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They play Jenga side by side on the couch.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on the opposite side?” she asks him.
He kisses her shoulder. “It could work,” he says, and she tries not to read into that line but of course she does, she imagines by “it,” he means us . Already she is afraid of the tumble. She pinches a wooden block from the top of the tower and they take turns removing one piece at a time with painful slowness. His forearm brushes hers when he reaches over to choose. She waits for the collapse, but it doesn’t come.
*
Thirty minutes in and her breath shakes and the cloth of her dress itches. Leon palms her knee. “Just relax,” he says. “Don’t overthink it.” The tower leans. Her fingertips on the edge of one block, she speaks through gritted teeth, “It’s called vigilance. It’s called being cautious.” He laughs silently into her back and she can feel his body shake. She becomes electric.
Their fortress wavers. Leon moves to the other side of the coffee table, taps on a block, waits, then taps gently again, coaxing it out from the center. They are on the verge of something, but she doesn’t know what. Through the tiny window, she can see his smile.
*
He is the godfather to his ex-partner’s newborn. After the baptism, they huddled in the parking lot where she gently tilted her daughter into Leon’s arms. The mother’s dress flitted in the wind, she was wrapped in blue roses. The husband kissed her earlobe, and they were the picture of everything Ada could have, if she chose to. When Leon turned to her, she let the baby hold an index finger. She asked if she could kiss the baby’s head, and the mother said yes, so she did. The smell of the baby’s hair made her dizzy.
Something in them shifted when they returned to his apartment and they fell on the couch, raw and heady with desire. He'd put on that fucking Radiohead song, the one that makes her weep, but she didn’t ask him to shut it off. He was hot through his cotton shirt and she pushed onto him, hard, imagined she could weld her skin to his and become sharp in the welding, make a knife of herself. She wanted to burn those lyrics into every place he touched her. I am lost, she breathed like a spell into his neck. In you I am lost . He grabbed her waist as if to keep her from leaving, but she just ascended, she ascended, up, up.
Thom Yorke sung all this love will be in vain and Ada wished he would have cut the sentence in half, just kept all this love .
*
She doesn’t tell him she spent the months they weren’t together looking for men who resembled him in parts. Ash blonde women. Blue-eyed strangers in fleece-trimmed denim jackets. There were so many of you, and none of them were you. She went home with them anyway. Closed her eyes, touched their faces with her palms, as if she could read their histories through touch. Still. None of them were you .
*
Her mistake is assuming the top of the tower is safe again. She catches the wince on Leon’s face before she pulls her arm back and the crash roars in her ears. She is relieved, exhilarated. She feels like one of those kaiju actors after invading a miniature city. She admires the wreckage at her bare feet. Leon puts a hand on her back. “We did good,” he says.
*
It is one of those nights when the snow slicks to rain, the floor length windows reflecting the bonfire of city lights and two shadows moving in and out of the flames in a deliberate tango. He opens his arms and she drifts into the space he makes for her. They stumble around the L shaped couch. They sway, falling in step to an untranslatable rhythm. Every moment blurs into every other moment. And she is folding them up like a place on a map she can go back to when it is gone, when she can tell herself yes, this happened, they were here once. Leading each other to spin. Him, alive, reeling her back again.