God, no, he’d be a disaster. “You’ll be fine.”
“Careful,” he warned. “This is nearly a conversation.”
He was probably stoned, wasn’t he?
“Aldo.”
“Regan?”
Even if he wasn’t, he’d like it, she thought. Everyone did. I’m naked. I’m touching myself. I was thinking about you before, I’m thinking about you now, I’m going to come like this, thinking of you.
Men loved that. They were so fucking easy. The whole thing was so tragically primal.
“I’m glad you’re going with me,” she said, withering.
“I’m glad you asked me to. Logistically speaking, of course.”
Speaking of.
“We should probably hang up,” she said, closing her eyes.
She heard him take another drag.
“We don’t have to talk,” he said, exhaling again.
Perfect, she thought.
“Okay,” she said.
By now she’d established the pace of his breathing; three pulses in, two or so out. In, out, with measured entrancement. She paced herself on his rhythm, seeing as her own had been lost to other pursuits.
She came after the pattern of ten more breaths; heart thudding, lip caught between her teeth to strangle the implication of sound.
“Aldo.” It slipped out like a whispered sigh, half-unsaid; more a breath than anything, flooding through her bonelessly.
If he’d heard it, or anything else, he didn’t comment.
“Tea would be nice,” he said eventually, “if you want. Instead of coffee.”
Logistics. She closed her eyes again.
“Do you want any cream or sugar? Lemon? Honey?”
“Just tea, please.” She heard the sound of him rising to his feet. “I’ll let you go.”
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.
Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
“Okay,” she said. “See you in the morning, Aldo.”
“Bye, Regan,” he said, and she hung up, letting the phone fall from her hand to settle on her bare torso, flat and still and lifeless.
This was no good, she thought dully. This wasn’t even close to enough. She had a voracity she could never quite quench, a fear she couldn’t stifle, a sense of dread lingering constantly overhead. She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn’t like needy, so she’d learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces.
Flaws, she thought, were just vacancies to be filled.
“Marc,” she called, and heard his footsteps approaching, padding towards the bathroom door. He’d require no explanation, no invitation. She wouldn’t ask forgiveness, and rightfully, he would offer none.
She closed her eyes as he stepped beside the bathtub, turning on the water just enough to let it drip down the soles of her feet. It caressed the shape of her heel where it met the cold porcelain below, and Marc smoothed a hand up her thigh.
“Better now?” he asked.
It was a relief, she reminded herself, not to be beholden to impossible expectations. Or even to meager ones.
“Will be,” she said, letting out a breath.
However she had to justify it.
* * *
ALDO TOOK ANOTHER DRAG from the joint, letting it out on the breeze. It wasn’t a particularly biting chill, which was good. He’d only have a few of these hospitable evenings left. One of them could have been the following evening, only he’d be busy then. At a party. With Regan.
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.
Aldo glanced down over the edge of his building, considering the length of the drop. He had a habit, carved into his affinity for heights, of looking down to determine the approximate point at which he would no longer be able to survive the fall. It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the whittled lines of city streets brought out his lingering melancholy; that l’appel du vide, the call of the void.
In Aldo’s experience, the void spoke many languages. Busy intersections, crashing waves, the too-still sounds in his apartment, the little plastic bottles he knew he could technically still get if he wanted to. Usually when the void spoke to him, Aldo countered with further contemplation of time. Time, and sometimes floods. Every ancient culture had a flood story. There must have been one, something to sweep them all away. The earth had been vengeful then.