The Source - caption 2 (Patreon)

The paper crackles under us. Rina's knee is between mine, her cardigan is half off with one arm out of it, and her mouth is at my ear, and what she's saying stopped being sentences a while ago. The suite is cold everywhere the diffuser isn't, and the diffuser is over us, and her hair is down across my face and smells of peppermint gone thin and of her office. Under the peppermint, where the smells run out, there's skin, and her skin is warm all the way down. My tits are against hers and the warmth between us has its own edges.

The gurney paper has the print of me in it from two hours ago, the shape I left cooling while I stood over the chair reading the washout panel. Rina lies half into that print, longer in the leg than I am, and every move either of us makes, the paper crackles through it.

Forty minutes ago I knocked on her door with the side of my fist, twice, because that's his knock, and the sound came back smaller than his ever would. She opened it with her tea gone cold in her other hand and looked at me for longer than a check takes. Her coat was on the hook behind her door. Off. She hadn't planned that at eleven.

"You're supposed to be on the gurney," she said.

"I was," I said. "I got up."

She took my wrist, two fingers, where the pulse is. She counted. Neither of us said the count out loud, and the count went up the whole time she held on, and we stood in her doorway with both lights on us, her thumb resting on the tendon, and that was the conversation for a while. When she let go of my wrist she kept her hand under it, like I needed the holding up. Maybe I did.

"Why'd you come to me," she said. Late. After the wrist.

"You had the light on."

She looked at me the way she'd been looking at the monitor all night, patient, willing the line to do what it was going to do. "Okay," she said. Then, "That's not why."

"No," I said.

She kissed me with her office door still open, or I kissed her, and the order of it is already gone, and I find I don't mind. There's a lot I'll never have the order of.

I came out knowing him. I've never met him. Runs two and three both died in week six, and he walks this corridor on those nights, end windows, the bathroom on this floor, the stairwell door, back to the suite to check a number that hasn't moved. I have his bad nights in me. I've never had one of my own.

Her office has a door that locks and a couch that folds most of the way flat, and neither of us walks there. I bring her into his room instead. For the heat, I'd have said, and the diffuser here is the best heat in the building after midnight, and there's a gurney in here. None of that is nothing.

We come in behind the loop, while it has him at the far end of the hall. The suite door doesn't latch unless you push it all the way shut, and it stands the way he's left it, and the room tells me everything he's done since I left it. The rig is laid across the seat of the chair, cables coiled on top. His water glass is in the sink, empty. The sheet is still on the wax where I dropped it. He stood over that sheet for most of a minute. I know how long he stood. I know his hands were still the whole time. And I know he hummed the four bars, because he hums them when a run completes, and this run completed, and there was nobody in the room to hear it but him. The log's last line says session ended 02:53, four minutes off the chair, and that's his speed coming up.

"He's up," I say.

She looks at her tea, and then at me. "How do you know?"

"I know him."

She looks at the chair with the rig laid on it, and then she sits on the gurney and takes her boots off onto the wax, one sock inside out, and puts the cardigan on the bench, folded, and somewhere in there the room stops being his. Neither of us says a word about it.

Twenty minutes. That's what I give us, because his loop runs twelve and I'm not going to cut it fine. The loop is what he does when a run dies. This one didn't. I use it anyway.

"We can stop," I say, at some point, with her cardigan half off her shoulder.

She waits to see whether I mean it. I don't say anything else, so she gets the other arm out of the cardigan.

I stand between her knees and she tips her face up at me. I'm taller than her by three inches, and I have no idea what to do with it. I bend to her, all neck, no idea what I'm doing, until she takes a fist of my hair and tips my head and sets the angle herself, and once she's set it, it holds. I pull up the gurney rails and lock them, then lean over her, and the lean is wrong at the elbow, the rail sits for a longer arm, and I ride the wrong bones for a second before I find a way down that works.

She pushes the sweater up over my head and stops when she sees the bitten-off tag at the neck. December clothes, tags on, bought by a man who parks badly on Main Street. She knows what that is. Her hands go still on the tag for a second, and then they keep going, and when the sweater comes off she folds it and puts it on the bench with her cardigan. She's going to take her time.

The clasp of the bra I put on myself forty minutes ago, behind my back, two tries at 02:30, takes her one hand, one motion, in the dark of my hair. She doesn't make anything of it. The straps come down my arms and my tits go back to hanging and the cold gets in where the cotton was, and my breath goes high and shallow the way it does now, and she puts her palms flat over my nipples and warms them.

"Those have been bothering me for an hour," I say.

She stops. Then she laughs, once, into my collarbone. "Okay."

"Not like that. Cold. They've been cold since two."

"I heard you the first time," she says, and doesn't move her hands.

Her cardigan has five buttons, and the middle one is sewn on with the wrong thread, white on gray, gone over twice, the work of somebody fixing a button at her desk with whatever the drawer had. I didn't know that button an hour ago. I get the five open one-handed while she holds my face in both of hers, and the cardigan goes down onto the wax with a pen still clipped in the pocket, and after that the pen clicks every time either of us kicks it, which is often.

Her bra closes in front, a small plastic hook. Every clasp in my head closes behind, one-handed, in the dark, a trick out of his twenties. I find her hook on the second try, and she laughs at the first, at me, at the whole idea of me being clumsy at anything, and I let her laugh, and then her laugh is in my mouth.

Under the cardigan she's narrow through the ribs and wide through the shoulders, a swimmer's build. There's blue ink on her middle finger, from her pens, and her hands smell of almond lotion over the department ethanol, and when I put my mouth on her throat the taste is salt and skin and the far end of the peppermint. She's dark-haired and small-handed, and she argues with everything, including me, including the cardigan. I had the taste before I had the mouth, drawn off women like her years ago by a man who never acted on half of it.

"I want to see you," she says, when I would have stayed under my hair.

The monitor over the chair is dark. "I've been looking at your numbers for six hours," she says. "I've never seen you."

I put my hair back with the two-finger hook and let her look, and the looking goes on a while, and being looked at has a weight to it, low in my belly, and I stand in the weight and let her look as long as she wants.

Somewhere behind me, out past the door, a chair leg scrapes once against carpet, hollow and far off. I let it go.

I lay her back into the paper. The print of me is wrong for her, longer in the legs, and the paper crackles the whole way down and keeps crackling, and after a minute I stop hearing it as sound and feel it as the floor of everything we're doing.

I know what she'd like before I touch her. Or I know what he would have predicted she'd like. I put my palm flat on her stomach and take it low, an opening move out of twenty years of his nights, and she says, "Wrong hand." She takes my wrist and sets it two inches left of where I'd put it. "Slower than you think," she says, and slower than I think turns out to be barely moving at all, and barely moving is the thing that works. She teaches me one correction at a time, her voice low and level, while the paper crackles under her hips.

"Left," she says. "My left." And later, when I go careful on her, "You won't break me."

I tell her what I want to do next, and I use the words that come up for it, which are his words, out of the back of a head that spent twenty years not saying them.

She stops. "Jesus."

"What."

"You've got a mouth on you."

"It's the only mouth I've got."

She looks at me a second longer than the answer needs. "It's a good mouth," she says. "I'd just like you to know what you're saying while you say it."

I don't, entirely. I say it again anyway, and her hand tightens in my hair, so the not knowing can wait.

I go down her the way his knowledge says to, and the pace is wrong, so I take hers instead, her hand in my hair setting it, her heel sliding on the paper. Her pussy is warm and plain and closer than anything has ever been to my face, and it tastes of salt and of her and faintly of the whole day she's had. My mouth waters.

Her breath gets shorter and her hips stop taking correction and start giving it, and I learn her correction by correction. When she comes she has a hand on the back of my head and her hips up off the paper, and she says a word in Spanish I've known the meaning of all my life, and then her weight comes down and she pulls me up her body and kisses me and says, "Okay. Okay," and I hold still for both of them.

"You've never done this," she says into my neck afterward.

"I know how it goes."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

She's quiet a second, her breath coming back down. "Good," she says. "I like being the one who knows something."

"Does any of it feel like remembering," she says later, into my shoulder.

"No."

"Huh," she says. "Incredible."

Then she sits up and does whatever she wants with me, and what she wants starts with my hands. "Give them here," she says, and she puts them on the rail above my head, the cold rail, and folds my fingers over it. "Hold that. Don't help."

I hold the rail and don't help. Not helping is a discipline, and I'm not natural at disciplines that involve lying still, and I last about a minute of it.

Then I'm moving, and she lets me move. Her mouth comes up my throat unhurried, and her weight goes onto me in pieces, a forearm, then a hip, and then all of her at once, and a whole person's weight is a thing I had only ever had from the top side. The knowledge holds plenty about being on top and nothing at all about underneath. Her weight keeps arriving, adjusting, and my ribs make room for it.

My own hands all night went where I sent them. Hers arrive when they arrive. I lie under her mouth at my collarbone with no idea where the next touch will land until it has already landed, and the not knowing goes through me warmer than the touching does.

She takes the cold off me that's been on me since the floor. Her mouth on one nipple, her hand on the other, and it goes through in the line I already know the start of, and it doesn't stop where the line stopped under my own hands. It goes the whole way, into my pussy, and stays there. Then I hear the sound I make at the top of a breath, a thin note, my voice, and I hadn't heard my voice do that yet, and she does it again to hear it again.

She knows what to do with my tits and I never did. She pushes up into them and lets them settle, pushes and lets them settle, and every time they settle the line goes through and doubles itself somewhere in the middle. She's had a chest like mine since she was thirteen. I've had mine since two this morning.

The suite heats uneven and it turns out I do too. Warm everywhere she is. Cold on the shin that's slid off the paper onto the wax, and the border between the two runs across me and moves when she moves. All night the cold found my earlobes first. Now it waits its turn behind her.

The knowledge ran all night on every subject there was. Under her mouth it stops running.

Sweat is new work. It starts at my sternum while her mouth is still at my chest and goes out from there, the small of my back into the paper, then the backs of my knees. Inside five minutes the suite smells of the two of us, and the room will still have it in the morning.

"Open your eyes," she says, into the skin below my navel.

I could keep them shut. The dark is doing fine by me, all heat and crackle and her. I open them. She's looking up the length of me with her chin wet, doing what she's doing, and I hold her eyes because she asked me to, and it turns out I'd have held them anyway.

The rail is still cold in my fists. I could hold it to the end, she'd let me, she means what she says, and I let go and put my hands in her hair instead, which is what she'd done to me. Her hair is thick and warm at the scalp. She gets out of the rest of her clothes somewhere in there and I don't track the mechanics of it. There's a boot that goes to the wax, and the pen in her cardigan clicks once, and then there's all of her on all of me, and the paper has nowhere else to be.

She goes down me patient past all sense, and it isn't effort, the patience is just hers. Her shoulders move my thighs apart and the wax takes one heel cold, and her mouth arrives warm at the crease at the top of my thigh, the same place my own hand got to hours ago and stopped, for lack of a reason. She has the reason.

There's nothing in my head at all, only her and the paper and my breath going short, and the heat from two hours ago, the heat that pointed itself down a corridor at a line of light under a door, that heat is this heat, and it has somewhere to arrive now, and it arrives.

Her tongue is flat and then it isn't, and she finds my clit the way you find a light switch in your own house. Two of her fingers go into me slow, crooked a little, and hold still while I get used to them, and the getting used to takes no time at all. I'm full and the fullness has her shape in it, and it moves when she moves, and the paper crackles under my hips.

It climbs and it doesn't stop climbing. In the knowledge there's a top, and you know when you're near it. This has no top I can find. It runs down the fronts of my thighs into the arches of my feet, my toes go out straight against the wax, my heels slide on the paper, my back arches off it, and my tits arrive late to the arch the way they arrive late to everything, and she puts both hands flat on my hips and holds them down.

By the middle of it my nipples are too much and everywhere else is not enough, and she knows the difference without being told, and keeps a thumb moving slow over one while her mouth stays where it is, and the two run together across my ribs, one arriving whenever the other does.

"Slower," I say, and she doesn't, and she's right to.

Fast gets loud in the ribs. I found that out standing still at two in the morning. Under her, loud turns out to be the whole idea, and I let the breath go quick and high and stop apologizing to my lungs for it, and the room in them gets used, and the paper crackles under me with every bit of it.

I stop keeping track of the sounds I'm making. There are more of them than I have a voice for, some with words starting in them that never get finished, and some of the words are his, and I let those out too.

My thighs take up a fine shake and keep it. My hands get into her hair past the point of steering and pull, and I get "sorry" out on a breath, and she says "Don't," against me, and keeps her pace exactly where it is, and I stop being sorry inside a minute.

I say her name.

"Rina."

It comes out of me before I've decided anything about it. Nobody's ever had a name out of me before. She has it now. Her hands go hard on my hips, holding me to her mouth, and it goes over, and comes down the whole length of me in one piece, and I find out what my voice does at the end of a breath with nothing left in it.

After, I'm still there.

His after finishes. It's why he gets up. It's why the water glass goes in the sink the minute it's over. My after doesn't finish. It goes on at a lower level, in the hips, in the skin, arriving late and long, the way the suite stays warm a while after the diffuser goes to rest. She comes up me with her mouth wet and lays her hand flat on my stomach, and it keeps arriving, and I lie in it.

"There," she says, against my sternum. "That's what the numbers were doing."

"You held the rail the whole time," she says, later, into my neck.

"You said not to help."

"You can help now." Her mouth idles at my throat, done, staying. "Your hands are freezing."

They are. The rail has taken their heat and given back its cold, and I put them on her back instead and steal the warmth back slow. There's a blue line on my hip where her middle finger was, ink off her pens, and the ceiling tile above the gurney has a water stain with no shape to it, and I lie under her looking at the stain a long time, because I can.

She kisses me and her mouth is her tea and me both. Somewhere in that kiss the bitter plastic off the sweater tag comes back at the back of my tongue and goes away again.

"Say something," she says.

"Like what."

"I've been listening to you for two hours and it's all been yes and Rina and one thing I'm not repeating."

"You liked it."

"I didn't say I didn't."

She laughs into my collarbone and the laugh goes through her ribs into mine, and her weight comes down onto me for real, all of it, given over, and I hold it.

She gets cold before I do. The warm pools under us and leaves her back out in the suite air, and she reaches down and drags the paper up over the both of us to the hips. "Share," she says, like I'd been keeping it.

"I'm not sorry," she says, into my neck, out of nowhere. "For the record."

"I know," I say. "You signed the sheet."

Somewhere in her mouth I lose his lap count. I'd been keeping it since we came in behind him, eleven minutes for the loop and a minute at the suite door, and I'd held it through everything, and then I'm holding nothing, and I don't know the minute it went. All night I held every fact that came in, his loop and her pulse and the melt point of snow, no effort, and her mouth undoes the holding in under two minutes. I put the corridor together from scratch and the count comes back different every time I run it, and the third time through I understand it isn't coming back.

She feels me change. "What," she says.

"Time."

"We have time."

We don't, or we do, one of those, and I have no way left to know which. The far stairwell is ninety feet of carpet the other way from his loop, and if he's at the end windows we'd cross it clean, and I don't know where on the loop he is. Both ends of the corridor are the same kind of quiet. I lie under her with her tea and her laugh still on me and let the minutes be whatever they're going to be.

"Boots," she says. "If we're going."

We aren't. I have her wrist in one hand and her cardigan off the bench in the other, and dressed and moving she's in her own office with the door shut inside four minutes, and I've done the walk in my head twice and it holds both times. She's already reaching for the boots with her toes. I let go of the wrist, put the cardigan back on the bench and lie back down, holding the rail behind my head again as she climbs onto the gurney and puts her hand back on me.

The cold comes in before he does.

The door stands open the way we'd left it, the way he'd left it, and the corridor air comes in along the floor, and cold in this building has a smell, carpet dust and the ethanol still coming off my own hands, and it finds my shins and the backs of my arms, and I look over, and he's in the doorway.

The cold has been in the room a while before I place it. He's been standing in the door longer than I'd known, and that's a count I'd have had an hour ago.

He came off the rig and walked his loop, and the loop finished where it always finishes, at his own door.

The chair sits on one side of the room with the rig laid across its seat, cables coiled the way he coils them, and the mouth guard hanging clipped to the arm with his teeth in it, and on the other side of the room, in the doorway, Aaron.

There are still gel smudges on his temples, two gray marks where the pads sat, and he doesn't know they're there. Nobody's told him and no mirror has. I know how his mouth is after the washout, dry, the plastic of the guard far back on his tongue. I know the stiff place at the base of both thumbs where the armrests take him.

I sit up into her, get the paper in both fists behind her back, bring it up over her to the shoulder blades, and turn us so my back takes the doorway, and she goes with all of it, quick. When she's covered and I'm not, I put my hand on the back of her head.

"Don't turn around," I say, into her hair.

She goes still all over.

"It's him," she says. Not a question.

"Just now. Stay put."

She stays put. Her heart is going against mine at the sternum, and her breath comes down slow on purpose, the way she'd brought mine down at her office door with two fingers on my wrist. From under the paper she reaches back, takes my hand off her shoulder blade, and holds it, and her thumb moves once over my knuckles and stops. "Do you want me to get up," she says.

"No."

"Okay." And later still, into my neck: "This is the worst hallway in the building."

His wanting gets to him before anything else does. It starts at the jaw and in a breath he doesn't know he's holding, and his jaw sets, and the breath stops, and his hands go still on the frame, and I watch it run him from across the room. Before he's understood one thing about what he's looking at, he wants.

Both of us. Me, because he built me to his taste and has never once said so out loud, the face he'd look at twice. Her, because he has wanted Rina Segovia since her interview, jaw and held breath and hands going still at the whiteboard, three years of it, and not one word of it anywhere.

Nothing in me goes toward the door. The heat stays where she left it, aimed where it's aimed. And under it, small, the fact of being wanted lands warm anyway, and I could do without learning that about myself.

Then understanding comes, and I watch it come. He reads the room the way I read it coming in, backward, off the objects. Her boots on the floor with one sock inside out. Her cardigan on the bench, folded, and folded is Rina, and my sweater folded on top of it, December tags, his purchase. Two sets of clothes and one gurney. He gets the whole night off the room in one pass, and the wanting stands through all of it and doesn't move. Then the shame comes, and it doesn't cool him.

Under the paper her heel finds the cardigan again and the pen clicks, and none of us does anything about it.

Under his want there's another one, older, with no words he'd allow it. He wanted Cora to wake up and come down the hall to him. He built a person to arrive at him, and she arrived, at somebody else.

He looks at the chair once, at the rig laid across its own seat, and I know what he's doing there. He's checking whether what he's feeling has the chair in it, the run, the four years, the man asleep in it at two o'clock. It doesn't.

He built Cora, aimed her, gave her his taste, and she chose, and she didn't choose him.

Pity comes up in me then, for him, along with everything else, the heat, her breath, the blue line on my hip. Four hours ago I'd have said I didn't have any.

There's a binder in his office with my first week in it, tabbed by day. When the work comes out of this room the name on it will be his, and the field can have that in the morning.

He wants in. Not the suite. The suite is his, his name is on the door and the rig on the seat is four years of his hands. He wants in on what's on the gurney. He wants the look I've been giving her to come around the room and land on him once, and it isn't coming around. I give him one look of my own, the kind I gave this room when I came in. I take him in the same look, the shirt from eight last night with the elbow he mended himself, black thread, badly, the gel smudges, the shoe, his weight back on his heels the way it goes when a run dies. Then I go back to her hair.

The paper is enough for one of us and it's on her, and I sit up into the cold with my tits bare and her taste still on my mouth and let him see all of it. Covering up would be doing him a favor.

His mouth works once with nothing in it.

"Cora," he says.

It's the name he picked alone in year two, off a shortlist with his grandmother on it, and nobody has ever said it out loud to me before, and it comes across the suite flat, and there's nothing in it to answer.

Rina's breath is on my collarbone. She hasn't turned, and she isn't going to. "Cora," she says, into my neck, after him, at me.

"Yeah," I say. "I'm here."

His hand comes off the doorframe. The diffuser comes around on its cycle, and warm air lands on my shoulders, and I stay where I am.