She walked in from the bathroom wearing only a t-shirt—her legs, smooth, shiny, and the color of raw cinnamon, rising from the floor to the hem of the shirt that hid the promise of their juncture.
He was sitting up in the bed, reading a worn copy of Baldwin, which she saw him dog-ear closed at the click of the bathroom light switch. He plucked the small silver reading glasses from the tip of his slightly upturned nose and dropped them and the book onto the low nightstand to his right, the blue comforter slipping low to reveal the expanse of his naked torso, once hard muscled and golden, now pale white, paunchy, and covered in soft gray hairs from navel to nipples.
He pulled the corner of the sheet and comforter down, exposing a square of crisp whiteness and revealing the dark blue cloth of his boxers on his hip.
They each paused for a moment at the sound of a car from outside. Its music thumped loudly enough to suggest the age of the driver, and they waited for the squeaking brakes or slamming door that would signal that Kevin or Mila were home from their dates, but the car kept rolling, the oomp-oomp-oomp of its bass receding like the clipping of a distant freight train.
Her pink t-shirt had “SURVIVOR” written across the flat spot where her breasts used to be. Pearse bit back an acrimonious remark when he saw the guarded vulnerability on her face, shrouded by the hanging ends of her headscarf—patterned in black and gold and double-wrapped around her short gray afro, which was just becoming thick enough to obviate the need for the scarf.
This wasn’t the time for anger, though Pearse carried a lot of it. Anger at chance or fate or whatever God handed out cancer, at the cottage industry of feel-gooders who cashed in on the vulnerable with all manner of promises, at the million unnamed pegs upon which he hung blame or fault or guilt. It sat in his chest, red and hot and malleable, always ready to burn and scar, and it sparked as though struck by a smith’s hammer whenever he saw a pink ribbon or heard the pie-in-the-sky discussions of staying positive. He swallowed it down now, just glad that she was still alive, even if it seemed just barely after the cure ravaged her as much as the cancer.
Where he had gotten thicker and softer over the years, she had stayed thin, but as she reached for the wall switch to the overhead light, her t-shirt stretched flat, and he saw how much thinner she was now, thinner than ever before. Her skin hung loosely at her elbows and knees, her cheeks pinched in so far that her round lips looked like they were made of Halloween wax.
The dim light of his reading lamp cast her half in shadow, darts of light glinting off the lenses of her glasses, hiding the tracks of age, and for a moment he saw the young black girl he’d made laugh all those years ago, the coltish teenager whose smile made his stomach flip. He felt that tingling again as he thought how the thirty intervening years had somehow made her better.
“My God, Karen, you look beautiful,” he said.
“Do you really think so, Pearse?” she asked. There was a touch of need in her voice as she crossed her arms and placed the palm of each hand on her shoulders, her elbows jutting forward in a grotesque reminder of her maiming.
They’d had this conversation frequently since the diagnosis nearly a year and a half ago especially after the surgery and during the treatments and halting recovery: He’d answer the same way every time.
“There are two things in this world that I’m certain of, Karen: You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and you must have the worst vision in the world.”
Sometimes Karen would let out a swallowed laugh, like the sound of an excited child at the glittering evidence of Santa’s visit, but this time she smiled the same sad smile of the last sixteen months and came to the edge of the bed.
“Don’t make fun,” she said, turning toward her dresser.
He watched as she took off her jewelry, dropping her gold band into a small crystal dish on the dresser and placing the plucked earrings back into their box. Next she picked up a blue and red labeled white tube and squeezed out a dollop of thick lotion into her left palm. After clicking closed the flip lid of the container and standing it on its cap on the nightstand, she rubbed the lotion in by rotating her fingers through opposite palms over and over again until her hands glistened in the low light of his reading lamp. She ran the first two fingers from each hand under her eyes, then along down both sides of her neck before getting into bed next to him.
He reached back with his right hand to twist off the tiny black knob of the reading lamp and then rolled toward her. He reached out and gently ran his palm across her stomach, the t-shirt catching and bunching as he went, like a windswept umbrella. He felt her stomach muscles tighten underneath her loose flesh and heard her murmur a voiceless syllable, the variegated cousin of a moan.
She let out a short, sharp breath as his hand changed directions, heading south toward the shirt’s hem. Even after all this time, he still thrilled to the feel of her tight pubic curls, only recently returned after the treatments harsh denuding, and in spite of his plans, his movements were more urgent, insistent.
He pressed gently into the fold hidden beneath her coarse mound and was rewarded with a velar moan as she cupped his head in her palm and drew his face toward hers, her lips parting.
It was the first time since the surgery that she’d let him touch her like this, and even though they’d discussed it before coming upstairs, They were both surprised by their shared urgency.
She clawed his arms, reaching for a secure hold as she felt pulsing warmth. He turned to her, and their lips stayed joined in series of soft, nibbling kisses, which became deeper when his fingers probed her gathering wetness. Without removing his hands from her, he shifted down in the bed, feet kicking the comforter and sheet into a rounded ridge near the footboard.
He rose on one hip, pulled the waistband of his boxers over his rump enough to reveal himself to her. He moaned into her throat when she assisted him in getting them the rest of the way off.
Erect now, he kissed her neck and plunged his finger into her, feeling the muscly grasping, the knobby thickening, the moist softness.
Moving down, he kissed her opening, reveling in the murmurs from deep in her throat and thrilling at the light tap-tap-tapping of her fingertips on the back of his head, the pressing of her thighs against his cheeks.
His hardness pressed into the sheet beneath him as he used a circling tongue to slowly draw forth the song of her climax. Her knees beat out a mournful tattoo against his temples as she flexed through the aftershocks.
After a moment, he raised up, his lips and chin wet from her paroxysm, and pulled at the hem of her t-shirt so he could feel the mingled warmth of their bodies when he pressed into her.
“Stop,” she said, pulling the t-shirt down tightly, and bringing her knees and thighs together as she shifted from underneath him. “Please, Pearse. I can’t.”
He leaned back and sat on folded legs.
“Can’t what? I thought we both wanted to do this?”
“I want to, but I can’t let you see me, Pearse,” she said. “I’m so ugly there.”
“Nothing about you is ugly, Karen, no matter what,” he said, quickly. “Besides, I want to feel you against me, not some ugly pink t-shirt.”
“No, please, no. I can’t. I thought I could, but I’m so ashamed…”
The pain in her voice was like a kick to his groin, the excitement ebbed quickly.
“Ashamed? Of what?”
“I’m not a woman anymore, at least not a whole one.”
“Horseshit,” he said, watching her recoil at the violence of the word. “Losing your breasts doesn’t make you any less of a woman.”
“I look like a little boy. A horribly scarred, twelve-year-old boy.”
“Not hardly,” he said. “Not with those hips.”
“Pearse!”
Her amusement was slight, but it was a sign that the dark mood might pass.
“What?”
He lowered his lips to the hollow of her hip where her pelvis pressed up against her dark flesh. She tried to pull away before he made contact, and she squealed as he nuzzled her sensitive spot.
“Pearse, stop, you’ll wake up Mila,” she whispered loudly, using all her might to push him away from her. He slid his strong hands under her then, grabbing her buttocks and squeezing.
“Mila ain’t home yet,” he growled, and renewed his oral assault on her sensitive flesh.
She bucked her hips hard into the air, and the pink t-shirt pushed above her navel for a moment.
He quickly moved a hand to the exposed flesh and stroked her skin. She resisted only a little as he bunched the oversized tee into her armpits.
She tried to cover herself with her hands, but he leaned above her and gathered them over her head, holding them there with his left hand as his right stroked a path from her hip to the hollow of her underarm, not stopping even when his thumb bumped over the white keloid that stretched like a snow-covered ridge across her torso. He looked down at her then, seeing the deep brown and pink valleys from the surgeon’s knife mapping out some grotesque version of a contour map.
Tears flowed heavily from her eyes that she’d squeezed tightly shut.
“Karen, I promise I’ll love you forever plus one day,” he whispered to her.
“Don’t say it, Pearse. You can’t mean it.”
She tried to roll away from him, and without knowing why, he lowered his face to her chest and followed the crooked lines of the double mastectomy scar across her with his tongue and lips. He kissed and licked and hoped he could heal her, could make her feel whole again.
She kept repeating, “Stop,” but he didn’t. She had no feeling there, only a sense of pressure as he went back and forth, left to right, right to left until the hardened scar was soaked and slippery with his saliva.
She moaned again now, feeling less like a creature wounded and more like a woman aroused. She felt his hand release hers, and while he still leaned over her on his right hand, still tracing the long path of the surgeon’s knife, he found her center with his left hand. She felt a quickening wetness there again. She laid her arms over his shoulders and rubbed the muscles of his back, and then he entered her.
There was resistance there, a tightness borne of lack, and it took them a moment to sort out a rhythm, but when found, it felt like it did in their first time all those years ago.
Age and aches forgotten, they reached their peaks, and he fell to the bed beside her, carefully pulling her into his chest, wrapping an arm around her waist.
“I missed you so much,” he said, his voice threatened by a sob.
“I missed you, too,” she said.
They were silent for a moment, each feeling the aftershocks of orgasms.
“Thank you, Pearse,” Karen whispered.
“For what?”
“For loving me.”
“I always have, always will.”
Patrick J. Salem is a former journalist from Cleveland who lives next to a pair of century-old cemeteries in suburban Chicago with his wife, their two-year-old son, and a three-year-old cairn terrier that he refers to as “14 pounds of trouble wrapped in an ugly fur coat.” He is completing his novel St. Kevin of Cleveland as part of his MFA in fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago.