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Chapter 2 The Old Bed
Chapter 2 The Old Bed
The quiet on the rug did not last long. Fang Qitong's phone buzzed once inside the handbag. The screen lit. It was a WeChat message from Duan Fei, only two characters: Received. She stared at those two words. Her thumb did not open the thread. Zhou Yu saw it. He did not crane his neck to read. He only drew the towel a little higher on her shoulder.
"Does he know you're home?" he asked.
"The lawyer will sync it. He's only confirming the process." She turned the phone face down. "The bedding in this room was bought together last year. He slept on the left. I slept on the right. There was a seam in the middle that neither of us crossed. When I look at that bed now, I feel the seam is still there."
"Then we don't sleep in the bed tonight," Zhou Yu said.
"No." She stood. The towel slipped from her shoulder. She did not pick it up. Her body was frank in the narrow light of the floor lamp. There was a very faint line on her lower belly, left by a pregnancy in her early thirties that had not been kept. Afterward they stopped trying, and they stopped talking about it. She did not explain. She only looked at his eyes, to see whether he would flinch. "I am going to sleep. I am going to sleep that seam out of existence on that bed. If you are afraid of my past, you can go to the sofa now."
He stood with her and lifted her in his arms. The movement was not effortless. His breath went heavy for a moment, but his arms were steady. She cursed him softly for showing off, and still her hands went around his neck. Passing through the corridor, her hair swept the row of wall lights she had chosen herself. The lights were off. Only the rainy light from the window stretched their shadows long.
The bedroom door was pushed open. The bed was one meter eight. The headboard was walnut. She had drawn the joinery herself. The quilt was folded very neatly. The hourly cleaner had been in the afternoon. There was the smell of laundry detergent in the air, clean, and it made her nose sting. She came down out of his arms, bare feet on the wood floor, threw the quilt to one side, and then pulled the sheet up from all four corners.
"Help me," she said.
Zhou Yu did not ask why. He caught the other side. They pulled the old sheet off and piled it on the floor. The pale gray surface of the mattress showed. One corner had already fuzzed. That was where Duan Fei's foot kicked when he watched the markets in the middle of the night. She stared at that corner for two seconds, then kicked it farther away with her toe. She went to the cupboard and took out a new set, bought last month when she was alone. The color was a very deep dark green. Duan Fei would certainly have said it was not bright enough. When the cloth opened there was the smell of cotton. Together they tucked the four corners under the mattress. The movements were clumsy. At the third corner she laughed, because he had tucked it too tight and lifted the mattress.
"Have you never made a bed yourself?" she asked.
"I have. I've never made one this big." He looked at her. "And I've never made one with someone I just kissed."
"We did more than kiss."
"I remember." His ears went red. That redness softened some place in her. She climbed onto the bed, knelt in the middle of the new sheet, and held a hand out to him.
"Come here. Shoes off. Clothes off too. I want to look at you."
He undressed without fuss. The T-shirt came off over his head. The lines of his waist and stomach were clear in the light from the doorway. Not the blocks deliberately carved in a gym. The thin, solid kind that belonged to a man who worked with his body. After the trousers came down he was already half hard. She beckoned. He knelt in front of her. Her hand moved from his collarbone to his chest, to his lower belly, and then closed around the cock that was growing hot again, and stroked it slowly. Every time her thumb passed the crown, his breath went disordered.
"On this bed," she said, "you listen to me. I want it slow. At the window just now I was urgent. The urgency is over, and I am still here."
"All right."
She had him lie down. She straddled his thighs, but she did not sit down onto him at once. She bent and kissed him, very deep, her tongue winding with his, as if she meant to turn every unsaid thing from the afternoon until now into saliva. His hands traveled her back, stopped in the hollow of her waist, and his thumbs circled those two shallow dimples. Her breasts pressed his chest. Her nipples itched where his skin rubbed them. She rolled her hips and let her wet opening slide along his shaft, not taking him in, only rubbing, her clit scraping the length of him again and again. That kind of grinding made both of them tremble.
"Do you have any more at your place?" she asked against his mouth.
"No. I didn't think it would be like this."
She turned and pulled open the nightstand. Inside there was an unopened box. She had put it there on some night when the divorce was already counting down. At the time she had thought herself ridiculous. Now it was exactly right. She opened it, took one out, and put it on him. While she did it she deliberately touched him a few extra times. His hips thrust up. She pressed them down.
"Slow," she said again.
Then she held him, lined him up, and sat down little by little. The dark green sheet wrinkled under her knees. The entry was drawn out. She could feel every fold being opened and taking him in. When she sat all the way down, both of them closed their eyes. She did not move. She only tightened her inner walls, once, and again, as if her body were learning his shape. His hands gripped her hip bones. His fingertips went white. He still held himself back from driving upward.
"Look," she said. She pushed her hair behind her ear so he could see her face. "I am on my bed. From tonight this bed does not take the name Duan."
"It takes the name Fang," he said. "Whatever name you want it to take, that is the name it takes."
She began to move. First a rock forward and back, so her clit ground against his pubic bone. Then she rose and sat, and each time she lifted she nearly left him, and then sat down hard. The sound of flesh striking flesh was loud in the bedroom. Her breasts swayed with the movement. He propped himself up and took one into his mouth. The suction was heavier than it had been at the window. His tongue pressed her nipple and circled. She cried out. Her hands braced on the muscles of his stomach. She sped up. Sweat fell from her collarbone onto his chest.
"Touch me," she said.
His thumb found her clit and rubbed in the rhythm of her sitting. Pleasure stacked, dense and hot. All at once she slowed and changed to a grind, her eyes fixed on him. The headboard tapped the wall lightly. The rhythm was the one she gave. She remembered the many nights on this bed when they had lain back to back, each person's breath going its own way, even the air-conditioning temperature something to quarrel over. Now the bed was sounding. People were sweating. Neither of them turned a back on the other.
"Say my name," she said.
"Qitong."
"The whole name."
"Fang Qitong." His voice was hoarse. Each time he said it, his hips could not help thrusting up once. "Fang Qitong. You're so hot inside. You're gripping me. I'm close to gone."
"Hold it," she said. She bent and bit his lower lip. "I haven't come yet. You wait and come with me."
He did hold it, even when the vein at his temple stood up, even when his breathing was a mess that did not resemble speech. His hands did not go wild. One steadied her waist. One pressed the clit that had already swollen, the pressure adjusting to the sounds she made. She straightened. Both hands pressed his chest, and she delivered herself into that wave after wave of tightening. When she came she did not hide. Her eyes stayed open, so he could see the look of her coming apart. Her walls clenched hard. Wetness overflowed along the base of the condom and dripped onto the dark green sheet, darkening a small patch. Only then did he let that breath go. Both hands held her ass and he drove upward a dozen fierce strokes. When he came his whole body went taut, and her name rolled in his throat.
She collapsed on his chest and listened to his heartbeat go from violent back to something that could be counted. The bedroom curtains were not drawn tight. A strip of city light fell across their overlapping legs. Her finger drew circles on his chest. On the third circle she realized she was smiling, smiling very lightly, almost without sound.
"The sheet is dirty," she said.
"We just put it on."
"Then let it be dirty a little longer." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Are you afraid? Not afraid of me. Afraid of tomorrow."
Zhou Yu thought, and his fingers combed through her sweat-damp hair. "I'm afraid that tomorrow you'll put this away as one rain. When the rain stops, you'll treat it as if it never fell. I can accept that you don't love me. I can't accept being used as a painkiller and thrown away when the dose is finished."
She was silent for a long time. The rain had lessened a little. The knocking on the window went from a density to intervals. Her legs were still wound around him. She could feel, after he had withdrawn, an empty place in her body, an honest emptiness. She did not want to fill it with pretty words.
"I can't give you a guarantee now," she said honestly. "The ink on my divorce papers isn't dry. What I can give you is this. I will not call you a painkiller. When I want you, I know who you are. Zhou Yu. Next door. The one who helped me move the boxes. The one I cursed about materials while we were measuring light positions. Twenty-seven. Eyes very black. The one who asks if he may, when he enters me."
He kissed the top of her hair. "Then that is enough for tonight."
"You sleep on the left," she said. "The left used to be his. I want you to sleep on the left. I want the person I see when I open my eyes to be you."
"The right is fine too."
"Listen to me."
He laughed low and turned, drawing her into the pillow on the left. The new sheet smelled of cotton. It covered the smell of the old laundry detergent. Her legs were still tangled with his. In her body there was the sore softness that comes after being filled. She closed her eyes and did not fall asleep at once. In the dark she touched his wrist, to confirm he was still there. He turned the wrist over and let her feel the pulse.
"Here," he said.
Outside, a night car drove through standing water. The sound was long. She counted his pulse. Later the count went wrong, and she sank. This time she did not answer back. The rain had not stopped. The bed had already changed its person. She buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder and allowed herself, on a night that no longer belonged to a marriage, to sleep first.
He did not fall asleep quickly. Her weight numbed the arm she was lying on. He did not pull it free. He looked at the linear light trough she had designed in the ceiling. The light was off. The trough was still there, like a silent river. He remembered the redness at the outer corners of her eyes when she came back from signing that afternoon. He remembered her pushing the heavy box toward him and saying, Be careful of your back. The way she looked after people was hard, hard in the manner of someone who refused to owe. He looked down at the center of her brow. Even in sleep there was still a little crease there. He smoothed it gently with his thumb. She hummed in the dream and burrowed another fraction into his chest.
In his mind Zhou Yu pushed tomorrow's site schedule back by two hours. He did not know whether that counted as crossing a line. He only knew that if the rain stopped, he still did not intend to pretend he was only a neighbor.
