Page 31 of Knocked Up

So, I crossed the room.

I got a fistful of his hoodie and pulled. He came down all at once and without a sound. I've thought about the first two seconds of that kiss more than I've thought about most years of my life.

Because it was not new. There was no learning in it. My hands went where they used to go, up the back of his neck into the short hair there. His hand came up and covered the whole side of my face the way he used to, thumb along my jaw. It was ten years ago and it was also now. Both were true in the same second.

He made a sound against my mouth like something being set down.

"Tessa. I'm not saying stop."

"Then don't say anything," I said, and he didn't.

I got him out of the exam room and down the hall by the front of his sweatshirt. He came. In my building he did what he was told, and it did something to me.

The break room had a couch my mother bought secondhand in 2003, a shelf of clean fleece blankets, and one window up high. I put my hand on the light switch and did not turn it on.

"Sit down."

He sat down. The couch was four feet long. He was not.

"This is a bad couch," he said. "I'm not going to fit on it."

"It's a terrible couch. Beckett, I'm going to lose my nerve in about ninety seconds and you are describing furniture."

He got a hand under my thigh and put me in his lap. That was the end of the couch discussion.

I got his hoodie off over his head and he let me, arms up like a kid. Then I stopped. I had not seen him in ten years, and there was more of him than there had been.

"You're allowed to laugh."

"I'm not laughing." I put my palm flat in the middle of his chest. "There's a hole in you here."

"Puck."

"That's a chest tube scar."

"Puck first," he said, "chest tube after."

I made a noise.

He said, "It was five years ago, I was fine in a month."

"Nobody is fine in a month."

"Tessa."

I said, "I know. Shut up," and kissed him with my hand still flat over it.

He got the scrub top up and off in one motion and went completely still, both hands on my ribs, looking at me like a man being handed something across a counter.

"What?" I said. "You stopped."

"Nothing. I'm looking at you."

"You can look at me later."

"No," he said.

That was the whole man. Two syllables, no argument possible. I sat in his lap in the dark and let myself be looked at for the first time in a decade. I did not survive it especially well.