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Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.
The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her single imperfection; Marilyn Monroe’s mole, or Audrey Hepburn’s malnutrition. It was the same reason Marc took no issue with Regan’s past. He didn’t mind that she had once required reinvention; she doubted he’d take an interest in her if he couldn’t elevate himself with her flaws.
“Have you thought about what you’ll do next?” Next. People were always thinking about what to do next. Other people were always planning their futures, moving ahead, and only Regan seemed to notice how the whole thing was just moving in circles.
In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.
She had tucked her hair neatly behind one ear, angling herself toward him as he approached her. She had a way of doing that, Aldo thought; of inviting him into the geography of the conversation. He wondered how quickly in life she had learned that people wanted to be invited in.
They both paused, sipping from their respective thoughts. “I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”
He doubted there was any mental space he could occupy that Regan would disrupt. In fact, he felt the place he usually reserved for rote mechanization and the occasional wandering thought would be vastly improved by her presence.
Would she ultimately wish to excise it from what she already knew of him, and would he be able to sleep there for any nights afterward, having witnessed in such detail all the places she had been? Not that it mattered. He rarely slept, and she’d already been in all his other places, anyway.
His mind retraced the shape of her touch, replicating its patterns and shapes; linking observations together. The speed of her hesitation. The force of her breath. He turned her over in his head, facts and details and observations, wrapping his mind around her the way his fingers had done.
There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.
That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.
He’d once asked his father what it had felt like to meet his mother. “Like jumping off a cliff,” Masso had said, and not in a way that invited further questioning.
He took another long drag, letting it out. They don’t tell you how close smoking is to setting yourself on fire. Some days, he enjoyed the act of it more than the outcome. The sense that he could burn something, trap the smoldering of ash inside his chest, and then breathe it out like some sort of omnipotent god.
There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and
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Will it be worth it, just for his hands on your skin? Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you’re the kind of person people leave? Maybe it will, because look at his mouth, look at the shape it makes when his eyes are on you. You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch
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He reached out, unthinking, and she sucked in a breath as his hand met her cheek, stroking along the bone, darting beneath the corner of her jaw. He shifted to his knees, facing her, and she did the same, a mirror game again, her hands floating up to brush a curl back from his forehead. Her thumb lingered beside his temple and he caught her fingers with relief. “What key?” she asked again. A second chance. He shook his head, lips still pressed to her knuckles. “Your art,” he said. Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.
“Because,” she said. Because I know he’ll sit for me. Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill this fragile little thing I’ve found, this fledgling breath I’ve taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee. Because I don’t know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I’ve already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.
It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye. Though, he reminded himself, maybe if he committed it to memory then he could return to it in another shape, with better understanding.
She glances around at the simmering water and the pasta and the chicken in the oven; she recognizes she’s entered a room that did not previously have plans to contain her and now has to expand. She opens her mouth to apologize and he, unthinking—thinking only that he doesn’t want her to be sorry, that in fact “sorry” from her tongue should be reserved for only the most capital of offenses, such as disappearing from his life forever—he takes her hand and holds it, urgently.
He was inside her, she liked his food, she came here for him. It washes over him in a wave, dawning, and it numbs him first before setting him alight; before he illuminates with it, resurrected.
This time, she finishes with a gasp. It grits through her teeth and she leans back to tell him, raggedly, I knew you would feel like this. I knew I would feel you everywhere, in my whole body, I knew it. She’s rocking against him slowly and whispering I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, in his ear until she sighs again, his hands tight on her hips.
He hasn’t even begun to think about her kiss, about the way it feels to kiss her, which is normally step one but with her is somewhere beyond intimacy. Being the thing on her tongue means something more to her, he can tell it does.
“Oh, good,” she said when she woke to the sight of him, and that’s what he thinks while he kisses her. Oh, good. It’s you.
They should have showered, probably, but he likes that she’s all over him. Makes him feel holier that way, shrouded in something that contains no doubt.
He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.
Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me. He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.
She was colossal like this, the enormity of what she was now steadily irrepressible, ebullient for being in his arms; Kiss me again, please, don’t stop, oh god don’t stop. He would never, he wouldn’t, but still, please don’t, we’ll shrink down to human-sized when we’re done but for now, stay like this with me; see the magnitude of being, see existence through my eyes; don’t blink or you might miss it. I am dwarfed, Aldo, by the happiness in that room, it’s overwhelmed me. It has made me feel so infinitesimally small; I need you to help me remember what it feels like to be vast again.
If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.
She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before, that this thing had never been felt or never tasted or never wanted, and now, because it existed, things were different; changed.
Maybe this is why men rule the world, because they were clever enough to convince women that virginity is precious, that sex itself should be secret, that being penetrated was sacrosanct. It’s idiotic, it’s even dumber than it is cruel and that’s the worst part. The idea that I should want sex less than you, why does that exist?”
Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. He smiled at her like: Isn’t it great? Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.
