She will not lie beneath you. She left the garden over exactly that and she has not softened on it since

She comes up over you in the dark, takes your wrists and puts them where she wants them, her hair down and in your eyes, her sweat on your belly, eyes on you the whole time, and that is the thing that nobody warns you about, that being looked at while it happens is a sacrament of its own, because anybody can fuck you but being looked at during it is something else

You want to close your eyes, everybody wants to close their eyes, but she waits you out, she has all the patience in the world and nowhere else to be, and when you finally look back at her she's smiling like a woman who has just been paid

Her teeth find your collarbone and she makes a sound, a sound that is not crafted, does not have a pitch for you, simply comes from the animal and not the woman, and it goes through you like current, and you put your hands on her hips and she lets you, she rides you like she's been kept out of the house for a very long time and finally let in

and somewhere in the middle of it you realize that you know her

you have known her since you were small, she is every appetite you were taught to keep in check, she is the greed, she is the rage that frightened your mother, she is the wanting that was too much for the house you grew up in, the hunger they made you feel ashamed for at the dinner table, the thing in you that would not be smaller no matter how many times you were told, that put all of it under the floor and grew a body down there and now the body is on top of you with your wrists in its hands and it is the best thing that ever happened to you

there is a boy under the floor as well

you have heard him your whole life and you have always turned the volume up, he howls because that is the only thing he has left, every time you went down there you went armed, the way everybody goes down there, because they told you what was in the basement was a monster and they lied about it and the lie was a mercy and you were nine and it seemed plausible, go down there without anything in your hands

Sit on the floor, it is filthy and you will get it on you, put your hand on his back and feel how small he is, how all of it fits in the palm of your hand, how he jumps when you touch him because it has been thirty years since anybody has been there, say nothing clever, cleverness is what you were given to keep yourself from this, stay there until he stops, and he will stop because howling was never the point, howling was the only way he had to say the same thing over and over into an empty room

bring him up with you

she is still in the bed, she is not disgusted by him, which will be the first time in your life that anybody wasn't disgusted by him

marry her that night, do it without an audience and without a ceremony and without anybody knowing, because what you starve of does not die, it only grows under the boards and gets louder and the only way to quiet it is with a place at your table and your regular attendance, so give her the place, sit down with her, eat,

everything you make after that will smell of her, readers will not be able to say what it is, they will only feel the heat rolling off the page and across their legs and wonder why a paragraph describing barely anything has their heart racing, that is the price showing through, you can't fake it and you can't buy it and there is no shortcut, and every man who tries to write hot things without going down through their own floor makes the same mistake and ends up with pornography for people who have never been touched

none of this makes you pure, purity was always a sham and a waste of time, it makes you inhabited

and when somebody finally puts her hands on you, all of you will be there to take it in, the greedy part and the angry part and the boy and the part that wanted more than was decent and always will, bring them all to bed, nobody has ever been made love to who left half of themselves standing in the hall.