Too Skinny, Too Small by Don Bajema Chapter 3

“Eddie. You didn’t sleep, did you?”
“Not much.”
Donna let a thick bathrobe drop from her shoulders to the bathroom floor then in two seconds of precise and smooth articulations she was almost immediately in a bra and panties. Sexy as hell that she could dress so fast, practiced in the art as they say.
I could breathe again when her foot slowly shut the door as she took position in front of the mirror over the sink.
This was the first I’d seen her in the flesh in the three days she’d been staying with me. Not that everything wasn’t appealing about Donna and she had me convinced she liked my company beyond being obligated to, and I loved having her around, but the idea of approaching her intimately just seemed to be for a far off future moment, and waiting for that moment was pretty satisfying in itself. I liked her ways-like her perfect timing as she appeared and disappeared from room to room in intervals of a few minutes to a couple hours always suiting the mood, never lingering and the way she said little but what she said was almost entirely unique. I never heard a phrase, or a pat term, no contemporary cultural reference in her words, if she were dressed she’d be anti-trend-she’d stick with classical lines, nothing over done, that was the way she dressed her speech and what she said usually had an element of something I’d never thought or heard before.
Her laugh was not frequent and never sustained. She had a wry smile when most women would laugh. She usually played music in the kitchen and once I saw her dancing in there in a nightgown letting her hair fall over the sunglasses she was wearing as though she didn’t want to see herself. Nothing showy about it, just on time, mildly suggestive but only to a certain point and only in an instant, she even took the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth once. She moved less as the trained dancer I learned later she’d been and more like a wayward trailer park girl coming down from her meds.
Donna is like watching a great movie, or reading a good book, she’s a walking wet dream as a penthouse companion.
Her eyes have a-dawn-of-mankind-predatory-intelligence behind them that manages to pretend pretty convincingly that she regards me as an equal, quietly respecting me like I was a poker player she was hesitant to bet against, all this-physical beauty disappearing and reappearing-caught dancing out of character-sleeping quietly beside me-laughing easily-generating a desire to know her, while feeling an uneasy sense in her of an experienced hunter behind a calm and constant deception.
I’m talking way too much about her. And you know what that means.
She knew I was afraid to touch her with any kind of intimacy. I was sure she knew why, but she offered no therapy, no coaxing me back to life.
She maneuvered her way around this problem as though it didn’t exist assuming an otherwise intimacy in her atmosphere as close and easy as though we’d been non-stop on a damp mattress for a day or two. I assumed my fear would pass, or be overwhelmed and one of these hours I’d have my wrists turned up beneath the small of her back and my face in her delta which was my recurring fantasy coming in flashing images superimposed on walls, counter tops, her reflection in the floor to ceiling windows, on almost anything I gazed at-I want to be at her table. I’m starving.
But I can’t imagine holding her in my arms, leaning in on her, throwing our hips together and shaking her surrendered body beneath me…because the last human intimacy I felt was on that field, and its left in me a trauma, I tremble at the thought of it, and its almost always on my mind as though the snap of his body, and then the way he flew, gangly disconnected like a puppet with cut strings amid the loudest hurricane howling in a stadium I’d ever heard thundering down and swirling the grass around my face guard like it meant to curse me for all my days and nights to come. And I knew what had happened immediately, its finality, its no going back and to get anywhere near that place again, to touch anyone, to bump into them on a sidewalk, to clutch them in bed just seems like it will cost me my sanity. I can still hear the stadium roaring beneath every sound, I fall asleep to it, I wake to it’s low roar-like the bellowing from an ancient battlefield.
You always feel that guttural storm. It goes right through you. The energy is directed only at you like an intense stare in a room but magnified by the thousands of distant eyes and howling stunned voices, like they’d made a discovery, or shared in the sensation of the impact, a kind of gigantic recognition-of you. And these, big play storms of approving human spirit are thrown over your shoulders like a King’s robe. Athletes live for it.
But this roar was beyond that, it was as though there was recognition on some deep level of horror, something they at first celebrated and leapt in the air over, and then wanted to retreat from, wanted nothing to do with as that same roar trailed off into a moan as though eighty thousands hands were suddenly lifted to cover eighty thousand gaping mouths. The roar went suddenly silent, it just ceased all at once, and a circle of players spread away from Chad Washington and me like oil on water.
I stood there, pointing down at him like a guilty kid, a guy shot it and it was in every paper in the country, raised on every screen, my hand pointing down at the player at my feet, my body sagged in defeat, my head turning slowly, I was still panting from the play, you can see the steam coming from my helmet, but Chad Washington’s chest wasn’t moving, his eyes stared straight overhead like he was looking at the Goodyear Blimp buzzing like a gigantic bee high over the field. There was steam coming from his body, like his spirit was lifting, but from his helmet nothing but a dark shadow. I was probably crying. I don’t know for sure because something separated from me on the impact, I can’t explain how much I knew and how instantly I knew it. I killed him. I knew not from my mind what had happened and it’s still kind of horrible to know that my body knew before my mind did. He was dead. I knew it though I couldn’t comprehend it. I know it now and I can’t comprehend it, I see Donna opening the bathroom door, suddenly stifling her smile, and stopping mid-sentence at what she had on her mind at what she must be reading on my face and walking to the table to pick up her book and moving toward me to put her long fingers on my shoulder before she crosses the window and goes into the bedroom, shutting the door, letting me be alone.

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