She Came Home Ready for More

Four months is a long time. I knew that before, in the abstract way you know things, but I didn't really know it until I spent a Friday night in February scrubbing my bathroom sink for the third time because I couldn't think of anything else to do with my hands. Cora had been gone since October. Deployment, the real kind, the kind where they can't tell you where they are and you count days off a calendar like an idiot.

We'd been together two years by then. I met her at a bar near Fort Brice when I was thirty and she was twenty-eight, and she'd laughed at my terrible joke about the jukebox and that was mostly it. I work at the base laundry, washing and folding for half the post, and she thought that was funny too, in a way that wasn't mean. She said somebody had to keep the Army's socks in pairs.

So anyway, Friday night, I cleaned the whole apartment like my mother was inspecting it. I bought her favorite beer, the cheap Polish one from the liquor store on the corner that she liked for reasons she never explained. I made a list of things to say and then threw the list away because every line on it sounded desperate. Travis at work had given me advice all week, and Travis's advice is always bad, so I ignored all of it except the part about shaving, which even a broken clock gets right twice a day.

She texted me from the gate at nine. "Walking now!" Two words and my stomach dropped out through the floor.

* * *

I heard her boots on the stairs before I saw her. That particular heavy rhythm, the one every soldier in Depot Town has, and I was at the door before the second step. Then she was in the hallway, duffel bag at her feet, hair shorter than I remembered, and she was grinning like she already knew exactly what was about to happen to me.

"You missed me?" she said.

I want to explain something about myself here. I am not smooth. I have never been smooth. The laundry guys call me Zeke the Machine because I fold forty shirts an hour and say about forty words a day, and here was this woman looking at me like I was the whole weekend.

"Yeah," I said. Stupid. Four months and my opening line was yeah. But she laughed and came through the door and hugged me, and her arms went around my ribs and squeezed like she was trying to reset something, and for a second I couldn't breathe and didn't care.

"God, you smell like fabric softener," she said into my neck. "My whole life reduced to laundry chemicals. I love it."

I offered to make her tea. That was on the list, actually, tea, because she always drank tea on the nights she came off duty and I thought it would be a nice domestic thing, a soft landing. I was halfway to the kettle when she dropped the duffel bag on my bed and unzipped it.

"Come here," she said. "Forget the tea."

I came there.

The bag was full. Not of clothes, or not mostly clothes. Of stockings. I just stood there looking at it, because there must have been a dozen pairs, packages still sealed, laid flat in rows like they were something precious. Black, navy, a wine red, a cream, some sheer enough that you could see the cardboard through them, some thick and opaque. Fishnets at the bottom. Lace tops on at least four of the packs.

"Four months," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Do you know what a PX sells? Nothing. It sells nothing, and then it sells the same nothing again. I had a lot of time to shop online."

I didn't say anything. My mouth had stopped being part of the government of my body.

"Sit down," she said, and pointed at the bed beside her, and I sat.

She picked the black pair out of the bag, the ones with the lace tops, and stood up, and pulled her jeans and shirt off without any ceremony at all, like she was in her own bedroom and I was furniture, which, fine, that was the point apparently. Then she sat back down and held the first stocking up and looked at me.

"Watch," she said. "You've been folding sheets for four months. Time to see how a real fabric behaves."

She pointed her toe and gathered the nylon over her knuckles the way you're supposed to, the way she'd taught me once in a hotel room in Fayetteville that I thought about more than I should admit, and rolled it up over her ankle, up her calf, slow, so slow, stopping to smooth it with her palms at the knee and then again at the thigh. She narrated the whole thing in this low even voice like she was reading a field manual.

"Seam straight. Fabric even. No snags. Good." She hooked her thumbs in the lace top and settled it high on her thigh. "Now. Question for the class. Do you remember how the garters work?"

"I remember," I said, and my voice came out rough.

"Say it anyway. Prove it."

"Clips first, back clips last. Push the rubber nub through the loop and turn it, and you don't tug, you ease."

"Look at that," she said, pleased, like I'd passed a board. "Two years and the material stuck."

Then the other stocking, and she made me watch that one too, and by the end of it I was sitting on my own bed with my hands flat on my knees like a man at a job interview, and she stood up and stepped into the little black lace thing she'd pulled from the bag, and that was all she put on. Stockings and that. February outside, radiators clanking, and she stood in my bedroom like it was July somewhere better.

She stepped close. She put one stockinged foot up on my thigh, right on my thigh, the nylon whispering against denim, and looked down at me with her head tilted.

"So here's my next question," she said, "and you're going to answer it honestly or we're going to have a very short weekend. Have you been taking care of yourself while I was gone?"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

"Zeke."

"Yes," I said.

"When. Last time."

"Tuesday," I said, because lying to her was never actually a thing I could do. "Tuesday night. In the shower."

She laughed, a real one, head back. "Tuesday. Poor Tuesday. It had to carry four months of load on its own." She let the foot press down a little, and the lace top of her stocking dragged across my thigh, and every nerve I own relocated to that one spot. "And did you think about me, Tuesday?"

"Every time," I said. "It's kind of humiliating, actually."

"It's not humiliating. It's the correct answer." She took her foot down and then, before I could process the loss, she swung a leg over and sat on my lap, one nylon thigh across both of mine, and put her hands on the sides of my face. "Hi," she said, soft now, the field manual voice gone.

"Hi," I said.

"I missed you," she said. "Like an ache. Like a tooth. Now kiss me, and do it properly, because I want you to remember every inch of this weekend."

I kissed her. Or she kissed me, it stopped mattering whose idea it was about two seconds in. It was long and it was hungry and it tasted like airplane coffee and it went on until I lost track of the room, her mouth open against mine, her fingers in my hair, and all the while her thigh was pressed right across my crotch and I was hard