A thresh-hole

Where presently were the leaves that had blown around them at the moment of the kiss in the park, twirling down and down as if they were endlessly descending from the sky? Probably they had been trampled by passer-bys, wet and folded, crumpled, soiled with mud, mingling with the moss. Eugenie dove into the kiss, thinking about the leaves, how they had formed a chrysalis around them, of various shades of brown, orbiting them in a rolled gush of wind. Her hands rose to touch the edges of Barry’s jaws with the tips of her fingers, then tightened around the base of his neck.

Anything that had been forbidden and brandished in front of one’s eye, once the access to this thing allowed, would famously consume that one person. Eugenie burned at the lips of Barry, entirely dismantled, her arms and knees cut off first, then, she didn’t know, she might be floating without them at his height, she might be dissolving slowly in the atmosphere, like the leaves dispersed after a wild tumble and soon forgotten, melting into winter at the end of autumn. She was going to fall and he must have sensed her struggles, because he slid his hands around her chest and lifted her to wrap her legs around him and then banged the both of them forcefully against the entrance door.

How will I survive this?

She recalled the turtle, from her Attenborough documentary, the one who had left her soft and melted eggshell at the bottom of the hole dug by her mother out of instinct, following the same urge of survival from centuries ago as the one all turtles shared, the one lighting up that down down part of the brain, or warming up that intuition feeling deep inside her belly. She was called to get into the water. Eugenie wondered, How would a creature born on land dream of water and nothing else? How would a thing infused with the gift of life in the middle of sand, hard sand, itchy sand, breathing air on the beach, long for a liquid home?

“The neighbors Barry” Some things were not easily explained. There was an infinite and invisible world around all the living beings of the Earth.

“Fuck your neighbors” he connected his midsection to hers and, in that elevated face-to-face, she felt her arms rise on her sides like she was stretching a ribbon, the fingers at the end of her hands stuck against the wood of the door behind her, her nails scratching it. A series of chills quietly detonated up her spine. She was going to be sick.

“Lovesick” she specified

“What” Barry detached his mouth from hers for a second, out of breath, his hair disheveled

“We… we shouldn’t” Eugenie heard herself, hyperventilating too. She brought her hands to his cheeks and ears, and realized that she was sitting, her butt in the curve of Barry’s forearms, her ankles crossed in his back, and that they had already entered pretty far inside the shouldn’t territory. Don’t leave me again, she thought, and she thought about her bridge of shouldnts, looking into his eyes with hers open as wide as casseroles from all the stupefaction and the terror and the “we shouldn’t” she repeated.

She could still hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind. Crisp, dry leaves tended to make a sharper, crinkling noise, while softer, more humid leaves produced a gentler, more muted sound. GIRL stop thinking about leaves and marine animals, stop thinking—

“Eugenie White, you are as light as a bag of feathers” Barry said and kissed her once more.

She opened her mouth, “what did you say”

“Eugenie White, you”

“What did you say”

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“Eugenie”

“Barry” she sniffled

“You’re alright?”

“Yes. I’m feeling so… crazy” She almost spoke her sentence as a question, seeking an absurd validation. She was so terrified that the thought appeared in front of her mind’s eye: maybe she had never been so afraid before. Maybe this was the scariest day of her life, and all the times she had believed she had been afraid in the past, she had never known how afraid afraid could be. The word afraid was losing all its meaning after flashing it and sounding it out a dozen times inside her head, “I’m feeling so crazy” she said again

“I agree” he chuckled, lowering the both of them against the door, depositing her cautiously, delicately. And yet the door’s casing and its old hinges rattled from something refrained, guarded, perhaps some bottled-up things, Eugenie saw, perhaps something in his magnetic field. Stop thinking about magnetic fields, and he bent further down to kiss her chin and neck, while one of his hands reached somewhere on his upper back, “you see that’s where it is, the zipper of this damn outfit” She pushed him back to look at him.

Barry thew her a mischievous grin, well aware of his monumental charms, while wiggling out of the top part of his suit. He was such a sight, even if the tee shirt he was wearing underneath was messy and wrinkly. His chest was strong, full of pure oxygen, full of cold and refreshing air, of dense and bounteous molecules, his arms were powerful, his shoulders were so perfect under the light layer of the cotton fabric.

She smiled back at him apprehensively, wondering if he could perceive her fear. Barry took off his tee shirt but kept it hanging around his neck like a scarf, brushed his nose against hers, pushing his knuckles hard on the floor with the same contained strength. The lines of his muscles were dancing in the harsh light of the corridor, tense and generous at the same time, “you are wearing too many clothes, Eugenie”

“I’m… distracted” she confessed

“By what”

“By you”

“You flatter me” he said

“You can… you can help me?”

“Copy that” he snatched away Eugenie’s cardigan and the tank top of her pajama after that. Her fear transformed into alarm. Exposed, she felt so self-conscious, her own arms were thick, they sagged with some droopy fat here, some cellulite there, oh man, she had not lifted any weights for a decade or so, and she crossed her elbows on her chest in a panic “Don’t cover yourself, I want to see you” he murmured, sitting straight on top of her, “you are very beautiful Ms W— Eugenie”

At the center of his dirty puddle eyes, she saw something sincere and something hungry. His face was angelic, his unorganized haircut making it look like the wind from the park had followed him all the way to here. Actually, there was always that thing about Barry, the feeling that he was walking around with his own mini tornado blowing rowdily for him and him only.

Eugenie felt two warm tears escape discreetly on the sides of her face. She was tired, confused, afraid, horny, joyful, burning with desire, pitiful, distressed, lonely, wanting, yearning. Barry brushed one tear with his thumb and wiped his thumb on his lips, repeated the gesture with the other tear, “you don’t seem to know your own beauty” he said. She saw something loving in his eyes.

“I’m a bit… I mean I’m, you know” Old she thought, yogurt-like, out of shape, round, so many horrible adjectives, “and you are so… you know” Not any of that. She felt like a flan.

“I have a scar the size of a pinky finger in the middle of my stomach” he pressed his head against hers, “it’s a bit gross, curved like a comma and it has some weird purple colors”

“Yikes” she scoffed, stop thinking about the wind, mamacita, stop thinking about autumn leaves and turtles, she removed the tee shirt from his neck and made a ball of it and discarded it away. The feeling of his bare skin was disarming, she had not anticipated that it would be so warm, tight, flushed with life, and it calmed the quivering of her hands. She rested them on the back of his shoulders and they sat, clasped like this, vertically parallel, their foreheads glued together, in embrace and suspension at the door of the flat. Eugenie’s heart was beating so hard that she feared it was going to explode out of her ears. It was going to leak out and sizzle on the floor, smoking and whistling from its sectioned arteries, and burn through the planks and break the entire building and cut the world in two.

Barry closed his eyes “it’s a nice souvenir”

“Nice?” Stop thinking, you crazy fig and blueberry bitch, stop thinking

He smiled, “nice like, you and me against uh… against—” he smiled wider, searching for the right way to put it

“Against a bullet”

“Against death” he nodded, “against the world I guess”

“Are we really going to do this?”

“Do what”

Make love, the voice told

“Make love” she whispered

“Make love?” Barry’s smile expanded, the expression on his face mesmerized, “hell yeah we’re gonna make love, Eugenie”