Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (30 page)

This is what this bacterium looks like.

We want to compare it to what we know, but it is incomparable. I can see.

I can see so much, I can’t begin to know what it means.

That’s the most exciting place to be, in an experiment, or in life.

I told my mom when I looked at the world I saw everything at once, the view and the small things.

That I loved the small things.

The big world has a way of not letting you see everything at once, but it’s actually made of small things.

Like loss.

Like love.

* * *

“I thought, maybe, we could walk there together.”

Evan is on my stoop, a paper bag in his hand, snow on his shoulders and in his hair. He rang the doorbell, the first person ever to do so, and now he’s on my stoop.

“It’s Christmas Eve’s Eve,” he explains. “It’s almost eleven.” I squeeze the handle of the door. “I know.”

“Were you going to come?”

“Well, I was putting on my coat and boots, and had my hand on the door when you rang the bell.”

He grins and looks down. He’s nervous.

He puts the bag down. “So, ah, I started my way there, on my own, and then I was thinking it was only three blocks from your place, and they haven’t cleared the sidewalks. It would be nicer, I thought, if I took you there?” He closes his eyes. “Fuck.”

“You were afraid I wouldn’t come?”

“I didn’t think I was.”

We both look out at the street, the snow coming down so fast you can almost hear it as it falls on the drifts and inches already over the ground. It’s cold. Dark, even at eleven in the morning.

“It’s seems kind of early for mashed potatoes,” I say.

“Okay. We could do something else? Coffee? Or, I can come back later.”

I hold open my door. “I was thinking you could come in.”

“Oh, sure.” He starts in, and then I remember something.

“Wait. One thing.”

“What’s that?”

I look at him, his face a little worried, his thin coat that forces him to hunch against the cold. I stick out my hand.

Evan takes it. “Nice to meet you, I’m Evan Carlisle-Ford. I’m an OT at LSU, and an amateur photographer.”

“Jenny Wright, microbiologist. I live here on Lincoln Street.”

“Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

“Before I kissed you, I should have told you I knew you were Lincoln.”

I turn his hand up and stroke over his palm. The look in his face is almost too much. I can see the small thing in his face that will start the whole origin of our world,
and even though it was all I have been thinking about, I can hardly breathe.

“Except, I knew a lot more than just Jenny Wright was Lincoln, when I kissed you.”

“What did you know?” I whisper.

“That I’d fallen for you. Then that day, when you fell in the courtyard—”

I meet his eyes, he has questions for me, what I’d asked for that day, and what he’d given me. “You weren’t just—available,” I whisper.

He looks down. “Okay. I’m glad. Obviously, I would have given you anything, anyway. But I’m glad it wasn’t just some reminder of the fact of life. It wasn’t like that for me, even like it was. I didn’t want to just be some reminder that there is something
nicer
in the world. I didn’t want to just be another kind of guide out of some darkness for you. I—”

I take a breath, and it is so hard to. “God, Evan, I’m sorry, I—”

“No, no. My point is, I didn’t want to be just this safe guy you could grab the shoulder of so you could walk out of whatever mess you’d found yourself in, but I was
willing
to be, if that’s all it was. I want you to know that. I wanted you to understand my willingness, but I also want you to understand what it is I want. I don’t want to table that, I want to talk about that Jenny, I want to talk to you about what I want.”

It’s hard to keep him in focus. The snow’s bright, even without the sun. My tears are faster than the snow, and I’m trying to hold them back, my throat aching. “Okay, you can. You can tell me. What do you want? Tell me what you want.”

“Jenny Wright.”

He says my name, low and fierce. Grabs my wrist, then slides his hand over mine.

He looks up at the overhang covering my stoop. “Most of the time, if we’re lucky, all through life, we never really know anybody because, I think, it’s only possible to know someone if they’re losing.”

I rub my hand across my face. “I don’t want to lose.”

“I know. My mom didn’t want to lose, either. She fought and fought. She fought so long, eventually I thought I had to fight for her. But what I didn’t get then, is that she fought so long she figured out what she was fighting for, which was ordinary things, like the love she enjoyed with her kids and her friends, and by then, it was okay, she could rest in that. She could be comfortable knowing she had managed some kind of life that meant so many people loved her, that she was always going to lose that love, that like all
of us, she was always going to die, but that she didn’t have to fight for it to enjoy it, to know it.”

“I fought you.”

“I know. And your fight has been so beautiful, Jenny. When I saw the pictures on your desk, realized you were the same woman who I was crushing on over the Internet because she liked to see, liked to understand things, and then, after I had been with you in your lab, seeing what it was you were fighting for, that’s when I knew I couldn’t help you.”

“Why?”

“Because to help you, I have to believe that what I teach you gives you the world. I didn’t believe that anymore.”

“What did you believe?”

“I believe you’re losing just one version of the world and I wasn’t sure the one I was offering to you, as Evan Carlisle, OT, was better. I had to be sure of that to help you. Instead, I started to become sure of something else.”

“What’s that?”

“You. Just you. Your world. You and your big brain and not just that you fight, but the way that you fight, like a scientist, like someone who will find the answer, no matter what. Like someone who trusts the data as they come to tell you something. Like the world is observable and beautiful both.

“I want to see that world with you. I want you to take me where you’re going, because I can’t even
imagine
it. All this stuff we haven’t been able to see about each other? Doesn’t it feel like if we just held on to each other we would be—amazed? That’s what I feel like. I feel amazed. I feel like none of this is comfortable but it’s not supposed to be comfortable, if we’re down in it, really living.

“Also, this thing, this thing that happened between C and Lincoln, I feel like it was like, this aperture. Like you couldn’t, at first, handle too much light, you’d be too exposed, so Lincoln was a way to let in just enough, and then maybe, I hope maybe, you can take in more light, and be Jenny, with me, who was always Evan. It was always me. And my amazement is so connected to all of it, to all these tiny moving parts that added up.

“The only thing I can’t imagine is being without you. Everything else, I don’t know if it’s dark or light, but that’s okay. I think that’s okay.”

“In theory,” I say, softly, but my insides are all on alert, interested, circling around how something small, a lot of small somethings, are coming together.

“Yeah?”

I look at him, tall and bulky and graceful, his eyes squinting and blue, his eyebrows mashed together. “Theories aren’t bad. It’s just that, really, it takes a lot of data to make a theory. It takes a lot of data that piles on top of itself, and is the same data, over and over. A theory also has to bear a lot of variation and still come out the same way in the end. Close-up, all the different methods you use to start the experiment could look scattered and chaotic, but as you pull back, you can see how all those different methods are converging into the same conclusion.”

“A lot of data?”

“A lot. For a theory, you basically need
all
the data.”

He reaches for my face, holds it, and then he’s stepping close to me, and I’m stepping close to him.

I’m so glad to be kissing him, his snowy-mint smell just like he said, amazing. Hard to imagine it’s real because it’s something I want, so much, and that I have.

When do we ever get what we want?

Maybe we do if we’re willing to lose everything, or maybe what we want is so bound to loss, is so inevitably something we will grieve even if we manage to find and hold on to it, that to grab what you want is to accept the grief of losing it.

If I love Evan, I will lose him. If not now, inevitably.

To be willing to love him is to be willing to lose him, to grieve over him.

I have always wanted to see the world, and I have seen so much of it—the small things that make up the whole origin of the beautiful world.

I can’t imagine how it is I will see them, now.

I can’t imagine, but I will, I’m willing to lose, and lose, and lose again and again just to be able to see what it is I can in all the ways I can’t imagine, standing on my porch in the cold, kissing Evan.

“Come in,” I tell him, our breath making clouds around us.

“Okay.”

He follows me in, still kissing me, holding back my hair.

He’s backing me into the sofa, and when my knees hit, the lamp on the end table goes on.

He looks over at it, at us suddenly bathed in light in the room dark from the snowstorm.

I laugh. “I put a little motion detector on it so I wouldn’t have to remember to turn it on in low light, before it was too dark. I can turn it off.”

He looks at me, sparkling again. “No. I do not want you to turn off that light.”

“What do you want?”

“Touch yourself,” he whispers.

“I don’t—” But I can’t finish. I don’t want to? But I do, I feel heavy and tight, like everything’s bigger, open, and a pulse has started.

He runs a finger over the gusset of my pants, soft. “I want to watch you.” He looks in my face. “It’s just—I’ve imagined it.”

Oh
. I know it is what he wants.

It’s what I want.

“You, too.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He sits down next to me and unbuckles his belt, opens his fly, and starts to reach inside his briefs, looking at me. When he pulls out his cock it’s so hard it seems to spring into his palm, and then his gaze falters from mine and he looks down, his ears and cheeks red.

That he’s a little shy about this, too, gives me the courage to come close, hook a leg over his, unfasten my pants.

He lets go of himself and pulls me by my nape to rest my forehead against his, then wraps his other hand around the base of his erection, letting out a desperate huff of breath.

When I slide my first and second finger over myself, I make the same sound.

“Show me,” I whisper.

I watch him drag his fingertips up and down the underside, pressing a little with his thumb right under the head. That makes him suck in air and reach to kiss my cheek.

“You, too,” he says—exchanging my words for his.

I watch his hand gripping and stroking, and I push my two fingers right through my folds, slow, just to revel a little in how good and wet and shivery it feels.

When I touch myself, he grips and strokes harder, faster.

Oh
.

With my jeans mostly on, all I can manage is tight, slick circles and it’s not long
before it’s unbearable. He’s already bucking into his hand, his strokes more like pulls, and his hand at my nape is tight.

He’s looking at my hand circling and rubbing under my pants, and I admit, it looks good.

It’s torture not to kiss him, but if I did, I couldn’t watch.

He’s slick, flushed, so hard, and for some reason his strip of pale stomach right over his dark curls is crazy-erotic and if I was using my mouth, I would start there, sucking pink kiss marks over that place until he was pulling my hair to get me to suck in the tip, taste him, lick down his length.

Now I want his skin, I want to see more of him, not just his beautiful hand slicking up and down, that crazy-making strip of skin.

I grab the edge of his sweater and yank it up, just to see his muscles bunching, where’s he’s gone rosy, the hair on his body, and he bucks when I do, when I decide to use both hands in my eagerness to see more of him.

He stops and helps me get his sweater and T-shirt all the way off, and
God
, it’s like I’ve never seen a guy before, and I don’t even know where to look—those curving shoulders, the lean muscles of his arms, the hair in the furrow bisecting his chest.

I press over myself with my whole hand, just looking. His erection is so naked and awesome against his skin, I want to touch him.

I do, softly, he’s hot, so hard.

When I look at him, it’s impossible not to kiss him.

Our kiss is open, soft, breathless. His tongue leaves my mouth to kiss over my neck and throat, and the way he does it makes me move against my hand again, little pushes to keep myself from going crazy, that just end up making me crazier.

He pulls off my pants and my underwear at the same time, and then his hands are over me, searching and shaping and making me crazy. His touch is firm when he smooths over my legs, and then firmer over my inner thighs as he drops to kneel on the floor.

“Oh, okay,” I whisper.

He kisses my knee, grabs my calf, and hikes one leg over his shoulder. “Yeah, oh.”

He grabs my other knee and pushes it wide, and I close my eyes, my face hot, everything hot, his mouth kissing my hips, licking them.

“Touch your breasts,” he says, and I pull off my shirt, pull down my bra cups,
squeeze and curl my toes when he licks through me, his voice, a hum, in his throat, one of his hands around the leg at his shoulder, the other circling my clit.

And it’s like this, in this circle of light, the snow falling fast through the window I can see over his shoulder, his mouth insistent and unhesitating, this is how I fall apart.

He lets me find my breath again, and then I need him closer. “Come here,” I tell him, but he’s reaching behind him, for his coat, then pulling out condoms.

He sits next to me on the sofa, almost sheepish, crazy-aroused, his skin flushed, warm, all against mine. “I mean, if you want to.”