Free Open by Lisa Moore

they’d just happen upon each other. The last time they met like this was in the wind tunnel between the library and the chemistry building. She was wearing a long candy-cane stripedscarf. It stood out in front of her, rippling. The wind was blowing her across a skim of ice and she was squealing and she slid into his arms. Their chests smacked, and when he bent his nose into the icy fox-fur trim he could smell her lipgloss.
    It was four-thirty in the afternoon, already dark. His wrists stuck out of the leather gloves his mother had insisted he wear and he remembered that his wristbones felt like glass, that a sharp bang might have cleanly snapped off his hands. It was below zero. They’d gotten a bus to her parents’ house. The windows of the bus were grey with salt and a man sat beside him with crutches that cuffed his forearms and his legs were twisted and stiff like pipe cleaners.
    Rachel told Lyle he should stop reading philosophy. She said, Literature is such a kick. You’ve got to read that. And she looked out the window over her shoulder as if one of the stout, soft-covered Penguins she had jammed in her knapsack —
Middlemarch, Anna Karenina
, or
Crime and Punishment
— was unfolding on the street. He told her his wrists were cold and she took the glove off his right hand and put her searing mouth over his wristbone so it bristled with needles like a startled porcupine.
    When they arrived at her parents’ house, somewhere in Mount Pearl, she lifted a curled real estate guide from the mailbox, a hardened baton sheathed in ice. She poked his stomach with it, and when he looked down she slapped his cheek. The ice on the guide smashed to pieces that skittered across the concrete step. The slap left a sting.
    That was for nothing, she said, don’t try anything. Sheturned her back on him and unlocked the door and he followed her inside.
    They smoked some pot in the bathroom, a white gauzy curtain gone yellow with age flying out the open window against the night sky. That evening of lovemaking has come over him lots of times since; often when he’s tired or drunk, it overtakes him, haunts him, so he can almost smell the crackling hope of the new subdivision, the whiff of cedar and camphor in the pink bedspread ruffles that had been unexpectedly rough against his cheek, the stinky dope meeting the stormy wind. There had been a marmalade cat with a fluffy tail drawing up the gold and rust shag carpet with her nails, very near his ear, on the living-room floor.
    Pot exacted from him a languid thoroughness while making love. Every touch lost its path, outlived its life expectancy. She had licked under his arm, and that cool trail he’d felt for days afterward, while washing dishes for his mother, dopey with the steam rising from the sink and the heat of the oven, or while lazing on the living-room carpet before
Gilligan’s Island
and
Get Smart
with the slippery velvet of the golden retriever’s ear in his fingers. The cheeks of her bum, breasts like saucers of snowflakes, smoky breath, the bitten-down fingernails with chipped blue polish. He’d held her arms over her head, both of her wrists in one hand. He’d lowered her bra with his teeth, uncovering a nipple so it peeked out from a crush of eyelet lace, and he could feel with his tongue the roughness of the cotton and the softness of just the very tip of the pink, pink nipple. When his tongue touched her there she squirmedagainst him. What a shock her mouth was. A hot, working muscle, a current, a force.
    After they had taken off each other’s clothes she went into the kitchen for a drink of water. They had a fridge with a door that made crushed ice, and it was the first time he’d seen one. It was super-modern, a reflective black that matched the other appliances. She held the glass under a spout in the door of the fridge and the machine growled and the glass filled with slush. She drank the whole glass and filled it again, stopping to grin at him, wiping a