Free Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady

cleaned up for me. The pile of crumpled chip bags is gone, there are no clothes on the floor, the narrow coffee table bears the streaks of a hasty swipe with a dust rag. Straightened up, this place is even uglier, more frightening to me. Through the partly closed curtains, light slants into the room like a blade.
    â€œYou can’t call me in the middle of the day,” I say.
    â€œI need to sleep,” he says. “I haven’t slept for two days.”
    I follow him into the alcove, where he pulls back the untouched covers, climbs into bed, and pats the mattress next to him. I lie down beside him, and he pulls the sheets up over both of us, curls his body against mine.
    He strokes my hair, and I can feel the warmth of him along my body, the oppressive clamminess of his sweat, his hot breath. A shock, like the nick of a static shock, runs through me each time he lifts my hair and lets it cascade over his hands. I can’t believe the impossible fact of a man other than Jay caressing me. I shut my eyes, block out the light the way Jay’s earplugs block the sound of me slipping into the bedroom after he’s gone to sleep.
    Walter’s hand moves down over my shoulders, along my hip, where even through my clothes, it kindles an unpleasant warmth. The blunt ridge of his erection presses against my thigh, and then he shifts his hand to his own crotch, rubs himself in rhythmic circles that make his breath catch. I keep my body rigid, as if there’s some rule that I must remain untouched, unmoved, while he does what he needs to do to arrive at release, to sprawl against me with a new, helpless softness. Soon I will have worked the magic that will enable him to sleep till morning comes, enable me to get up and fetch my children, move through the clean corridors of my own life, blunt the pleading of his fingers on my skin, renounce the complicity of our bodies rocking on the mattress.
    After a while, when his breathing becomes even, I slip slowly and carefully from beneath the covers. I need to leave him sleeping, need to lean over him to tuck the sheets around him in just the way I would tuck them around my children. Only when he’s asleep do I want or dare to touch him, brush damp hair back from his forehead.
    His hand comes up like a vise to grip mine in the act of tenderness.Panic bolts through me when he pulls me down toward the bed.
    â€œPlease,” he says, “just one little good-night kiss.”
    He shifts his hand to the back of my neck, brings my face to his. The pressure of Walter’s mouth on mine unlocks an answer, and I open my mouth to let his tongue fill the little cave of my hunger.
    He laughs when I jerk back from the bed. “Sweet dreams,” he says, as if I am the one he has released to oblivion.
    I race down the stairs as if he will come after me. When I get into my car, I lock the doors, but I can’t turn the key in the ignition, not with these hands. I look in the rearview mirror, see that my lipstickis smeared around my mouth. I spit into a Kleenex and slowly rub the rosy aura from my skin. I run my fingers through the disarray of my hair, hiding the evidence once again.
    But it’s there in the gaze the mirror reflects. I’m not the only one in the world with the eyes of a liar. No, there’s a herd of us, the comrades of lonely craving, slapping down folding chairs in a thousand musty meeting rooms. I close my eyes the way I closed them when Walter kissed me, and again I can feel the rushing warmth of desire, of hungered-after contact. Such allegiance it claims, this second self, this scavenger who returns to demand its sweet share, whom I must let come and go, come and go, move through me like fog.

honor among thieves
    Three days after Daniel left Carrie, a tree came down against her house in a terrible rainstorm, crushing the front stairs and puncturing the roof. Carrie and her daughter, Anya, got up from bed and set out buckets, every last pot