Free Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci

it over from him at how small it fit on me.
    Rita came to the door. She had washed her make-up away to leave just a puffy tiredness around her eyes, as if she’d just risen from sleep.
    “I’m not sure I have any pyjamas for you.”
    “Maybe just an old T-shirt or something.”
    She changed for bed while I fixed up the couch.
    “Can I get you anything?”
    “No. Maybe a glass of water.”
    “I’ll bring it in.”
    She was sitting on the edge of the bed in my father’s robe when I went in. She had draped her clothes over the bedside chair, the strap of a bra dangling from them.
    I sat down beside her.
    “Are you feeling any better?”
    “Yes. Thanks. You’ve been great.”
    The tension of the previous days seemed forgotten, as if we’d somehow circled back to the moment that had preceded it, before the confusion had set in.
    “I guess things have been a little strange between us lately,” I said.
    “Yeah. It’s been hard.”
    “That day at the Falls. I didn’t mean – I’m not sure what I meant.”
    “It didn’t feel wrong, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s just afterwards –”
    “Yes.”
    The only light was the dim glow of the bedside lamp. The particular angle it caught Rita at made her look changed, softer but also more sage, more sad, as if some hidden side of her had been revealed.
    “Maybe we’re not normal,” she said. “I just think – how things worked out between us. How mixed up it’s been.”
    “Maybe you’re right.”
    She had half-turned her face from me so that her hair, slightly tangled and still damp either from her tears or from when she’d washed, cut off my view of her.
    “Sometimes I feel like I’ve never had anything,” she said. “Anything that was really mine.”
    “I know what that’s like. I suppose I always thought that
you
were what was mine.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “I don’t know. Just that. That I wasn’t anything, really, except for you. I guess I hated you for that in some ways.”
    “And now?”
    “Not now.”
    She was still half-turned from me.
    “Would it be all right if you held me for a bit?” she said.
    “I think so.”
    I put my arms around her. She had started crying again.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel – I don’t know. There’s no way to put it.”
    “It’s all right.”
    I held her. There was a moment then that was like falling into a kind of darkness, like the two of us opening a door in a dream and stepping out; and then we were kissing. There seemed no decision in this, just a giving-in to the darkness, to the falling. The darkness was like a tangible thing, what the world had been stripped down to; only our lips had vision within it, probing along the contours of skin and bone until they met with an instant’s small, delicious cushioning of padded flesh on padded flesh.
    We were still falling. There seemed no distance between us now, just this awful relinquishing as if everything were unfolding at once unreal and yet inevitable, having nothing to do with us and yet what our lives had always been moving toward. I slipped her robe from her shoulders, pulled her T-shirt up so that finally she lay before me with her breasts, her belly exposed like the pale underside of some infinitely fragile thing; and then I was lying beside her, kissing her, running my hands against her skin, doing these things and being inside the doing of them and yet seeing them as if theirreality were merely a mirroring of something already lived through, that had already long ago been done and atoned for.
    I entered her. There was an instant then when we were looking directly into each other’s eyes, when what was going on with our bodies seemed merely the adjunct to this moment of unblinking sight. There was something almost ruthless in us then, hopeless, the instantaneous mutual admission of wrong and its flouting. There would be this one time, we seemed to say, when the world would split open and every unspeakable hope, every