THWACK

“I’m so mad at you, I feel like slugging you!” Seely said blackly the next evening.

“Why don’t you?” suggested Zeke.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“No, I mean it.” He stuck out his chest. “I’m tough. I can take it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. I was being a jerk—I deserve it.”

So she did…a resounding thwack on his chest.

“Oof!” he groaned. “Feel better?”

“Yes!” she said, astonished. “I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me!”

WARRANTIES & INSTRUCTIONS

A day came and went and in the evening they watched another movie—in her bedroom on a bank of pillows again. When the movie ended, they were both quiet. Pulling at a broken thread in a seam on her embroidered bedspread, she finally said, “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but…”

She told him about the abortion and her guilt, how she’d promised herself never again to sleep with someone she didn’t love. She admitted she hadn’t been with anyone for five years.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he cried, a pained expression on his face. He was sitting at the foot of the bed beyond her legs, and reached out to rub them consolingly. “I thought you were just being coy—I thought you were acting like a teenager.”

To which, she said nothing, only sighed.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you get hard like everyone else?”

Tears began to slide down her cheeks. It had gotten dark.

“Can I hug you?” he asked.

She nodded but lay inert, while he stretched out in the narrow bed beside her,  fitting his arms around her and rocking her. Soon she started to convulse with silent weeping—and each time her body started to rack with pain, she felt his arms tighten around her. Finally she pushed him away a short distance and studied him.

“What are you smiling about?” he asked.

But she pursed her lips and zipped them with her fingers.

From then on he touched her in all the right places. When she told him she couldn’t remember the whereabouts of her diaphragm, he suggested maybe she’d left it at work.

“That’s it!” she cried, “Filed under ‘d.’”

She sat in a slice of light coming from under the bathroom door, rummaging through the boxes of clothes she used as drawers, since she didn’t have a dresser, searching for the small blue compact. But when she found it, she couldn’t remember how much jelly to use, so while Zeke smote his head with mock annoyance, she riffled through her file box, looking for the folder entitled Warranties and Instructions—and read the paper out loud.

Their lovemaking was calm, whimsical. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m beautiful?” she asked him.

“I don’t usually say that to women.”

“Then your bedroom manner definitely need improvement.”

In the end he never did tell her she was beautiful, but he did say he loved her again. And fell out of bed—twice.