The Safekeep(48)

She knew what she wanted to hear, hated how obvious it was: wanting to be told she was wanted. Eva inhaled. Isabel, flustered and unable to keep herself from moving, went to her. Always toward her. Her hands shook on Eva’s hips, and Eva looked up at her. She said, “Isn’t it about what you want?” Eva arched her back into the hold, easy. “Isn’t it about what you don’t want?”

“What I want,” Isabel said, hovering, lips close. Isabel had never wanted before. And now any day Louis could knock on the door and then what Isabel wanted would no longer matter. Neelke was in the dining room, two doors away, and in a pocket in a skirt in a wardrobe: a list, forgotten. Eva had a small silk scarf tied at her neck. Neelke will wonder, she’d said that morning, adjusting the fabric over the markings. She’d been looking at Isabel through the mirror. Don’t look at me like that. She’ll wonder, she’s smarter than you think.

“What you want,” Eva said now, hands over Isabel’s wrists, moving: up her arms, her elbows. Up. There was muscle there. Knees in the earth, back bent over soil: digging work.

They were running out of time. There still were places Isabel wanted to show Eva. That’s how she told her this: I want to show you places, which made Eva laugh, made her grab Isabel by the shoulder, made her say, You sound like the bad guy in the movie. And Isabel had only been to the movie theater twice in her life, and found it all very loud, and all the people had sat too close. She pulled away a resentful inch and said, smarting, I meant it seriously, and Eva pushed in that same inch and grabbed her and said, smiling wide: I know I know I know I know.

They went biking to the places Isabel wanted to show her. Picture-book places: fields, sheep, cottonwood trees puffing into the air. The whole time Isabel glanced at her from the corner of her eye, sure that Eva disliked the whole idea; disliked the land, the nature, the saccharine summer of it all. They stopped at a teahouse. Eva ordered ice cream, which came in a big glass bowl. She said, “I can’t finish it.” She held her spoon aloft, beaten. The ice cream dripped down her wrist. And Isabel, possessed by something rough and unfamiliar, briskly took her wrist and licked it off her skin. Eva pushed her away, quick, looking around.

Eva spoke, all amusement gone, eyes turned away: “She can see outside.”

Isabel retreated immediately. She rolled the sugar around her mouth, swallowed it away, said, “Who?”

“The owner,” she said. There had been an owner. She had told them they could sit outside; she had come to take their order. Isabel had forgot about her, couldn’t even recall her face—only something of a voice remained. Accented, the eastern blur, swallowed syllables.

They continued on their trip. Eva in a rumbling silence, a set to her shoulder, and Isabel with a hiss of humiliation, of annoyance. She kept thinking of the sudden jerk of Eva pushing her away, and how her body shocked with it. They arrived: a shallow lake where Isabel would ice-skate in the winters. She thought to bring Eva here for a reason that felt important and was now vague—there was nothing much to see. They left their bikes by the slope of the road. Eva said, “I’m going in,” and stood and took off her dress. Nothing could be seen from the road, and here there was only the two of them; only the bubbling of water on reeds.

Eva went into the water in her underwear. A surprised “Oh, it’s not that cold!” and then she dove in. Isabel watched her, frowned at her, leaned back on her elbows. She pulled out tufts of grass and watched her some more.

Eva floated on her back. Eva disappeared below the surface, a blur of pink from under the green. She came back out, dripping, shivering. She brought with her the chill of water, standing by Isabel’s legs. The fabric of her underwear was translucent, clinging.

Isabel said, “You’re done swimming?”

Eva wrung out her short hair, dark and wet. She was panting. She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m done.”

She lay back down. Her skin was all up in goose bumps. She noted Isabel looking at her and closed her eyes to it all the same, turned her face to the sun. “Remember,” she said after a while. “Remember when you hated me? Remember when you looked at me like you just wanted me to die?”

They were talking around Louis’s name. They’d been talking around him all along—touching around the invisible shape of him, across the length of a table, the width of a bed, the length of a bare leg.

Isabel’s world narrowed down to a small patch of skin on Eva’s shoulder. She didn’t look at anything else, didn’t lift her eyes. She didn’t want to have this conversation. Eva did. Eva said, “You don’t remember? It was really only yesterday. Really you don’t know me at all.” She was talking with a loud kind of voice, like she was telling herself as well as Isabel.

A shiver ran through Eva. Then movement, all at once: she rolled over onto Isabel, kissed her hard and fast and her jaw and her neck, shaky hands everywhere. Eva was still wet from the lake, pushed the water through Isabel’s dress, and Isabel could only catch up: could only try to hold her in return, try to gentle the embrace, and if not gentle then match it somehow—match the dig of her fingers, the rhythm in how she moved. Isabel said, “Eva.” She said, “Eva,” and wanted to say: I never, I only, I only wanted, I’m—

There was no one around. It was fast and furtive. Eva kissed sloppily, mouth slipping off Isabel’s and coming back again. The press of her fingers was purposeful under Isabel’s dress, the damp crotch of her underwear pushed aside. It was quick; she knew Isabel’s body by now, knew how to pull her to a frenzied peak. “Is that good?” she asked, Isabel bleary and hot beneath her. “Like that? That’s good?”