Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

hand landed centimeters from her lower thigh, testing. I knew things about lust now. Could she tell? Could she sense that I’d become, in some way?

“You don’t want me to drive,” I said.

“Not if you don’t want to,” she said.

“Hang on.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, a beat-up brown imitation-leather hand-me-down from my father, the same thing I’d been carrying since high school. I reached behind the driver’s license and pulled out the two golden hoops I’d taken from Anita’s nightstand ten years earlier. They had lived with me all this time, out of habit.

“Here.” I unlocked her knuckles from their hard fist and pressed the cold circles into her palm. “These belong to you.”

I felt the phantom of them on my skin then, all the times in Hammond Creek and Athens and Berkeley when I’d fingered them and placed them under my tongue, as though if I swallowed, I’d possess all Anita was—all we were—back then. And there, in the lingering cool circles of those hoops, those last physical mementos of the Lemonade Period, was one answer to what Anita had asked me. What did I want? It was impossible; all I wanted was what had already been lost. I wanted more than to change the past. I wanted to be consumed by it, to go back to a moment when all was still potential and I had ruined nothing, no one.

But absent that, there was this—Anita’s eyes widening as she slid each hoop through her bare earlobes and fingered them as though surprised they still fit. Then she was leaning over, her palms taking my head with surprising force, pressing me to her chest, as she whispered thank you, more than once, so I was sure she was not only speaking about the earrings.

“I need you, Neil,” she said. “Will you do it? Will you help?”

I brought my hands to her wrists and pressed them against the back of her couch. I nodded then, my cheek moving against her braless breasts, and I breathed, hot and hard, on the poke of her left nipple through the cotton, then the right. I looked up to see her eyes closed, her own mouth open. I didn’t know what private dreamscapes passed behind her lids, and yet I had a sense of the pattern, a collage of what had been lost, and what she craved.

“Yeah,” I said. I brushed my lips on her neck, still pressing her wrists into the sofa, as though we’d done this a thousand times before. “Yeah. I’ll do it. I have some terms, though.”

Her eyes opened. I loosened my grip on her wrists. “You want some,” she said.

I thought about hiding my need, but I couldn’t. “Yes,” I said into her skin.

“I gathered,” she said, husky but measured. “I need her covered first.”

“You must want some, too, right?”

“Oh, Neil,” she said. “I can’t—”

But I hardly heard the rest, because my mouth had reached her earlobe. I felt against my lips the cool shape of the old gold hoops. “I like them on you,” I said.

“They’re familiar,” she whispered back, and then I was upon her, and her lips were at first surprisingly clumsy, but endearingly, flatteringly so—was she nervous?

The last time I had been so close to her body, there had been someone else in the room. I waited for Shruti’s voice (Aren’t you two, like . . . ?), waited for her to wander in and blink at us intently, as though at her dissected frog on the biology lab table. But—nothing. We were alone. My hands were heavy when I pushed them into her hair, a little roughly. I felt, with enormous joy, the little puff of air her mouth expelled at that display of control. I tugged again, my hand on her neck, the years of want that I had worried were weakening me now becoming something like strength. There was a flesh and flop to her breasts as they bounced against her compact body—more than I expected. Jigsawed flashes of all the girls I’d ever fucked—not that many, never a brown girl—swished by me and then were lost. Her darkness was new. The black hair, the blanket of peach fuzz on her belly. I imagined Adah Eckman’s eyes on Isaac Snider, the Snider I’d dreamt up, those eyes erasing the difference between him and the rest of his homeland. Him, disappearing into her. And me, in the present, not disappearing into Anita but becoming more of a person as the friction grew. Me, my uncut foreskin that had made me nervous around anybody new in bed, but Anita was not anybody, hers not any body. She shuddered at my teeth on her neck, her thigh. Her voice lifted, turning vaporous at my tongue, my fingers. “That, yeah, that, unh,” I heard her say, like we were swapping promises, her yeah meeting my yeah.

9.

A miracle: here, within groping distance, was the body kept secret for so long. I discovered Anita’s dramatic particularity. Things both attractive and mundane. That her mouth smelled like pungent yogurt in the mornings. That sharpness of her pelvis, that feel of her elfish little hands digging into my lats. What had once been a brick wall between her sexual self and her life-self now became a permeable membrane, and I could and did reach through whenever I liked, to nip the edge of her ear with my teeth as she wrote a grocery list, to cup her breasts in the kitchen as she poured wine, to press myself into her hips while she talked on the phone.

After just a few nights, she left me a key. “We have to do some planning as soon as I get home,” she said sheepishly. “So you don’t need to drive back to Berkeley, and waste all that time.” She’d return to find that I’d been lying on her floor most of the day, reading, working. (Yes, working! For something about her presence had revived my commitment to