Page 28 of After His Eulogy
“I am doing what I want,” he says.
“You’re deciding to give me the thing.”
“I’m deciding to ask for it. Those are different. I’m asking, Reed.”
I look at him.
“Okay,” I say. “Yes. Yes, Griffin.”
“Okay.”
“And the other times. After tonight.”
“After tonight we figure out. After tonight is for after tonight. Tonight I want you to fuck me. That is the thing I am asking for tonight.”
“Okay.”
He kisses me again, hard, fast, like sealing it. Then he takes my hand. He walks me into the bedroom.
The bed is small. Full size, not queen. The sheets are gray. There’s a lamp on the side table with a brass base and a paper shade — the lamp is on, has been on. He’s been waiting for me with the lamp on. He’s been planning.
The room is cold the way the apartment is cold. He reaches over and turns on the second lamp on the dresser. He pulls the sweater off me. He does it the way you take a sweater off a person whose body you used to know, which is to say without checking. He knows where the sweater catches on my shoulder. He knows to lift the back of the collar so it does not pull my hair. He does these things without thinking. His body remembers mine. My body remembers his.
I take his sweater off him. His chest is not the chest I remember. I knew it would not be. He is thinner than he was two years ago. The lines of him are different. There is a small mark on his shoulder I do not know. Pink, the size of a fingernail, the kind of scar you get from something stupid, a kitchen knife maybe, a closing door. I touch the mark. I do not ask. He sees me touch it. He does not say.
“Bed,” he says.
We get on the bed. I am over him because he has put me there. He has lain back and pulled me on top of him with his hand on my hip, and he has done it without ceremony, the way you arrange a thing you have already decided how to arrange. He is on his back. I am between his legs. He is in jeans still and so am I and I can feel him hard against me through both of them and he can feel me and neither of us is moving for a second.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t done this in two years.”
“Either way?”
“Either way.”
He waits. He is good at waiting. He is letting me have whatever this is.
“I don’t know if I…“
“Reed.”
“What.”
“Your body knows what to do. I am not worried about your body.”
“Okay.”
“Are you worried about your body.”
I check. I check the way you check for an injury you have learned to walk on, pressing different places to see what hurts. Nothing hurts. My body, it turns out, is fine. My body is the part of me that has been waiting.
