The Same Hour, From The Other Side,,,,

The last ten minutes of the drive are the best part, and I've stopped pretending otherwise.
Not the whole drive. The last ten. The point where the radio stops mattering and I turn it off and the streetlights start being the ones I know, and I get to be nobody for a few minutes, no performance, no phone, just a man in a car with his hands on the wheel thinking about his wife in a black thing with straps, standing up because it sits wrong if she sits down.
She thinks I don't know she does that. She thinks the standing is invisible.
I park badly. I sit for a second with the engine off and let the cold start coming through the door, and I think about the fact that in about ninety seconds I'm going to have to be a person who can hold a conversation, and that it's going to cost me something.
Then the key in the lock, and the warm hits me, and there she is at the counter, and the whole day goes out of my head like water off a plate.
I look at her too long. Deliberately. Long enough that she has to decide whether to look away and decides not to.
"Long day?"
She says yes, and it's a terrible performance, and the badness of it is the sweetest thing that's happened to me all week. I take the glass out of her hand. She's made it the way I like it and hasn't touched it, and I don't say anything about that either, because if I say it out loud she'll get shy and the shyness is better kept quiet.
Her neck is cold from the shower. My mouth behind her ear, and the noise she makes goes straight down my spine and settles somewhere low and stays there.
Here's the part she doesn't know, the mirror of her hour: I'm not in control of this, not the way it looks. She thinks I come through the door with a plan. What I actually have is a list of things I know work and a deep animal fear of the moment the list runs out and then she turns into me and puts her forehead against my jaw, and the list stops mattering, and I can stop being competent and just be hungry.
The coat is a problem. I get it half off, one arm, and leave it hanging off the other because it's too far to the hook and I'm not walking anywhere. The straps come down off her shoulder with my teeth, and there's the freckle under her collarbone that only exists in this light, and the clock says seven past, and the drink is going flat.
I like this part best: the part where she stops helping. Where her hands come off me and go loose and she just lets me, entirely, with her whole weight, and I have to do all of it. Take the decisions. Hold the shape. Be worth the trust of a woman who has stopped steering.
Nobody tells you it's heavy. It's heavy and it's the only thing that makes me feel like a man and not a man-shaped arrangement of obligations.
I get her to the wall and she says my name once, low, and I feel it in my teeth.
Then nothing for a while. Then nothing for a good while after that.