Opening of a new short story

The opening of Daybed...a story in-progress.

This is what they never had before. In all the possessive, unspoken worship, the panicked sex that caused sparks—literally caused sparks—to flicker between their bodies, the love that was so burly neither could even admit it. But they’re old now. Well, older. And yet this feels like their salad days. A salad day. Anyway, this time together, this unexpected intimacy bought in a few hours of downtime on her book tour, away from husband and three children, will probably never happen again. At least neither can think of a way that it will and when this comes to pass, each will be petulant, broken, without appetite for days, quick to blame the other. And yet, it happening again (and again and again) will fill their imaginations to capacity.

They started 13 years ago, in 1995, and ended about a year later. He’s 33 now—and looks it—except on the sun-pocked parts of his neck and throat, where he looks much older. Ali’s a few years younger, though not as many as it used to seem. When they’d met everyone called him Ollie, but “Ollie and Ali” was too cutesy to stomach, and she’d insisted on calling him by his initials, O.D.—a not very funny joke—or O for short. But now, all grown up, he goes by Oliver.

Back then he never had a place of his own, but now they’re in his tidy apartment in Bakersfield, her hometown, an easy stop on her book tour because she draws a crowd and can stay with her parents. Oliver did not come to her reading but she came to him afterwards, and now his right hand—the one that he’d laid on her once and only once in fury—holds her calf. Holds her calf. Towards the bottom, under her loose black pants, between his thumb and middle finger, stroking the silken sandpaper of her leg. They’re jammed up against each other, sitting side by side on his daybed—the only real place to sit in the room—and he realizes that her neck is crooked against the brick wall.

“Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?” he says, and means it, and moves so she can adjust, recline with a pillow, allow him to lay his head in her lap. She traces circles

into the cropped part of his still-black hair, near the nape, the juggle of their breath and a flicker

of candlelight the only movement in the little room.

“Tell me about your day,” he says, and she does. And then he tells her about his.

And that’s all that happens. All they never had before.

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