Lovely

There is a sound the socks make on the wood — cartoonish, slick and fast — and then you are not standing anymore.

You get your left arm out toward the rail and you feel your fingers close on it and then not close, and then the stairs come up and take you at the base of your spine.

The rest is fast. Two more steps on your side, your elbow finding the wall, your shoulder finding the floor.

Then you are sitting at the bottom with your legs out in front of you and one sock hanging off your toes and hot coffee everywhere — the wall, the floor, soaking through your thigh where the mug came down with you.

The noise you make is not a word.

It comes out low and it keeps going, and by the time it stops your eyes are already spilling over, and you have not decided to cry, and you are crying.

Upstairs, the bed creaks and then his feet hit the floor and he’s already saying your name.

—

He comes down fast and stops three steps up, and you know he’s seen the coffee before he’s seen you, because there’s a half second where nothing happens.

Then he’s on the floor.

Not lifting you. Sitting down on the wet hardwood in gym shorts, one hand going to the back of your head, the other flat on the floor beside your hip.

“Hey. Hey. I’m right here.” His hand moves in your hair. “Don’t move yet, okay? Just let me look at you first.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you are.” He says it like he means it, and he keeps going anyway. “Humor me. Shoulder.”

He presses. You shake your head.

“Elbow’s bleeding a little. Not bad, we’ll clean it up.” His hand travels down. “Neck? Anything in your neck?”

“No.”

“Did you hit your head. And I need you to actually think about it, not just say no.”

You think about it. “I didn’t hit my head. I landed on my side.”

“Okay. Good.” He exhales. “That’s good.”

He gets his fingers around your wrist, the one that went for the rail, and turns it. You make a sound and he stops immediately and holds it where it is.

“Yeah, okay. We’re not doing that anymore.” He lowers your hand to your thigh and covers it with his. “You caught yourself on the rail?”

“I tried to.”

“You did, though. That’s why it’s your wrist and not your face.”

Then his face changes. “Is that hot? Baby, is that coffee still hot?”

“It’s not that hot anymore.”

He’s already got the waistband of your shorts in two fingers, pulling the fabric off your skin. It’s pink. It’s not blistered. He looks at it longer than he needs to.

“You’re wearing socks on these stairs,” he says.

“I’m aware.”

“I know you’re aware. I’m not — ” He stops himself. Puts his hand flat on your knee. “You scared me.”

The tears are coming down slower now. You wipe your face with the back of the hand that works and get coffee on your cheek doing it.

“You’ve got — ” He reaches up and thumbs the coffee off your cheek.

—

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s get you up.”

“I can get up.”

“I know.” He’s already standing. He gets a hand under your good arm anyway. “Slow.”

You go slow. You get your feet under you and your weight over them and you’re up, and for about a second it’s fine.

Then it isn’t.

It comes up through the base of your spine and takes your breath, and you hear yourself say something with no vowels in it and grab a fistful of his shirt.

“Whoa. Hey.” His arm comes around you. “What. What is it.”

“My — ” You can’t get to the end of it. “Give me a second.”

“Where.”

You put your hand at the small of your back, low, lower than that, and he watches you do it and his mouth flattens out.

“You landed on it.”

“Yeah.”

“On the edge of a stair.”

He bends and puts one arm behind your knees and lifts you before you can get anything out, and you make a noise and get both arms around his neck, and he turns and takes you into the living room like you weigh nothing, and steps directly through the coffee on the way.

He gets you down onto the couch on your left side, which is the only way you can be, and puts a pillow under your head, and then he stands there over you with his hands on his hips looking at the coffee in the hall and the coffee on his shorts and the coffee soaking through the shoulder of your shirt where he carried you.

“Don’t clean it up. It’s my mess.”

“I’m gonna clean it up once I get you settled.” He crouches down in front of the couch so his face is level with yours. “Do you want ice, or do you want me to sit here first.”

“Sit here first.”

He sits down on the floor.

—

He brings ice wrapped in a dish towel. He brings ibuprofen and a glass of water and stands there while you take it. He goes back for a second pillow and gets it under your hip, and then takes it out again when you tell him it’s worse, and puts it under your knees instead.

He wipes up the hall. He puts your shirt in the wash. He comes back with one of his, and helps you into it, and gets your arm through the sleeve on the wrist side without you having to move the wrist at all.

Then he sits on the floor with his back against the couch and his phone in his hand and reads about tailbones for a long time.

“Coccyx,” he says, at some point.

“I know.”

“Okay, so it’s four vertebrae, fused. Sometimes five. And it says here it’s vestigial, which means — it’s a tail. It’s what’s left of a tail. Everybody’s just walking around with a leftover tail at the bottom of their spine and nobody knows until they fall down the stairs.”

“Joe.”

“They can’t cast it. There’s nothing to cast.” He keeps scrolling. “You can’t splint it, you can’t wrap it, there’s no — ” He stops. Reads. “It says four weeks.”

“Okay.”

“It says four to eight weeks and to take ibuprofen and sit on a cushion.”

“Okay.”

“That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire — that’s the medical advice.” He turns his head and looks up at you over the edge of the cushion. “Sit on a cushion.”

“I’m gonna be fine.”

He doesn’t answer that. He looks at his phone again, at whatever page he’s on, and then he puts it face down on the rug.

He orders a donut pillow. You don’t know that until later that afternoon when it shows up at the door, but he orders it right then, sitting on the floor, without saying anything about it.

Then he gets up on his knees and turns around so he’s facing you, forearms folded on the couch cushion by your ribs, and he looks at you for a while.

“I can’t do anything,” he says.

“You’ve done like nine things.”

“I moved a pillow around.” He puts his chin down on his arms. “Y/N, I did the laundry wrong. You had to yell the settings at me from in here.”

“You did the laundry.”

“Badly.”

“There’s nothing else for you to do right now. Just sit here and be with me.”

He stays where he is. You reach out with your good hand and get your fingers into the hair at the back of his neck, and he lets his head come down onto the cushion beside your shoulder.

“Okay,” he says, into it.

—

He turns his face into your shoulder and kisses it there, through his own shirt, and then he sits back on his heels and takes your wrist.

He doesn’t turn it this time. He holds it the way it wants to be held, and he brings it up, and he puts his mouth on the inside of it.

Your face goes before you know it’s going.

It’s not the crying from the floor. It’s the last of it, and it comes up fast and stops almost as fast, and he holds still with his lips against your pulse until it does.

“There we go,” he says. “Get it out.”

“I’m crying because this is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done and I feel stupid saying this out loud, but I think it’s actually helping.”

He doesn’t laugh at you. He kisses the same spot again, lower, at the base of your palm.

“Yeah?”

“A little.”

“Okay,” he says, and keeps going.

He works his way up. The heel of your hand. The inside of your forearm where nothing’s wrong. Your elbow, which is scraped open and cleaned and has a bandaid on it that he put on crooked, and he kisses the skin next to it because he can’t kiss the bandaid.

“Roll toward me a little.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a mark on the back of your leg and you don’t know about it.”

You didn’t know about it. He gets his hand under your calf and lifts, and there’s a line across the back of it, purple already, the width of a stair edge. You look at it for a second and then you have to stop looking at it.

He puts his mouth on it. He stays there.

“Joe.”

“Mm.”

“What are you doing.”

He doesn’t lift his head right away. When he does, he says it like he’s telling you the time. “My mom used to do this.”

You don’t say anything.

“Anything happened, she’d kiss it. Didn’t matter what it was. Broke my thumb in sixth grade and she kissed my thumb.” He sets your calf back down on the couch. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It’s a little stupid.” He moves your hair off your face with two fingers. “It worked, though. Every time.”

He’s quiet then, and you can see him look down toward the wrong end of the couch, at the part of you he’s been avoiding this whole time, and you watch him get an idea about it.

“What if I rubbed it.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Not on it. Around it.” His hand is already hovering. “Everything around it’s gonna lock up by tonight, and then that’s gonna hurt worse than the actual—”

“Joe.”

“I’m just saying I have hands.”

“You are not massaging my tailbone.”

“That’s not what I said.” He’s fighting a smile now. “I said around it. There’s a difference.”

“There’s no difference.”

“There’s a considerable difference.”

You laugh. It hurts, which makes you laugh harder, which hurts more, and you get a hand up to make him stop before he says anything else, and he catches it and kisses that too — the back of it, once, without ceremony, like he’s just going to keep doing this now.

“Lie down,” you say.

“Where.”

“Here. Behind me. There’s room.”

He looks at the couch and he looks at you and you can see him running the math on whether he can get behind you without moving you.

“I’ll be careful.”

“I know you will.”

—

The doorbell gets him up an hour later.

He brings the box in, opens it in the middle of the living room floor with a kitchen knife, holds it up, and looks at it, and neither of you says anything for a second.

“It’s a pool float,” you say.

“It’s medical.”

“It’s a pool float, Joe.”

He puts it on the end of the couch and doesn’t make you use it yet.

You eat dinner sideways, which is not a thing anyone should have to do, and he doesn’t try to make you sit up for it. He eats his on the floor with his back against the couch so you’re not looking at the top of his head.

At nine he turns off the lamp and puts something on you’ve already seen four times, volume at eleven, and then he stands at the end of the couch and works out the logistics.

“Okay. Don’t help.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

He gets a knee up on the cushion by your feet. Then a hand on the back of the couch. He comes over you and down behind you in one long movement with his weight on his arm the whole way, and the couch takes him and you don’t move an inch.

“See,” he says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He gets an arm under your neck and the other one over your waist and pulls you back into him until there’s no space anywhere.

The room goes blue and then dark and then blue again from the TV. You stop following it somewhere in the second act.

His hand comes off your waist and goes low, and lower, and the heel of it starts working in slow circles into the muscle beside your spine, four inches above where it actually hurts.

You don’t say anything.

He doesn’t either. He doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t get closer to it, and he doesn’t ask, and after a while your breathing does what it does when you’re not in charge of it anymore.

He feels it happen. His mouth finds the back of your head.

“There you go,” he says, to nobody.

—

You come up once, later, for no reason.

The TV’s still going, the same show, a different episode — the one after, or the one after that. His hand isn’t on your back anymore. It’s around your wrist, and he’s holding it against his chest, and he’s kissing it.

The inside of it, the same spot, over and over, because that’s the one he can reach and he’s not done trying.

You don’t open your eyes. You don’t tell him you’re awake.

He does it again. And again after that.