The Tub

The Tub
The book had been open on Isabel’s lap for the better part of an hour, and the hour had not, in any honest accounting of it, been the hour she had thought it was going to be.
The page she had landed on was the one with the four words in the second hand. For the one who arrives. The four words had been, when she had first read them, the kind of small declarative that gave a woman a chill and then released her back into the rest of her afternoon. They had not, this afternoon, released her. The four words had stayed under the pad of her thumb. The thumb had stayed on them. The page had warmed slowly under her hand, not the way old leather warmed in a sunny window, but the way a person’s skin warmed when somebody else’s skin was pressed to it, and sometime around the twelfth or thirteenth minute, Isabel had stopped trying to argue with the temperature and had simply let her eyes close.

The hour that had unfolded in the chair after that had not, technically, been a memory.
It had been the memory and the present at once. Her body in Jean’s worn upholstery, her body on the moss in the gold-threaded clearing, her body bent over the heavy wooden desk in his office, all three at the same time, layered the way three transparencies laid over each other made one picture. His mouth at her throat had arrived in the chair as though it were arriving now. His hand at the back of her thigh had arrived in the chair as though it were arriving now. The small low command he had given her in the dream, the one about coming around to his side of the desk, had landed in her chair with the precise weight he had given it the first time, and the chair had not, for a long warm seamless minute, been the chair.
Whatever the book was, it had not been built to be read.

It had been built to be touched.

The hum in her chest, when she finally opened her eyes, was no longer a hum. It was a pulse. The pulse had a partner. Her body was, with the small certain confidence of a body no longer requiring permission to know what it knew, picking up a second beat from somewhere considerably east of this cottage. Both pulses lived in her sternum. Both pulses lived in her hips. When her own palm pressed flat to the hollow at the base of her throat, the way her hand had been pressing there for the last several minutes without her quite asking it to, the skin under it was hot.

The book went onto the side table.

Standing required her, as it had since waking, to brace one hand against the arm of the chair and let her thighs decide whether they were going to hold her. Today they were. Barely. The ache that had bloomed through her hips in the morning had, over the chair-hour, refined itself into something far more inconvenient, which was the heavy warm pull of a body that had been asked, for the second time in twelve hours, to remember what it was capable of.
The bath was the only honest answer.

Jean’s bathroom was at the top of the stairs. The clawfoot tub at the far end of it was the kind of tub a woman drew herself into and only emerged from when the cottage demanded. The faucets ran hot in a way modern plumbing had largely forgotten how to. Steam came up soft and full. The soap on the wooden rack across the rim was hand-milled, faintly resinous, faintly floral, older than any soap Isabel had paid for in her life. Her clothes came off slowly. Each layer was a small precise relief. The cool air on her skin in the half-second before she stepped in did the small specific work of reminding her she had been at a low simmer for longer than she had consciously registered.

The water was almost too hot.
She stayed in it anyway.

Deep heat moved up her calves first, then her thighs, then the soft hollow of her stomach, and her head rested back against the rolled rim of the tub. The second pulse, the one not technically hers, deepened by another half-note. He was, wherever he was, paying attention to her. The fact arrived in her chest with the immovable certainty of something she had stopped questioning.
Her hand moved before she did.

Down through the warm water. Across the soft wet skin of her stomach. Lower. The first touch of her own fingers against the place that had been, since the dream, holding the heat the dream had left in her, brought a small unsteady sound out of her throat she had not made out loud in any bathtub of her life, and the cottage, soft-walled around her, made a small architectural sound back.

She stopped trying to be quiet.
The cat had left a long time ago on his own private errand. The trees moved in a small unsignificant breeze. Her own breath, in the quiet, became the loudest thing in the room, and she let it. The fingers of her right hand moved in the soft slow circle her body, in the dream, had been moved in by his. Her left hand pressed flat against the hot wet skin between her breasts. The pulse there was no longer two beats overlaid. It was one beat, doubled, his and hers playing the same note from two cities, and when her hand below the water moved a degree harder, the pulse above the water moved with it.

The gold under her skin came up.

It moved along the inside of her wrist where it was pressed against her sternum, along the soft slope of her collarbone, along the long line of her own throat when she tipped her head back further. The flush across her chest was not the flush of the heat of the water. The water itself, in the long gold afternoon, had begun to do something it had no business doing, which was glow, very faintly, around her hips.

She did not stop.

She let her hand keep working in the soft slow rhythm her body had asked it for, and she let the dream come back the way it wanted to come back, which was not a memory anymore but a small private conversation between her body and his, and somewhere east of the foothills, in a kitchen, a man pressed both palms flat against the cold stone of his counter and made a low broken sound into the empty room of his own apartment.

The water broke in a soft warm wave against the porcelain.Isabel came in the bath, with her own hand and his pulse and the gold light of her own body filling the room, and the cottage, when she finally let herself sink lower into the water, sighed around her with the contentment of a building that had been waiting, very patiently, for exactly this.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, the answering machine, untouched all afternoon, gave a single soft electronic click.

A red light came on.

A new message had begun to record.