Days of Awe Read Online Free Page B

that seem to migrate all over my body, like accessories. The signs of disrepair are faint but unmistakable. I flash back to that birthday party, just two years ago, but it seems like a decade:
No movie star will have me now!
    Okay, I’ll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm. And Chris, whose chest hair is going gray; Chris, who has never had any fat on his frame, and so it’s his muscles that are softening, loosening a little, his firm stomach growing slightly paunchy, his biceps starting to sag.
Need you?
    But here we are again, all the same, answering death with sex. I peel off his sweater, lift his T-shirt over his head. We’ve lost so much. I run my hands down his back, across his chest, his body as familiar as my own. I can imagine this with someone different, if I try: the ways passion would, or wouldn’t, humiliate you. The ways it would release you.
    Chris kisses me, unembarrassed. After a certain amount of time with someone, crisis is an aphrodisiac. It’s probably best not to think too hard about the implications of that one. And we are desperate for this, the flotsam of our intimacy. It’s true. I can hardly breathe for how much I want him. Need him. “Iz,” he says again. “Okay?”
    I let him guide me onto our bed, a tangle of soft sheets and heavy blankets. And I don’t need to answer, but I do: “Yes.”
    ···
    I wake up with a start. It must be hours later, still dark, the dead of night. Chris is lying next to me, snoring softly.
    “Shit!” I jump out of the bed and scramble for my clothes. “Chris, shit, we were supposed to pick up Hannah hours ago. What the hell? One of us was supposed to get her! Shit!”
    Chris glances at the clock and sighs, pulls the covers up to his neck. “It’s three o’clock.”
    “Holy mother of fuck.” I fumble with my shirt, pull it on backward, wriggle it around until it’s on the right way.
    “Izzy, it’s three in the afternoon. We’ve just been…dozing for a few minutes.” He rolls over and runs a hand through his fine, disheveled hair and peers at me. In our marriage—in every marriage?—no annoyed glance holds only the displeasure of the moment. Each one reflects all the irritated glances he’s ever shot at me for all of my transgressions: for lacking discipline, for being brittle and sharp, for overreacting, for swearing all the time, even in front of Hannah, for letting my worst self porcupine out before I retract my quills. Every exasperated look Chris gives me—and there have been plenty—carries the sediment of all the displeasure that has accumulated over the past fifteen years. “Everything is fine,” he says. He exhales through his nostrils like a bull.
    I shrug. “Well, that’s a relief.”
    He shrugs back at me, an unconscious imitation. “I should be getting back to the apartment,” he says, a little embarrassed, and the fact that he is ashamed almost absolves him.
    “You don’t have to call it ‘the apartment,’ ” I say, suddenly uncomfortably aware that I am standing next to our bed half naked and about to be abandoned by my sort-of-ex-husband whom I probably should not have just slept with. “Just say, ‘my apartment. I have to get back to
my apartment.
’ ” I step into my favorite old pair of sweatpants, which I wear frequently and which Josie used to call a blend of cotton and self-loathing. “You should get back to your apartment,” I say, the bitterness in my voice turning the edges hard.
    Chris sits up in bed and fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand, then props himself against the headboard with a pillow. “Come on, Iz. Don’t. Let’s just…would you just get back in here for a minute?” He pats the mattress next to him, rubs his hand down the sheet: fifteen years of signals we’ve been sending each other, fifteen years of fingers and faces, of communication, understood or missed. Our bed. Chris’s beautiful