Free Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg Page A

Indonesian print, Anne said easily, on surer ground here, was the Murphy bed. This was a less fraught demonstration, as it implied their sleeping separately, so Anne could show Flannery the lethal-appearing spring mechanism, make an unavoidable joke about the prospect of its giving way, mid-sleep, to snap the sleeper wallward. She patted the traplike item almost affectionately, as if it were a pet.
    “Now you know. A Murphy bed. That’s how it works.”
    Then she stood, still jacketed, arms folded, her eyes green as motel-sign neon. Vacancy or no vacancy? Flannery wondered, though she was pretty sure she knew.
    “Anne,” she said softly. Naming her, she thought, might steady her. Flannery felt protective. “Thank you. For letting me stay.” She let the love leak into her voice, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her.
    “Well. Thank you,” Anne replied, with an angled smile directed somewhere at the ceiling, “for writing that poem.”
    An awkwardness threatened to yawn between them.
    “I wouldn’t mind—”
    “Do you want—”
    They both stuttered, stopped, laughed a little at the broken ice.
    “—something to drink?”
    So they moved to the safer-seeming kitchen, where they sat down at the round table and talked to each other in fond voices, the scattered chat of new friends; while the air around them wondered if they’d soon be more.

T here, across the Formica surface, their hands met, Flannery’s right to Anne’s left: the bodies’ first admission that they wanted each other. It was not planned or spoken. It was Flannery seeing those finely shaped, shy fingers, and there is that strange way hands are alive, and animal, separately expressive from the rest of the self. It is no surprise that hands create the characters of the puppeteer, or that movies have imagined them moving independently, spiderlike, around a room. Flannery saw this lovely creature and greeted it with her own, stroking it, covering it, and then, finally, holding it in a half-clasp. A declaration. I am here. We have touched.
    Anne was quiet. Looking down. Her eyes would not find Flannery’s, but her hand held hers, too, returned the embrace with its own strength, so that Flannery knew that Anne was with her, though she was sheltering in some wordless privacy.
    Flannery allowed the hands and silence to continue as long as she humanly could, until her nervous heart was stretched taut, too taut to breathe.
    “Anne?” she said finally.
    The question was everything. It was, in fact, the only question.
    To Flannery’s surprise, when Anne looked up at last to answer it, her eyes seemed darker. With lust, and with something else, too—like grief. Or doubt. She didn’t say anything, but she nodded.
    Flannery took that as her yes. It was her thumb she moved across Anne’s mouth then. Slowly. Following the curve of her lips up to that sweet peak, and back down the gentle slope of the other side. Flannery knew that she knew this mouth already, had lived with its shape and its sounds in her imagination, but she had not yet felt it. Her blunt thumb made this first intimate acquaintance.
    “You have the most beautiful mouth,” Flannery said to Anne. And then she did what she had been wanting to do her entire life.
    She kissed her.

Y ou see, it didn’t have to be in the dark, after all.
    It could start in the light. There would be hours of darkness later, sure, when in the moon-cast blue they’d wander over and over this new terrain, learning the lay of the land as much by touch as by sight. There would be that long nighttime, enjoying the obscurity of being in each other’s arms. But here was the revelation: it could start in the light. Those uncounted hours alone in her sleepless room had taught Flannery something, after all. That, in love, she could face illumination.
    They kissed in the lit kitchen first, because that’s where they’d come modestly, just to talk, to sip some small, late tea together. Not alcohol: they had both decided not