The forgetting runs in the women in my family like bad eyesight. My grandmother. Then my mom. At fifty, my mom didn’t just forget things, she forgot herself. She forgot her quiet sense of humour, her acceptance of people, her love of the men she called the Dylan Boys, meaning the poet and the musician. In the end, she swore and raged and pinched.
I’m still holding the pill when I hear Raina come in. I drop it back into the envelope and slide it quickly under the pillows.
Downstairs, Raina slicks off her raincoat and stamps her feet on the rug. “Ana? Anabel?”
“Up here,” I call. “In bed.”
Raina laughs, her big horse laugh that comes from her belly and booms through the house. Such a little person to make such a big sound. “Of course you are.”
It’s true. All I want to do lately is fuck. Fuck and be fucked and then, finally, lie in our big wide bed with Raina on one side, Mad on the other. It’s like my biological clock is ringing overtime, only it’s not for having kids. It’s for having orgasms, for having the taste of skin in my mouth, for the feeling of being filled once, twice, three times more.
I lean back against the pillow, listen to Raina’s stockinged feet pitter-patting up the stairs. The smell of fall enters the room before she does. Her curly salt-and-pepper hair is damp with rain. “Sleeping?” she asks.
“Not with that loud-ass laugh of yours booming through the house,” I say.
“Oh, I’m so sure,” she says. Her eyebrows go up — she’s caught sight of my new lingerie. A lacy bra that’s almost blue, almost grey. I ordered it online and forgot what colour it was until I put it on this afternoon. “Nice,” she says. “Birthday gift?”
“Do you like it?”
“Mmm. .” She sits on the side of the bed and rubs her hands together. Where I am dark and tall and thin, Raina is white and short, shaped like an alabaster violin. Her hair, now more salt than pepper, seems the same colour as her washed-out blue eyes, as her pale skin. She has on a soft orange skirt that I like — one that looks like fall — and I slip one hand beneath the hem, find the top edge of her thigh-highs. Beneath my fingertips, the band is raised in some kind of pattern I can’t make out.
She raises the hem of her skirt enough so I can see the top of them — it’s some kind of flower — I can’t remember the name — and I slip one finger beneath the fabric, feeling the cool of her skin. Raina shivers, maybe from my touch, maybe from the cold she’s brought in with her.
“Fucking freezing and pissing out there, all at once,” she says. “Lucky you’re not out in it.”
There’s nothing to say to that, so we sit in the silence for a moment. Raina’s hands make a fast, scritch-scritch noise as she tries to warm them. I love having her here. Mad and I asked her to move in, once, a long time ago, but she said no. And it’s worked this way: me and Mad here; her in her little condo downtown, spending the weekends with us. Although, lately, it’s been more than that. I wonder if her biological clock feels something too.
“How was your day?” She wants to know if I forgot anything, but she doesn’t ask.
I reach up with my free hand and run my fingers along her eyebrows, notice a bit of grey there too. I don’t tell her about the phone, how I tried to call Mad at work and got his old college office, the one he left years ago.
“Fine,” I say. “Better now. Even better in about, oh, half an hour?”
She laughs again. It’s so big it sounds like it belongs outside. “That when we’re expecting the Mad-Dog?” She’s called him that since the first time we all had sex, when he ground his teeth and nearly growled out an orgasm. Now we laugh about it, but still when she says it, I get a visual memory of us all that first time, playing like puppies in the big bed, how young we all were, how free. Raina’s hair was down to her ass, and Mad had pulled it like reins while he was fucking her from behind. I hope I never forget the curve of her neck when he pulled her backwards into him. Or the way she moaned my name, beckoning me closer.
“Ana?” Raina prods me lightly with a finger.
“Hm?” I’m rolling down one of her thigh-highs, watching the white length of her thigh being revealed bit by bit. I like moments like this, when I don’t even know what kind of underwear she’s wearing — if any at all — but her thighs are bare and free. Exposed to me and my roving fingers.
“Mad-Dog? Coming soon, yes?” she asks again.
“Oh. Yes,” I say. “Half an hour or so.”
“Guess I have time for a warm-up shower then?” Raina asks.
I don’t want her to leave me, now that she’s here, but I nod.
She wiggles her cold fingers at me. “Jack Frost be-gone,” she says. “Warm Raina be-back.”
“Warm Raina,” I say. “Sounds like the perfect weather for a vacation.”
When she kisses the tip of my nose, her lips make me shiver all the way through.
Out of the shower, Raina is warm-warm and naked-soft against my back. She spoons me up in the hug of her arms, and we lie that way for a while. My ass fits against the front of her perfectly and her small, round breasts press into my back. She used my lotion, and it makes her smell like oranges and chocolate.
Smells. Lately, I want to smell everything that’s possible to smell in the world, to hold it in my mind like the key to a dissolving door. I turn my head to sniff her shoulder, the clean crook of her armpit. I will the scents, those invisible pheromones or atoms or whatever they are, into my nose and brain. I pray for them to stay.
“Shall we wait for Mad?” Raina asks, her palms already sliding over my shoulders, down my arms. Her touch is soft, so unlike Mad’s, the small callouses on her palms the only sharp edges at all.
“Since when do we wait for Mad?”
“Thought I’d ask,” she says.
I reach around until the globe of her ass is in my hand, and pull her closer to me. “Don’t,” I say. Meaning: don’t wait for Mad. Don’t ask. Don’t change the pattern. We’ve never waited for Mad. We’re not about to start now.
She kisses the back of my neck, the side of my shoulder. Her hands find the edges of my bra. “Really nice,” she whispers, as she tucks her fingers beneath the lace. She makes soft circles around my hardening nipples, and I move so she has better access.
“You should see the thong,” I whisper.
“Later,” she says, her voice heated around the puckered point of my skin. “Roll.”
I roll to face her and then she’s kissing me the way she does, her tongue meeting mine. She used my toothpaste too; she tastes like mint and the mochas she drinks. Soy something-or-others.
She unhooks the bra and pulls it off me. Then her fingers start again, circling my nipples until they crinkle.
“So, birthday girl, what’s your pleasure?”
“It’s all pleasure,” I say and, for the moment, it’s true. Her warm body here, the way she’s touching me, the knowledge that Mad is due to join us any second.
“Hmph,” she says. She slides down, runs her tongue along the underside of my breast and then down my stomach. She looks up at me as she moves her tongue between my thighs. I spread my legs to let her in. I’m not wet yet, but the tip of her tongue slipping between my lips is enough to start the flow. And then she presses, laps, opens me. I love the softness of her tongue and lips, how different from Mad’s often scratchy chin. She presses, slow rasps of her flat tongue between me, before she edges the very tip lightly to my clit, round and round and round.
I’m so lost in the pleasure of Raina’s strokes that I don’t hear Mad come in. Suddenly, I open my eyes, and he’s there, leaning against the doorjamb.
“Hi, ladies,” he says, that half-smile punctuating his words as he watches us, hip canted to the wood.
After all this time, such a beautiful man. Ever the professor, just as he was when we met, dressed in jeans and a brown corduroy jacket. Glasses now, and a bit of salt in his hair too, just at the sides.