanging over the back of the couch, her eyes focusing on the ceiling fan above them.
She lifts her head back up. His eyes are open now and he’s watching her intently. He says, “Hey, I love you, too.”
She laughs, because it’s the most ridiculous thing he could say right now. “You just got into a fight with a guy over another woman, Jim.”
He’s shaking his head and trying to sit up, but he winces as he does and lays back down. “It’s not-”
Only he doesn’t know how to finish that because it is. This time it really, truly is. And she knows he doesn’t mean what he says despite the warmth that comes when the words vibrate against her, through her. It’s just another earthquake that ends in cracked pavement and shattered glass.
His right eye is only sort of swollen and when she reaches out to touch it, she thinks about how it’s almost comforting to know that love like that can really exist still. That maybe there is this epic, everlasting, worth fighting for love somewhere. Then again, she’d sort of at one time thought that maybe that’s what this was, this thing with him. And it was why they spent a week at her kitchen table, slumped over at two in the morning, talking gently about histories and how things are mended.
But when she says that she’s leaving, the whir of the ceiling fan is suddenly louder than it had been and she has to repeat herself when he doesn’t hear her for the first time and says absently with his face half in the pillow, “What’s that?”
“I said I’m leaving. I can’t be here anymore.”
And then he turns his head to look up at her and after a few seconds he nods and says quietly, “Yeah,” and she doesn’t have to ask him to repeat it.
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