Page 17 of Love Always

“Listen, before I follow you back, I have to fix this thing. And to do that I might have to take my pants off.” Leaning over he starts wrestling with a perfectly polished black leather shoe.

I stand there for a moment and jut a thumb in the direction of the hallway. “Should I go? Like to the—bathroom?”

He’s working on getting his shoe off. When he glances up, his face has a hunted look, a vulnerability that pulls at my heart for reasons I don’t understand.

“What? Do you need something?”

“I—I do need some help.”

It’s clear he’s not used to asking for assistance and hates it.

“Can you go in the bathroom and get my other liner?”

He reads the puzzled expression on my face.

“It’s a white, rubbery, silicone looking thing hanging off the shower door. Just grab it and bring it here.”

When he averts his eyes, I leave. I hear his belt buckle unclasp and the sound of pants sliding down.

The bathroom is neat, clean and tidy, just like him. Some guys’ bathrooms are trashed with empty toilet paper rolls on the floor, overflowing trash buckets, but not his. There, looped over the glass door of the shower, is exactly what he described: this meshy thing about as long as my forearm and at least twice as wide. I grab it. As I head back to the front room, arm extended, I put my other hand over my eyes.

“Here.” I dangle it out in front of me, my eyes screwed shut. A part of me wants to peek, though. To see those thighs that were straining under his pants, revealed.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says. “I’m decent.” There’s a lilt in his voice.

As my hand slips away and I open my eyes, I don’t know which emotion to tether myself to. Shock, surprise, pain, anguish, pity, sorrow, sympathy. It’s such a huge, slippery ball, and I don’t know which thread to follow. I hate that I gasp. I hate it’s not the reaction I wanted and not the one he deserved.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I should have warned you. My bad. I don’t have a lot of practice telling people.”

“Here,” he says, leaning forward, reaching for the liner. He can’t quite grasp it, so I take a step and he lifts it from my hand. “Thank you.”

I still can’t manage words.

Only one leg is out of his pants. He sits in his boxer shorts, silky black things, his muscular thighs, quads deftly defined. My eyes follow his knee, a perfect structure of bone and tendons, and then after a beautiful curve, about six inches down, his leg just stops. It’s like a trick of the eye, as if at any moment a magician will wave a wand and it will reappear.

But it won’t. The round end what is left of his leg is red and raw and angry. That’s why he was in pain. He wears a prosthetic and it must have been rubbing.

“The liner I put on today is old,” he tries to explain, as if this is a completely normal conversation for us to be having. “I think there was an air bubble. That’s the one thing you don’t want. It makes for all kinds of chafing.” He pauses, assessing my reaction. He reaches into his pants and pulls out what looks like a tube of toothpaste or what I thought it was when I grabbed his keys: spermicide.

“This is silicone gel and it helps.”

I watch as he starts massaging his thigh and when he gets to his knee, he opens up the tube of silicone gel, puts a dime sized dab on his fingers, and then very slowly and gently goes to the end of his—

“Is the right name … residual limb?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to call it. That’s the correct name. I call it Nubby, because that’s what it is and I don’t like things sugarcoated with lots of syllables. One day when Nubby and I get along better maybe I’ll just refer to it as my leg.”

I’m suddenly aware I haven’t moved.

“Can you hand me a dish towel there,” he says nodding towards the kitchen counter. I grab a black terrycloth and hand it to him. He wipes his fingers on it, wads it up, and places it on the table next to him.

I watch with morbid fascination as he first turns the liner inside out and works it over the end of his leg, pulling it up, like how Mom taught us to pull up pillowcases over pillows. Next, he picks up his prosthetic, which is smaller than I expected and all black with the leather shoe still attached. He adjusts the end of his leg into the socket and then there’s a black sleeve thing like a very long cuff that also gets inverted and smoothed all the way up over his knee to halfway up his thigh.

“Mateus I—I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. You know it’s really hard to get one pant leg on. If you could help me pull the hem of the pant leg over my shoe that would be great. Shoes are a pain in the ass, and why I don’t wear skinny jeans.” He grins.

Lifting his leg slowly, he scrunches up his pants and starts working the shoe and his leg into it. When it gets to the bottom and it’s clearly about to get wedged, I kneel and start working it out widening the opening, pulling, jiggling it back and forth until the shoe comes through.