You are weary to the cartilage of your joints, the marrow of your bones, the vessels of your blood. Too weary from deciding what to do each minute of your working day and the prospect of deciding what to do each waking minute of your evenings to face anything else at all. Too weary to summon outrage when Finn tells you he’s had an agent appraise your home.
‘I’m looking at our options. Trying to take the pressure off you,’ he said.
It’s impossible to think of working again in the department, or at the university, living back in Hobart with its familiar hills and valleys, Mount Wellington looming overhead, the harbour lapping at its feet, the little houses crowded on its hills, backyards largely free of swimming pools in that chilly climate. Safe, familiar.
‘If I can get enough commissions, say two or three, we could go straight away,’ Finn says. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a job.’
Without a job what machinery would grind the moving hours past? Without some slender thread holding you to the world, who knows where and how far you might fall?
‘I need to work, Finn.’
He nods. ‘Sure. But we’ve got to get home.’
You turn and put your hands on the bench. Outside the sky is all kinds of vermillion and orange, streaked with light, speckled with flying foxes streaming from their roosts into the evening. You remember that Hobart smelled of lavender and brine and empty oceans and Antarctica. Here smells like Asia: shiitake mushrooms, frangipani, mildew and bat shit. You’ve been foreigners all along, out of your element. If you’d stayed at home, this would never have happened.
When you fall into bed not long after dinner, Finn reaches for you and for the first time there is humming intent in his hold. You’ve wept, separately and together, each night for the past seven, but there’s been no desire. Now, suddenly, you feel it flaring in him.
It might be comfort, perhaps, and release. Connection, skin, breath, life. But you’ve stitched together someone to be and those threads are so thin and stretched that anything might snap them. You’ve created a person who might be able to get you through, a person who can forget, for some moments here and there, dragging her drowned son from the water.
You can’t think of that. You can think of Finn and the gate and the stupid Owl Sentry. You can think of your older son, your ordinary son. It wasn’t Jarrah who blew your world. Jarrah was, and continues to be, exactly what you’d expected from a child. The most normal kid you could imagine.
Toby, on the other hand, did nothing but surprise you. He hurtled into the world, uncontainable. A force of nature, Finn used to call him. Like he was going to reach out and devour the world. So dangerous, you now know, to live like that. To treat the world without fear. It should be feared.
Finn reaches for you and as his body presses against yours he could be a stranger, coming at you so tentatively, trembling.
‘Please,’ he whispers, and he draws you against him slowly, not daring to demand. You almost wish he’d stop asking, stop making you the decider and just take you. Fuck you so hard you could get lost in it. Fuck you past this agony.
Your traitorous body feels him and some primal biology kicks in so you are suddenly ravenous. You roll on top, straddle him, feel his surprise and matching desire. You can’t kiss him, not that, but after just a few moments of grinding together you position yourself and thrust down so he impales you. You groan, deep and guttural, just as he does, you rise up and come down furiously, hands on his chest. From indifference to hot and hard and slick in seconds, agonising and irresistible at once. You’re rutting like animals that have tasted death and want nothing of it.
You’re going to come; you can’t believe it. When you do, it blazes through like rage and you look down at his face. In that second you hate him with your whole being. His eyes roll back a little and he arches and cries out and in your mind you’ve killed him and it’s gore, not sex, that slicks over your body. It’s the only punishment that matches the crime, your rage’s obliteration of him.
You slide off and he pulls you down and sobs, hulking sobs in the space between your breasts. Then he falls silent, and a moment later twitches, and you know he’s dropped into post-orgasmic sleep. You lie next to him, shuddering deep inside. It’s dangerous to be open to the world and dangerous to be open to him. Coming, you felt the start of a primal shriek you couldn’t afford to utter. And so you roll away from him, clamp your legs together, clench your jaw and fight down that shriek, wrestle it down to its dark hiding place and shut the lid on it.
He sleeps, damn him, like a child, sweaty and restless and deep, whimpering and crying out but never waking. Toby used to sleep like that, bringing you to wakefulness often with his thrashing and murmurs. He’d wake in the morning revitalised, while you were shredded. Orgasm has stoked your rage and focused it more freely on Finn, who dares to sleep, dares to breathe, dares to sweat and weep and pant and ejaculate.
You’d thought that after a week you might have been able to comfort each other, but your fury is deepening and widening, becoming inexorable, soldered onto the foundations of your being. It’s becoming the buttress to your grief, its equal and opposing force.
The clock flips its way around the hours, glowing red in the dark, and the night noises outside swell and subside, and the darkest, quietest hour arrives and somehow, eternally, passes. You can’t be close to Finn, but you can’t be too far away from him either, or what holds you upright will collapse.
He wakes at the first hint of light in the sky, some time a little after five. You hear him swim up to consciousness, his crusted eyelids cracking open, his tongue moistening his lips, the scratch of his nails on his belly. It’s repulsive.
You’re up on your elbow, facing away from him, watching the window. He rolls into your back, reaches out a hand and cups the curve of your hip bone.
‘I want you to sleep somewhere else.’
In the silent, shocked moment that follows he removes his hand from your skin. The only other room is Toby’s. Still untouched. You can feel his incredulity in the air between you.
‘The studio,’ you say. ‘There’s room for a bed.’
‘What will Jarrah think?’
You almost want to laugh at this. ‘He’ll think the world’s gone to shit, Finn.’
You get up and begin to dress, keeping your back to him.