The train to Harlow Junction runs twice a day, and I took the second one because I’m a coward who wanted to arrive in the dark.
It was my mother’s idea, the visit. Three days for her birthday, and the whole way there I rehearsed how I’d get through the town without running into him. Back road, not Main Street. Groceries at the big store out on the bypass instead of the Foodway. Sunglasses at night, if it came to it. I had a plan with the structural integrity of wet cardboard.
Then the train hissed to a stop, I dragged my suitcase down the steps, and there he was under the one working light on the platform. Cal. Leaning on the post like he’d been installed there. Flannel, work boots, a steel thermos tucked under one arm, and the same stupid patient face.
“Your mom’s got a thing at the church,” he said. “She asked if I’d pick you up. I said sure before I thought about it.”
“She asked you.”
“She asks me about once a week to fix something. Gutters, mostly. Her kitchen sink. She’s playing a long game, your mother, and I’m too tired to fight it.”
I stood there with my suitcase and my entire rehearsed plan lying in pieces around my boots. Six years. I’d left on a Tuesday, in his truck, because mine was in the shop, and he’d driven me to this exact platform and said, Go. Go on. I mean it, and then he’d stood right where he was standing now and watched the train pull out. I’d cried so hard in the second car that a woman gave me a mint.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” He held up the thermos. “I made tea. It’s the kind you like, the smoky one. I don’t know why I made it. I felt like I should have something in my hands.”
I laughed, and it came out wrong, wet at the edges. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m punctual, is what I am. Come on, truck’s out front.”
It was a different truck. Same smell in it, though: sawdust, coffee, a little of the cold. He drove with one wrist hooked over the wheel the way he always had, and I watched the town go by in the dark, the Foodway, the hardware store, the diner with its one flickering letter. Nothing had changed and everything felt like a photograph of itself.
“You didn’t move,” I said.
“I stayed.” He said it flat, no hurt in it. “I’d like to be clear about that, because your mother thinks I’ve been pining, and I haven’t. Mostly. I just liked it here. I liked the shop and my mom being close and the river. I stayed. I didn’t say I stayed for you. I said I stayed. The rest is you reading my mail.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I was a little bit hoping you’d say it was for me,” I said, to the windshield.
He didn’t answer for a block. Then he turned left instead of right.
“This isn’t my mother’s house,” I said.
“Church thing goes till ten. You’ve got two hours of nobody home and you’ve been awake since four, I can tell by your eyes. I thought you could have a cup of tea in a warm room and not have to hold your face still for your mom yet.” He glanced over. “Say no and I’ll turn around. I mean it. I’m not slick, I’m just out of ideas.”
I should say here that I was not, in that moment, thinking about tea.
His house was the same little yellow box with the leaning porch, and the kitchen was exactly as I’d left it, which is to say it was a disaster in a way that looked like a decision. The yellow table with one short leg propped on a folded cereal box. The crooked shelf. The window over the sink that fogged up if you ran a kettle. He put the thermos down and we both just stood there in the light from the stove hood, and I could hear the old fridge making its noise.
“You kept the cereal box,” I said.
“It works.”
“It’s been six years, Cal.”
“The box doesn’t know that.”
I put my hands over my face. I didn’t cry. I laughed instead, a ridiculous honking sound, and when I looked up he was grinning, and then he wasn’t grinning, he was just looking at me. That old look. The look that used to make me forget what room I was in.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I need to say it, even if you don’t want it. I’m sorry I left the way I did. I wanted to go and I wanted you to make me stay, and I know that wasn’t fair, and I let you carry the whole thing.”
“I told you to go.”
“You told me to go because I wanted you to say stay and you were too decent to be a thing I’d resent.”
He looked at the ceiling. “Christ. Six years of therapy-adjacent podcasts and you do it in one sentence.”
“I listen to the same ones.”
“I know. Your mom told me about the one with the guy with the voice.”
I stepped toward him, and he didn’t step back. “Cal.”
“Yeah.”
“If I kiss you, are you going to be weird about it?”
“I’m going to be extremely weird about it,” he said. “I’m going to be so weird. But I’ll be here.”
So I kissed him. It was slow, careful, a little clumsy at the start the way it always is when you’re checking whether a memory is true. His mouth tasted like the tea he’d been sipping in the truck. His hand came up and settled at the back of my neck, thumb under my ear, exactly where it used to go, and my whole body made a sound I’d honestly forgotten I could make.
“Oh,” I said against his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Do that again.”
He did it again. Then he did something else, walked me backwards until the counter hit the backs of my thighs, and I got my hands in his flannel and pulled. He made a noise low in his chest. We were both breathing like we’d run from the station.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. “Like old times. I’m not guessing, I’ve stopped guessing.”
“I want your mouth on my neck.” I tipped my head. “And I want you to not hurry.”
“I’m not hurrying. I’ve had six years to plan this. I’m very slow.”
“You’ve planned this?”
“Not like plan plan. Like, on a Sunday, sometimes, you know. I had a few thoughts.”
“Tell me one.”
His mouth was already on my throat, and I felt him smile there. “The counter,” he said, rough, “was always a good idea and we never used it enough.”
“We used it a lot.”
“Not enough.”
He lifted me. I hadn’t expected that, the sudden ease of it, my ass on the cold laminate and his hands under my thighs, his hips between my knees. I wrapped my legs around him and kissed him hard, and the kitchen tilted. We were both laughing a little, because it was so ridiculous, because it was so us. My coat was already on the floor. My sweater went next, and he stopped for a second with the hem in his fists and just looked at me.
“Still the same,” he said. “Still got that freckle.”
“Under the strap?”
“Under the strap. I used to think about it on the bad days.”
“The bad days.”
“I had a couple,” he said, and kissed it.
I’d like to say I was elegant. I was not. I fumbled with the buttons on his shirt, got two, lost patience and tugged, and a button actually shot across the room and clinked off the toaster. We both froze, and then I was laughing so hard I had to put my forehead on his collarbone, and he was shaking too, his chest bucking under my face.
“I’ll sew it,” he said.
“You will not.”
“I will, I’ve learned. I’m very domestic now.”
“Take it off. Take all of it off.”
He did. And God, he’d gotten broader, the shop work had settled into him, and there was a new scar along his forearm I didn’t know the story of and wanted to. I put my mouth on it. He sucked in a breath. I asked, “What’s this one?” and he said, “Table saw, don’t tell your mother,” and I said, “She’d love you more,” and he said, “That’s the problem,” and then my bra was gone and his mouth found my nipple and the joke died in the air.
He went down slowly. I had both hands in his hair and he kept his eyes up on me the whole way, like checking, like asking permission with his face. When he got my jeans open and tugged them down over my hips, he paused with his mouth against the inside of my knee.
“Tell me if it’s too much,” he said, dragging his lips up my inner thigh. “I want to do it right.”
“Cal. You were always right. Please.”
He peeled my underwear down my legs and put his mouth on my pussy, and I swear the kitchen light flickered, though that’s probably the old wiring. He licked me from my entrance all the way up to my clit, slow, the flat of his tongue, and then again, and I dropped my head back against the cabinet. He remembered. He remembered the thing where he circled my clit with just the tip of his tongue until my thighs shook around his ears, and the way I came apart if he hummed. I had my heel hooked over his shoulder and one hand flat on the counter, knocking over the pepper grinder, and I didn’t care. I was so wet I could hear it. He pushed two fingers inside me, curled them up against the spot he used to know like his own address, and sucked my clit between his lips.
“Cal. Cal. Don’t you dare stop.”
He hummed. I ground my pussy against his mouth, shameless, fucking his face while he fucked me with his fingers, and I came with a shout that I’m fairly sure the neighbors heard, my cunt clenching and pulsing around his knuckles, slick running down his wrist.
He licked me through the aftershocks until I tugged him up.
“Hi,” I said, dazed.
“Hi.” His chin was soaked. “Remembered the humming.”
“You remembered the humming.”
I kissed him, tasting myself on his tongue, and wrapped my fingers around his cock, hot and already leaking at the head, and stroked him from base to tip. He groaned into my mouth.
“Bed,” I said. “Same bed?”
“Same frame. New mattress. Same creak.”
“Hold that thought.” I slid off the counter onto my knees on the kitchen tile and took the head of his cock between my lips, sucking, swirling my tongue around the ridge, then took him deeper, my mouth stretching around his slick shaft until I gagged a little and he said “easy, easy.” His fingers tangled in my hair, not pushing, just holding on, and I felt the muscles in his thighs go tight.
“Stop,” he gasped. “I want to be inside you.”
I let his cock slide out of my mouth with a wet pop. “Fine. Bed.”
He carried me down the hall, which was ridiculous, and I told him so, and he told me to shut up, and I said, “Make me,” and he almost dropped me, laughing. The bedroom was cold and smelled like cedar and clean sheets, and he set me down on the quilt my grandmother made, the one I’d left behind, the one I’d assumed was gone. He’d kept it on the bed.
“Cal.”
“Don’t. I’ll cry, and then you’ll cry, and then we’ll never get anything done.”
“Get naked,” I said, hoarse.
He shucked his jeans, and I watched him the way you watch a thing you’d stopped believing in. He came down over me, and the frame did creak, the exact creak, the one note it had always made, and something in my chest let go all at once.
“Condom?” he said, hand on the nightstand. “I’m not sure how old they are.”
“Check the date, you disaster.”
They were fine. We laughed, helplessly, and then he rolled it down his cock and I pulled him into me, the long slide of it, his head pushing past my entrance, then inch after thick inch until he was all the way in and my pussy was stretched tight around him. Both of us went still, foreheads together, breathing.
“God,” he said. “That’s still, that’s really.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to move, and I’m going to be bad at it for about a minute.”
“Watch me.”
He wasn’t bad at it. He started slow, deep, rolling, his eyes on mine, thrusting into me with long drags that made me feel every ridge of his cock, and I wrapped my legs around his back and met him. It built the way it always had, steady, then not steady. I raked my nails down his shoulders and heard him hiss, and I said, “Harder,” and he said, “Yeah?” and I said, “Yeah, like you mean it,” and he did. He fucked me into that old mattress, his balls slapping against my ass, the bed singing, the headboard knocking the wall. His breath broke against my ear. I dug my fingers into his ass and pulled him deeper.
I hooked my ankles behind his ass and pulled him deeper, and he slipped his thumb between us to circle my clit, and I felt myself tightening, that coil low in my belly, his cock hitting the spot with every thrust.
“Come with me,” he said, voice wrecked. “Please. I want to feel it.”
“Cal, I’m,” and I couldn’t finish, because it hit me, and my pussy clamped down around his cock, pulsing, crying out. He grabbed my hips and thrust up into me twice, three times, and came with a shuddering groan, his cock jerking, spilling hot into the condom, his whole body bowing off the bed. I collapsed on his chest, and for a while neither of us could do anything but breathe.
Afterward he got a washcloth and a glass of water and we lay under my grandmother’s quilt with the lamp on. The ceiling still had the stain shaped like Ohio. I traced the scar on his forearm. He told me the story, which was dumb and involved a squirrel.
“I’m not going to ask you to stay,” he said, after a while, to the ceiling.
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to ask. I did that wrong last time, I told you to go and I should’ve told you what I wanted. So here’s the thing I should’ve said. I wanted you to stay. I wanted it badly. I was proud and scared and I didn’t say it, and that’s on me.”
My throat closed. “Thank you for saying it.”
“I’m still not asking. You’ve got a life. I want you to have it.”
“What if I asked?” I said. “What if I said I could work remote, and I’ve been sick of the city for two winters, and I took the second train because I wanted to arrive in the dark and not be seen deciding?”
He turned his head. “Are you saying that?”
“I’m saying it’s on the table. Next to the cereal box.”
He kissed my temple, then my cheek, then my mouth, slow. “My mother’s going to be insufferable,” he said.
“My mother has been planning it for six years.”
“She has, hasn’t she.”
“I’m going to be so mad when I figure out the gutters were a scheme.”
We lay there and listened to the house tick. At ten past ten my phone buzzed on the floor, my mom wondering where I was, and I read it out loud: Did Cal find you? Don’t let him feed you only tea.
“She knows,” Cal said.
“She absolutely knows.”
I texted back, Be there in twenty. Cal is feeding me eggs.
“Am I?” he said.
“You will be. Get up. You’re making me eggs.”
He got up. He made eggs in boxers and one sock, humming, and I sat on the counter wearing his flannel, the missing-button one, swinging my feet, and the window over the sink fogged up from the kettle. I didn’t need a plan anymore. I just needed to remember to hold the door at the station next time. Someone would be waiting.
