And then she was rising. She squeezed harder into his right thigh, keeping her arm with the needle in it as straight as she could. She moved in a small space, did not flail or kick out; she shuddered and rose and shuddered. The back of her left hand moved back and forth beside her head on the pillow. Once she moved the hand to her mouth and sucked at her fingers and bit them. When she came, she came long and delicately, and before she could reach the peak of it, she was tired from it, but she was able to begin to relax near it, and her sighs were strange and ethereal. They were a mixture of passion and giving in to the failed effort of passion at the same time. They hurt her, and they hurt him. His hurt was the hurt of loss impending made into an emblem from the future as he felt and heard her coming. Hers was the hurt of fulfillment coming from the diminished quota of fulfillments. She felt another one going as it went. She wanted to rise up to it completely, to say good-by to it, but she could not make it. It went above and beyond her, and when it was almost gone she slipped back from it into the tiredness that had, almost insidiously, its own reward. For a while she would not have to struggle against the cancer, to win the small holding-action battles that gave her the little moments that were left to her, if she wanted to fight for them. And she did fight for them, always; they were living, and she felt very alive. But they were hard won, and she was tired, and the guilt-free and long resting after such times with him had their own value; they renewed her a little.
He checked the bottle. It was half empty, his arm was tired, but he could hold it there. She was relaxing now; her breath was returning. The last thing she released was the flesh inside his thigh. When her hand went loose the drip quickened a little, the pressure she had given her veins, their blood pushing against the Laetrile, diminished, allowing the fluid in. He was still hard above her hand, but he began to fall, and when the head of his penis hit the tips of her fingers, he lurched up and became hard again. She looked up at him out of her half-closed eyes. They both knew that there was not much left that she could manage, maybe nothing. He needed more, but he knew the trip and the time at the pool, the snake dinner, and now the rain had taken a lot out of her. She looked wasted and on the edge of a kind of sleep.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You go to sleep; I’ll unhook you when the bottle’s empty.”
She sighed and settled deeper. Her left arm moved from the L down to her body, her hand coining slowly to rest on her stomach. Her legs came together, and he reached to her and adjusted her robe, covering her breasts and legs. When he tucked the collar of her robe at her throat, she said “No,” and she reached her hand up and pulled her robe back from her breasts, tucking it around them, so that they stood free and accentuated, very white and brown tipped against the green of the robe’s fabric. She reached up a little and took him in her right hand and ran her fingers over his penis; she shifted slowly, and her breasts moved a little, swaying. She smiled faintly below her lids, looking at his face he thought, but he could not see her eyes. “Let me see it,” she said, and that aroused him further, and he moved closer to her and half stood, one knee on the bed. As he moved, the clamp on the tubing hit with a light click against the bottle as he lowered it to get to her, and he glanced up and elevated it again.
When he looked back he found he cast a shadow cutting into the light and that her right breast was now darkened, the left the more prominent in contrast. He caught his breath to hide his response from her, though she was occupied and would not have noticed. The fear of mastectomy, and the odd wish for it, hit into his stomach briefly. There had been a biopsy and some time of dazed fear in waiting before the call came. And he remembered it and how they had looked not quite at each other, neither able to incorporate the idea of it. And now he saw that negative image on the right. It was like a boy’s chest. There was a place below her breast, just under it, where he liked to put his hand flat against her ribs while she was on her back, with arms on the pillow above her head, her breasts pulled up. To move his hand down the ribs to her waist and back up again, to the edge of her breast on that side. And in this light, he could imagine the breast gone, could almost see it that way, but without the scar tissue, and could think of the way her boy’s chest would feel on that side, his hand moving to touch ribs all the way up, stopping and changing the fingering of bone only when it reached her clavicle and the cup’s indentation above it before it reached her chin and cheek. He would take her head then, his palm holding her lower mandible, and would be rising up himself, beginning to lift and turn her face toward him. He would want her eyes in his eyes before he kissed her, and he would be looking at her face up until the final moment before his lips touched her lips. Their flat, bare chests would touch against each other as they embraced; there would be no protuberance to keep them apart.
Then his hand moved, in the imagining, up cheek to ear, and the hard, gold bullet in the post driven through her lobe scraped against the pad at his hand’s edge, and she came back to him as who she was. He backed up slightly, lifting his eyes up from her shadowed chest. She shifted as he moved, and their linked actions brought her right breast into the light. And she was symmetrical and ordered again and conventionally lovely.
She tossed a fold of his robe to the side, exposing him; she put the tips of her fingers under his scrotum and ran them out to his tip. She shook her breasts a little, and he reached down and took the whole of her right breast in his hand. He was hunched over, his left hand in the air above them holding the bottle, his right arm fully extended as he held her breast. Her head shifted a little, her lids still half closed over her eyes; her breath was very shallow. She brought her hand to her mouth and stuck out her tongue a little and wet her palm and her fingers. He watched her mouth, straining in himself in his position. She was weak and fading; she was half conscious, but the corner of her mouth was up, half twisted, leering, beautiful, and spacy. Were it not sickness it would be drug-lust, he thought. Or lust from desire he imagined; lust after desire fulfilled, lust from thankfulness, from the purest kind of relaxation. He squeezed her breast harder, ran his index finger over her nipple. She moved her wet hand and took his penis, her fingers cool and slippery. She pulled gently, watching herself do it. He watched her breast in his hand, her face, her hand moving. He looked to the glass doors and saw the rain and the shadow of the car and a new shadow the size of a man standing. The hair on the inside of his thighs raised up, though he was not sure of the shadow at all. He looked back at her breasts, her face, and her hand. His semen began to flow out, the first drops falling to her wrist, the rest running down her hand to reach them. As he came, the bottle high in his left hand was quaking; it was lighter, almost empty.
“Almost empty,” he grunted softly, and when she looked from her hand to his face, he nodded up to the bottle, directing her eyes there. She followed his look, and when she saw the bottle she got the point and shook a little in weak laughter. He laughed softly with her; he was still shaking and quivering, still coming, his penis lurching. And then the lurches had more space between them. He glanced at the glass doors. The figure was gone. They stayed as they were for what seemed to both of them a long time, his body bent over, her hand holding him, the semen slowly drying, the bottle in the air.
After a while he said, “Let me get a Kleenex, before it dries.” She had drifted off to sleep, but just to the edge of it, and she woke up without much transition. She let her hand fall from him.