Chapter 17

Saoirse steps in front of the audience with a mixture of resigned control and little-girl fear. She takes the microphone from Emmit, manages a weak smile at the crowd, and tests the mic: “My name is Saoirse White. I used to write cozy mystery novels, but I’ve recently become something of a poet.”

Emmit, who’s made his way back to their table, whistles and claps his hands. Saoirse unlocks her phone and zooms in on the image of her notebook, the lines marred with smears of ink and a few—but not many—cross-outs.

“I’ll get right to it.” She clears her throat, willing herself to exude more confidence than she feels. “This is called ‘The Weight of Birds.’” From her position on the stage, she can see the waitress approaching Emmit, but the woman fails to gain his attention and leaves the wine on the table without having him taste it. It’s the intensity with which Emmit stares at her, waiting, that gives Saoirse the strength to begin.

She reads the first stanza with slight hesitation, but by the time she starts the second, her voice has taken on the quality of a professional, Sarah Whitman onstage at the suffragist banquet, reshaping judgments with each provocative metaphor and slick rhetorical question:

“What to do with a cracked egg

when it is empty?

Where to put the pieces of the shells that once held

the thing you swore you’d treasure most in this world

but which now contains nothing but disappointment

and regret,

an empty repository to hold

tears that shoot from your eyes like filoplumes,

pain like talons clipped too far into the quick,

and the blood your heart still pumps,

having no one to tell it

that the ghosts of birds do not bleed?”

By the poem’s closing lines, after Saoirse has recalled the pain she felt not when writing the words but during the events that inspired the words in the first place—“Weight is the endless night. / A night where birdsong is lost / to sleeping throats / and children are lost / to angry husbands, / whose words become speech bubbles / out of which whole flocks / spring forth.”—she feels she could take flight herself. She reads the final stanza in a voice both as plaintive as the purr of a starling and as sharp as a vulture’s beak:

“If a whip-poor-will calls out

in an empty forest,

does its trill fill the bellies

of every woman who wished to

feed off the expectations of others?

Or does the sound merely disappear?

If I call out

in an empty marriage

does my cry calcify

and deposit itself onto the outermost membrane,

an eggshell stronger than steel to those

screaming for life from outside it

but liable to break from the inside

by a breath so silenced

it’s rendered as light as a feather?”

Saoirse thinks the crowd cheers, but she sees only Emmit.

Brava, he mouths at her.

She’s walking to him, winding through the high tops. When she reaches their table, he stands and pulls her to him. He is kissing her before she can think, before she can say anything, before she can react. She is stunned, and then she is kissing him back.

The room falls away. The applause is superfluous. The world, as she knows it, disappears.

The door to the hotel room smashes against the wall as their bodies knock against it. They kiss, Saoirse grabbing the sides of Emmit’s face, feeling the smoothness of his cheeks, holding him, pulling herself against him. His hands are in her hair, on her neck, his fingers brushing against her skin, soft wisps of his hair tickling her forehead. Then the door slams shut, and they are ensconced behind the walls of this room on the top floor of a Hilton, or perhaps it’s a Marriott; she’s already forgotten which chain occupied the lot closest to the restaurant when they stumbled out of it, giggling like teenagers, drunk and railing against the weather.

Emmit has thrown his coat to the floor and is ripping off hers. She is pushed up against some low and inconveniently placed piece of furniture. He grabs her face again, and she is breathing hard through the kissing, letting out little gasps of pleasure. A mirror behind her slides noisily on its hook as her back knocks up against it.

He pulls away, stares into her eyes. She runs a hand over his cheek, feels the dampness there, wants to lick the remnants of rain off him with her tongue. “What?” she whispers, when he continues to stare.

A flash of the crooked smile. He’s unsure of himself, which makes him even more attractive. “No, it’s just ... maybe it’s too much. Too fast.”

“Oh, wow,” she says, and her hand drops from his face to his shoulder then trails heavily down his chest. “I didn’t think that was something guys typically said.” She steps away from him, toward the door. “Do you want me to run downstairs, get us some more wine?” She’s not sure why she says this. Emmit seems merely to be making sure she’s okay with what’s happening, not wishing he had another drink. The last thing she wants is to leave this room, to be anywhere but with him. She wants more of him. More. And more. And more. Still, she feels an overwhelming need to relieve his anxiety, perhaps to assuage her own.

She turns back and gestures to where shadows still darken the room. “Or, maybe there’s a minibar?”

The nervous smile again. A breath of disbelieving laughter. He steps deeper into the room, into the shadows, then turns and sinks down onto the bed. He looks at her in a way that is carnal and sweet and pleading. “No,” he says, chest rising. Falling. Saoirse swears she can hear his heart beating. “Just you. I just want you.”

She can’t think. Cannot breathe for the pure longing for him. She sucks in a hot, desperate breath and goes to him. He stands before she can fall onto him, scoops her up and turns, lowering her onto the bed.

His kisses are like a rush of air after being suffocated. Relief. Release from everything that’s been in her head for nine months. For nine years. She’s taking her clothes off, helping him with his. He keeps flashing her that irresistible half smile, as if it’s a nervous tic. It makes her want to sit back and study him, memorize his every mannerism, if only this wasn’t at odds with her physical need to be against him, part of him, as close to him as humanly possible.

They melt into one another. Her hands are in his hair, and it is soft, so much softer than she would have imagined. Everything about him is unexpected and wonderful and warm, and that’s before his kisses travel elsewhere on her body, and the strange, warm glow from some building across the street streaming in through the window lights his face as if he were an actor in a movie, highlighting his perfect skin and his perfect lips and his perfect hair. The moments stretch, and the night takes on the quality of a dream, but it’s so much better than a dream because it’s shared, he is in the dream with her, experiencing the same nighttime logic, floating in this bubble of wine and lust and warmth and ... something. Something more. She can’t, won’t, put her finger on it, but it’s close to perfection. As close as she’s ever been. It’s a dream within a dream, a dream in the poetic sense of the word. Magic. Euphoria. Transcendence.

She gives in to the bliss. Again.

And again.

And again.