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It was summer. Grace told herself this was a step up from her apartment, and in many ways it was. Children played outside. There was a patch under the bay window where flowers grew. The trailer was bigger than her apartment in the city, with plenty of room for her growing book collection.
Between the coming and going of the movers, someone let himself inside. She stared up at all seven feet of him, his head brushing against the ceiling, his skin scarred and veiny, and his eyes masked by an eccentric array of lenses. He smiled down at her, offering a potted white camellia bush. His name was Victor Gideon, he explained, and he was one of her neighbors. If she needed anything at all, she had only to call him. He wrote down his phone number on the back of a gas station receipt and pressed it into her hand before leaving.
Victor paced in his room that night. He never should have visited her. He should have moved away immediately. The thought threatened to disembowel him and leave a howling void within him.
He couldn't leave. He could never get away. He wouldn't try. He'd already bought her flowers. What was he doing? His heart moved before his mind, and he was slipping, and he hated it.
When she showed up two days later with a tray of brownies, he bade her come inside, and he showed her his collection of snakes. She was silent at first, surprised by the blacklit menagerie. She asked if they had names, and he laughed.
His living room was a mess of shelves and tanks, of stacks of periodicals—a messy coffee table and a lumpy leather couch shoved against the far wall. Blackout curtains covered the windows. The entire trailer reeked of scales and old substrate. A Baphomet poster decorated one wall, its lurid colors illuminated by the blacklight. He offered her coffee, and she demurred, stating that she had to run some errands.
He found her sitting on the grass by the creek, picking little white clovers. Victor sat down beside her without a word, but this time she didn't startle at his presence. Grace smiled at him. She was making a crown of clover flowers, carefully woven together. A book lay by her side, dog-eared and bookmarked.
He watched her hands silently. The sun shone overhead, and children were chasing each other in the playground across the gravel street. Before he could stop her, she pushed back his hood and placed the finished crown on his head. He felt a little foolish, but there was no mockery in her eyes, no cruelty in her smile.
She taught him how to find the best flowers and how to bind them together. There they sat until the sun reached the tops of the trailers and the shadows grew long. She went home arrayed in wild chicory and clover.
She was hesitant to accept his late-night invitation, but Victor sounded urgent.
His face was nearly pressed against the tank as he watched the egg slowly pulsate and break apart, hands on the glass, utterly silent and still. Grace studied him the way that he studied the snake hatchling in its struggle to become.
Slowly, as if not to startle him, she slipped her hand over his, fingers between fingers, the soft catch of his breath not unnoticed. He tore his eyes away from the scene on the other side of the glass, and she was smiling up at him. The little corn snake inside the tank struggled free of the eggshell, its eyes drinking in all the sights, its flicking tongue sensing things beyond its young imagination.
The rain during their walk was a gentle drizzle at first. Grace sheltered under her umbrella, and Victor under the hood of his coat. They returned to Grace's trailer, surrounded by peonies and hydrangeas in bloom. The air was perfumed by wet gravel and the fading lilacs of the neighbor's bushes. The rain grew heavier as they mounted the steps to her door.
She folded her umbrella. In the time it took her to open the door and let Victor inside, her hair became plastered to the sides of her face, and her jacket was soaked through. He grabbed a dishtowel from the kitchenette, and he tenderly wiped her face and hair. She took his hand and thanked him. He pressed his lips to her fingers. Then, he leaned in and kissed her lips. He pulled back when she gasped, ready to apologize, but she smiled and kissed him back.
When it finally happened in front of him, they were in the library. Grace had been looking at old microfiche slides. He came around the corner to share a book he'd found about Ottis Toole, and he noticed immediately that she was soaked in sweat. Her breathing was shallow. Her chest hurt. Her body was rigid, teeth clenched. Tears streamed down her face.
He pushed her chair back from the desk and stared into her eyes, licking his lips nervously. He tried to get her to take slow, deep breaths. Then he searched her purse, found the little white pills that she sometimes took. He gave her one, placing it on her lips. She dry-swallowed it and hugged herself, and he rubbed slow, small circles into her back as they waited for the medicine to take effect.
This all could have been prevented.
Wherever they walked, he held her hand. His grip wasn't too tight, but he needed to touch her, to brush his thumb against the back of her hand. When he couldn't hold her hand, he grasped her shoulder, let his hand slide down her back, and stroked her hair. In the theatre, he placed his hand on her knee, going no further. Still, he begged silently for her permission. He wanted in.
Grace knew this, though she said nothing until the power went out at the trailer park during a storm. He stood on her front step with candles and a lighter, with a heart full of longing. She let him inside, and she led him to her bedroom without a word.
She was so warm inside, so tight. They didn't say a word as he pushed into her slowly, his breath hitching. Her fingers dug into the scaly flesh of his back, gripping him as she spread her legs wider for him. The candlelight forgotten, the two of them found a rhythm all their own, slowly at first, between tender kisses.
Grace gasped as he stretched her open, as he pumped in and out of her. The darkness obscured his face, but she could swear his eyes were glowing. She didn't care, swept away by his breath against her neck, the way he whispered her name just once, an ardent invocation.
She brought a photo album with her to Victor's one day. She showed him her mother; she showed him her baby pictures. She turned each page carefully with one hand, holding his hand with the other.
He listened to her stories, and he held her as she cried. He'd had pictures of her, too, once. All of them were stuffed hastily into a manila folder and left inside the clinic as it burned to the ground with everyone in it.
They were at the arboretum, admiring a linden tree, when Grace said it first. She loved him.
She loved him.
Victor felt the heat rise in his cheeks, the cold prickles in his belly, and all up his spine. He trembled like the leaves of a cottonwood.
She loved him.
His grip on her hand tightened. He gathered her into his arms and held her close. She couldn't see his tears, but she could feel his heart hammering in his chest.
The wind howled and pried at the metal walls of the trailer, and the branches of the bare maple tree lashed at the roof. Autumn was turning into winter, foretold by the violent gale that had made their ears burn and their limbs shiver all day. Now, they were tucked away under piles of blankets in his bed. Victor couldn't sleep, knowing that Grace would find out on her own if he didn't tell her soon. How much deeper could things go before the confession would do irreparable damage? Would she ever forgive him? His arms tightened around her.
Grace opened her eyes. Something was bothering Victor. He lost sleep so easily when his mind was troubled. She closed her eyes and sighed, rubbing his back as she drifted off again. Whatever it was could wait for now. He would tell her in his own time.
Nothing worth watching was on TV that New Year’s Eve. They watched Silence Of The Lambs instead, with Grace seated comfortably in Victor’s lap. They ate shrimp and drank wine, and they kissed at midnight. She asked him what his New Year’s resolution was, and he told her that he couldn’t say. She kissed him again and told him hers was private, too. They made love as the credits rolled, and as Victor’s old VCR whirred to a gentle stop. They fell asleep on the couch under the soft glow of the television.
There was a warm spell in February. Grace and Victor sat outside her trailer, in front of a fire pit, covered in blankets, watching the flames.
Grace had noticed his silence as of late. She thought he was hurting inside. She'd waited for him to open up on his own, but the deluge never happened.
She sighed, and she slipped her hand into his. "Victor, what's wrong? You can tell me anything."
The wind blew the fleeting clouds over the moon. Victor took a deep breath before he spoke…