Solly and Lark

By the time I'm finished cleaning up, Termite has eaten and Solly's plate is just sitting there.

'A tape Joey sent me. Jazz piano, and someone singing scat vocals. That's sounds, no real words. Termite might like it, especially through the headphones. If he wants to listen.' Solly's talking to me, but looking at Termite. He wipes Termite's mouth with his fingers, touches his face. I see Termite lean so slightly, rest his jaw on Solly's palm, and stay quiet. Like he's reading something he remembers. Someone he lost.

I never even thought, all this time. I lost Solly, but Termite lost him too.

I see Solly realize. His face changes and he puts his hands flat on the table, like someone's punched him and he needs a moment. It's something else between us, all we've done and all we didn't know. He looks over at me, but he keeps his voice smooth. 'Joey's down at Camp Lejeune, getting an education. Left last month. You knew he was going down there, didn't you, Lark?'

I nod. Termite turns his head to listen, hear our voices, but we're not talking. I move to pick up the headphones.

Solly stops me. 'Here, let me. Listen to these voices, Termite. They sing like you talk.' He stands and puts the headphones on Termite and turns on the tape. Termite sits up, then leans back, touches his wrists to the sides of his head, as though to press the music closer.

'You were three. I was four. It must have been soon after you came here. Probably with those boxes.'

'I don't know when the boxes came. Maybe they came with Termite.' I look past Solly, out the kitchen window into the rain. But he keeps talking.

'I'm like your brother, even if I'm not. I'm like Termite except I can talk to you. I can touch you back. I remember things.' He comes close to me behind Termite's chair. I see Termite relax his shoulders and lean his head to listen, and I can hear something like clicks and sweeps through the headphones. Solly's got it up loud, the way Termite likes it. I look at Solly. He's so familiar, like he's me, he's mine, like he's my child, but he's a stranger, the cold, hot look he gets, like any of them. If I let him do what he wants I'll get that look too, that cancels everything. It's like a pit I could fall into. I need to keep out of it.

Solly could talk me into things because in my mind he still wore the face he used to have, behind the older face I saw. I forgot and I thought doing things with him was like doing things to myself. I got my period early and he was drawn to me then. I was eleven and kept myself so clean, but it was like he could tell. He would come and tease me and talk at me. It wasn't just looking. He would try to get me to want to be touched, he would show me things. I liked it, thinking about it, liked watching his body work, how he delivered himself into it so quickly, so easily, what he could do to me, how my not letting him do what he wanted just extended everything, how he'd find some other way to get around what I wouldn't let him do. He'd hold on to my wrists and mouth the backs of my legs, I'd be blue on that soft skin behind my knees. He'd get to me, talking without words, with sounds. I'd have that achy, crampy feeling in my belly and he'd say he knew it hurt, he'd pull me across him and stroke the bones of my hips, those socket bones the belly sinks between, until the pain turned syrupy. I lay there feeling him harden under me and I thought about his hands, about bleeding into them, filling them. He wanted me to, he said. And other things. Lots of things.

He's looking at me and his eyes are tawny and gold, flecked with green. His lashes look wet. 'Lark,' he says.

We must have stopped when he was fourteen or so, when it wasn't kids any more. There was that one time, the last time. I told him so. After that I stayed away from him. Then he got angry and stayed away from me. Or not away, but we were never alone any more, or trying to be. I'd left him, so he left me. He had this one and that one. I'm sure he got to a lot of them. He was too young, but that's how he was; I guess it's how I was, but only with him. It was like we ruined each other. I'd see him and I'd look away, but I always knew if he was in a room, or across a street or in a hallway at school, or tackling sandbags at a football practice, outside some classroom window. I'd sense him lunging and hitting, pounding at all the anonymous smeared bodies in their pads and helmets.

He reaches across and puts his finger in the centre of my chest like a hard little point, and moves it down like he's writing a line on me. It's the storm, I think, the storm has closed us off here, the rain has drowned everything out. I can hear the rain, pouring.

He knows this game. It's an old game. His lips look almost swollen and he opens his mouth slightly and breathes, like he's filled with some horrible relief. I feel like something has got us, just swallowed us.

'Okay.' He mouths the word like he can't talk, not even a whisper. Just the shape of a sound on his lips and he clinches his teeth. Now that he knows I'll do it I can see the feeling come on him full-blown, into his eyes, into his breathing and the tawny flush of his face.

'Don't touch me with your hands,' I tell him, but he doesn't have to. Just the force of him moving toward me backs us into the little hallway, then into my room and against the wall. I can see the flecks of dirt across his chest. A gleam of blond hairs and sweat fills the space my eyes can see and his nipples are hard and tiny. It's so long since I've been this close to the smell and feel of him. He flattens his palms on either side of the wall at my head and keeps his hands still to promise he will. I put my mouth on him and the brown nub of his nipple fits between my teeth like a little stone. I pull on the other and touch and roll it under my fingers, and the sounds he makes seem to start inside me. There's a measure of time we have before he can't hear me or listen to me any more. He reaches down to pull the laundry basket and all the piled clothes over behind me and his face moves down my chest and belly, along the bone of my hip, and he nudges me back on to the basket. He arches over me and I get my shirt off and push my forehead hard against him through his jeans, then I put my hand inside the button and feel for the zipper, pull his pants down, close my eyes. I feel him hard and silken in my mouth, and in my hands, and against my face and in my hair. He's pushing and pushing at me, all over me, not fast, just on and on. I hold him at the hollow of my neck and then I raise my arms all along the line of his torso. The blunt head of him moves its tear of wet across my ribs and my breasts and finds the hollow under my arm, and that's how he comes, and on my neck and my chest, with me holding him so I feel the pulsing as it moves through him.

'Do that to me,' he says, 'Lark, do that to me.' He sinks to his knees and lies across me and we slide down on the towels and T-shirts and sheets that have spilled. It's easy now, like no time has gone by without this, and I put my hand on the cleft of his buttocks and touch the secret fur, push my finger just inside, like I own his body,like he would own mine if he ever got inside me. If he got inside me I would never get away.