“You wouldn’t lose me,” Henry says with a sad smile.
“You say that now.”
Henry gives me a startled look.
“We’re living in a bubble here.” I gesture. Here. The cabin. The lake on all sides. No one but us and the crickets to tell us if we need a jacket before going outside. “I don’t know yet how this translates in the real world.”
“I’m just talking about trying. You want to try, don’t you?”
“I said I did.”
“Youdid?” Henry sets his drink down on the floor. Begins to get up. Shit. I glance at his phone on the bed. Six minutes.
“I do,” I say, correcting myself, but this does not diffuse the suspicion on Henry’s face.
“Did something happen?” Henry wants to know, edging close, worrying his hair with his hand. “Did something change?”
I shake my head vehemently. “It’s just hitting me that we’re leaving. That I should be scared. Really fucking scared.”
Henry reaches for me. He tugs me to him, cheek to chest. I let him. I don’t have a choice. He smells too good.
Henry burrows his face in the crook of my neck. “What aren’t you saying?” he whispers warmly into my skin. The room has a chemical, trippy odor. My mind feels jumbled, distorted. Something. I have to give him something to pass these next five minutes and thirty-four seconds.
“I’m different,” I attempt haltingly, “out there. I’m not likethis. I’m not soft.”
Henry draws back, scrutinizes me all over. He picks something out of my hair, shows it to me as though to assure me it’s not anything with legs. Just a small, fleecy white bloom. “Faye, no offense”—he blows the bud from his fingertip—“but if you think this is you being soft, we’ve got some work to do.”
I say to him, unsmiling, “I think you’ll still want me out there. I could be wrong, but I think you will. What I mean is that I don’t know whatI’llfeel.”
Henry stares down at me, the tenderness in his eyes turning over into something else.
“There is something tempting,” I rush to explain, “about feeling small.” I look down at my feet, wishing I had thought to put on shoes before I came in here. “I’ve gotten to be that again with you, here, but back home”—I glance out the window. Who knows in what direction. East, south, Canada. If my architecturally significant post and beam with a view of the observatory lies due west, it is only by luck. “I am too big for that. I do not need you the way I once did.”
“Faye,” Henry says, my name smooth on his tongue, “there are ways I can give you what you need that have nothing to do with who has the bigger mortgage now.”
I look up at him, crinkle my nose in disgust. “You have a mortgage?”
There is a subtle darkening in the room. Cloud cover, though last time I noticed, the sky was an unblemished blue. My heart kicks my chest. This is our third rail. Who has the money. Who has the power. And I’ve just reached out, gloveless and death-wishing, to touch it.
“Your bravado,” Henry says, cool and remote, “is actually revolting.”
“Nothing I’ve said is untrue.”
“You don’t need to say everything that is true,” Henry says. “That you don’t know that yet, that’s the revolting part. Show some fucking humility.”
I glance at the timer on the bed, back at Henry. “Make me.”
Henry stares at me with livid calm. Lightly, he runs a hand up my back, gathers my hair in his fist. “Easy, Faye. It’s so easy with you.”
My head jerks back. I expel a guttural sound from my diaphragm, like a tennis player at Wimbledon returning a tough serve. Henry adjusts his stance, shifting his weight so that he can slide one of his considerably thick thighs between my legs. My pelvis is instantly flush and frantic with blood.
“I want you to fuck yourself on my leg,” he says. “Don’t be cute or sexy about it. You know what I want.”
It is what I want, actually, but what I want is what Henry wants and around and around we go. I sink down on Henry’s thigh with a groan that will haunt me until the end of my days. I can barely stand to hear myself so needful. Henry watches me with something like curiosity, but as I squeeze my thighs around his thighs and seek my relief, I realize the look on his face is nearer to pity. A warm panic squeezes my lungs. How can I leave Henry? How can I leavethis? And so instead I leave my body to watch what I am doing from the outside, the gruesomespectacle I am making of myself while Henry stands, unmoving and benevolent, scanning my face for signs I’m about to bust all over his J.Crew chinos.
“I could watch this all day,” he says fondly. “Are you going to come, sweetheart? I see it in your face. That’s fast, even for you.”
I grunt with my bottom lip in my top teeth.