Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [108]
She’s sound asleep, her mouth is a little bit open and she’s kind of drooling. He realizes she probably wouldn’t want to be seen like that so he closes his eyes and before he knows it, he falls asleep right there, right beside her, like all this heartache and craziness and anxiety is more exhausting than running ten miles or something.
When he wakes up, Alice is lying in the crook of his arm, her head on his chest, the blanket covering both of them. He can’t believe it. He is lying on the beach with Alice in her underwear. And the sun is going down. And she has her eyes open and she’s looking right at him.
“Henry,” she says, her voice thick, her throat scratchy.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
How can she do this? Why does she always do this to him? Why does he let her?
“You don’t believe me,” she says.
“Not right now I don’t.”
She leans over and kisses him. He pulls away from her.
“You just puked!”
“That was hours ago.”
“So?”
She cups her hand to her mouth and tries to smell her own breath.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“I think you’re immune to your own smell.”
“I don’t taste anything.”
“You were almost passed out when you puked. You didn’t see it; you didn’t smell it.”
Alice grabs the foul tasting brandy. Henry tries to grab it away from her.
“Not again.”
She takes a swig, swishes it around in her mouth like mouthwash, turns away and spits it into the sand. Does the breath test again. Henry is trying not to smile, Henry is trying not to laugh, but he is not, he notices, trying to get up.
When she leans over him again he wants to look in her eyes, but her eyes are closed, she is already far away on the Ferris wheel of this hoped-for kiss.
She moves closer to him, if that is possible, she moves closer and presses against him. She puts her hand inside his shirt, her cool hand on his warm skin. She’s never done anything like this before. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands; he doesn’t know what to do with the confounding fact of her, the body and breath and near nakedness of her.
She takes his hand and pulls it under the blanket.
“What are you doing?” Henry can’t keep the alarm out of his voice.
“Touch me . . .”
“Wait.” He can feel his heart smashing against his ribs. “Alice . . .”
“Shhhh . . .”
“I don’t know . . .”
“It’s all right.”
“Is this what you really want?”
“Henry . . .”
“You’ve had a lot to drink—”
“I puked, I napped, I’m pretty sure I’m back to normal.”
“But how would you know? For sure?”
She laughs.
“I wouldn’t want you to change your mind or something tomorrow,” he adds.
“I won’t,” she promises.
Touching her is overwhelming; it is like trying to read a symphonic score. It is, in fact, so overwhelming it is nearly impossible, but there are glimpses of comprehension, like something inside of him understands this; the way clusters of notes combine, make melody and counter melody and he is reading something with his fingers, with his body, he has never read before.
The hollow beneath her throat; her clavicle, he thinks, and his mind flashes on an ivory key and a clavichord and he remembers why he loves that word and that fragile bone. There are the bones in her shoulders, the hard knobs of her spine and then there is the elastic of her underpants. He stops. His hand stops.
“Will you take your shirt off?” she asks.
He is looking at the singular, hollow-eyed, broken beauty of her as he starts to unbutton his shirt and then pulls it over his head, and he wants to tell her he can see the broken places, he can see where she is blasted by grief. He somehow knows that what she wants is to obliterate her anguish with their bodies, with their longing, with the whole symphony of sensation that is washing over each of them right now. And he knows it might work, for a minute or two or ten, it might work long enough to gulp down a few clear, pain-free breaths. But he also knows that she will still be brokenhearted when this moment ends,