Letter 02 — The Stranger

Dear Lilith,

I have spent three summers proving to myself that I am not a fanciful woman. I am the one my colleagues call when a paper needs its numbers checked twice. I have a drawer of rejected grant proposals and a filing cabinet of field notes in handwriting so cramped even I have trouble reading it back. So you will understand that what I am about to tell you cost me something to write down, because I still do not have a chart that explains it, and I have never once in my life let a man have the last word before I understood exactly what he was.

I was thirty-four that summer, camped outside Socorro with two graduate students and a rented reel-to-reel recorder, chasing potsherds by day and, some nights, chasing something else. The dig was Ancestral Puebloan, a scatter of room blocks under a mesa that dropped its shadow across our trailers every evening like a held breath. The other thing, the thing I never put in the grant reports, was a radio anomaly I'd first caught three years earlier on a receiver I kept tuned low at night out of habit, a leftover from a summer job at the Array. A signal that showed up only in July, only after 2 a.m., only when the monsoon clouds were stacked high enough over the Magdalenas to make the air taste like a struck match. It never repeated the same way twice. It never lasted past first light. My advisor called it terrestrial interference and told me to stop wasting recording tape on it. I kept recording it anyway.

That July the storm took its time. Three weeks of thunderheads building over the mountains every afternoon and refusing to break, the kind of dry lightning that makes the whole desert smell like a warning. My swamp cooler had given up somewhere around the Fourth, and I'd taken to sleeping with every window in the trailer open and a bandanna wrung out in ice water across my throat, useless work with sweat sliding down my spine and red dust gritting between my teeth no matter how many times I rinsed my mouth. My students had driven into town for the weekend. I was alone with the reel-to-reel, a lukewarm six-pack, and my notebook, and at eleven that night the signal came on the receiver stronger than I had ever caught it, a low, deliberate pulse that made the hair stand up on my arms even before the storm finally broke.

It broke hard. Rain on a tin roof outside Socorro does not patter, Lilith, it detonates, and I stood at my screen door with a beer sweating in my hand watching lightning peel the sky apart over the mesa, and that is when I saw him walking up the wash road with no truck behind him and no flashlight in his hand, moving through sheeting rain like a man crossing a familiar room in the dark.

I'll admit the first thing I felt was fear, because a sensible woman camped alone in the desert should be afraid of a man appearing out of a storm with no vehicle for twenty miles in any direction. My first thought, God forgive me, was that he moved like the signal sounded. Unhurried. Certain. As though he had all the time that had ever existed and had simply chosen, tonight, to spend some of it walking toward me.

"You're going to want to come inside," I called out, because it was true and because it gave me something to do with my voice besides let it shake.

He came up the two metal steps unbothered by the rain sluicing off him, and standing under my porch light he was not what I expected a stranger conjured by static and thunderheads to look like. Ordinary height, dark hair plastered flat, a jaw that could have belonged to any rancher's son in three counties. It was only his eyes that stopped me, a color I did not have a word for, something between storm-glass and the blue-white hash you get on an oscilloscope when a signal is strong and clean and coming from very far away.

"Sandra," he said. Not a question. I had not told him my name.

"You have me at a disadvantage," I said, which was the driest, most professor-ish sentence I could produce with my heart going like a struck drum.

"Vlatko," he said, and something in the way he offered it, plain, unadorned, made me understand he was giving me the only true thing about himself he had to give that night, and that I should take it as a gift rather than an answer.

I let him in because the storm was reason enough, and because some traitor part of my brain, the part that had spent three years defending a signal nobody else believed in, recognized something in him before the rest of me caught up. He stood dripping on my linoleum while I found a towel, and when I turned back he was looking at the reel-to-reel on my card table with an attention that scanned it top to bottom like a man calibrating an instrument, not admiring a curio.

"You've been listening," he said.

"To interference," I said. "My advisor's word, not mine."

"What's yours?"

I should have deflected. Instead I told him, because it was midnight and the power was flickering and I had wanted to say it out loud to another human being for three years. "I think it's a message. I think it's been trying to say something and I've only ever caught the edges of it."

He looked at me then the way I imagine a man looks at a woman he has been waiting a very long time to finally stand in front of, and it went through me low and sudden, arousal I had no business feeling for a stranger who had walked out of a lightning storm, and no ready explanation for either. "You've been very patient," he said.

"I've been called worse."

"I mean it as praise." He said it slowly, like every word had been chosen out of a much larger set and set down with care. "Most people stop listening long before they hear anything worth hearing."

I handed him the towel instead of answering, because my throat had gone tight and I did not trust what would come out of it. He dried his hands, not his hair, which struck me even then as strange, a small tell I filed away and did not examine. When he set the towel down his fingers found my wrist, not gripping, just resting there, thumb tracing once along the inside where my pulse was going too fast for a woman who wanted to claim she was unaffected.

"You're cataloguing me," he said, and there was warmth in it, not accusation.

"Occupational hazard."

"Go on, then." He didn't let go of my wrist. "Catalogue."

I made myself look at him properly, the way I would look at a find I did not yet trust, cross-referencing every detail before I let myself believe it. Rain-dark hair, a scar through one eyebrow, hands that had calluses in the wrong places for a rancher and the right places for something I couldn't name. When I lifted my eyes back to his, he was watching me with a patience that had a physical weight to it, pressing low in my belly, and I understood with total clarity that this man was in no hurry at all, and that his lack of hurry was itself a kind of hand laid flat against my skin.

"You're not from around here," I said, which was the smallest, safest true thing I could offer.

"No," he agreed. "I've come a long way to find you listening."

I should have asked what he meant. I asked instead, "Are you going to kiss me, or are we going to stand here in my kitchen all night discussing my listening habits," because three years of careful patience with an anomaly nobody else believed in had left me with very little patience remaining for a man who could clearly see exactly what he was doing to me and seemed entirely willing to keep doing it slowly.

Something moved behind his eyes, amusement, maybe, or a recognition that startled him as much as it startled me. "Not yet," he said.

"Vlatko."

"I want you to want it more than you want it right now," he said, low, and drew his thumb once more over my pulse before he let my wrist go. "It's a poor kind of gift, taken too early."

I laughed, a short disbelieving sound, because I had never in my life had a man tell me to my face that he intended to make me wait and mean it as generosity rather than a game. "That's a very strange thing to say to a woman standing in a trailer with wet hair at midnight."

"You've spent three years listening to something you couldn't prove existed," he said. "I don't think strange frightens you the way it frightens other people."

He wasn't wrong, and the fact that he knew he wasn't wrong, that he had clocked something true about me in under ten minutes that most men never managed in ten months, knocked the careful tuning I'd kept locked in my chest since graduate school clean off its frequency. I stepped back before I could do something reckless like haul him down by his wet collar, and busied myself pulling two jars down from the cupboard, pouring what was left of a bottle of mediocre bourbon I kept for exactly this kind of emergency, though I had never once imagined the emergency would look like him.

We sat across the card table from each other while the storm worked itself into a second wind outside, lightning strobing white through the screens, and he asked me questions no one had asked me in years. Not about my research, though he asked about that too, patient and precise, but about the moment I first knew I wanted to spend my life listening to things other people had stopped believing in. I told him about my father's shortwave radio, about a summer at fifteen when I caught a fragment of a numbers station out of somewhere behind the Iron Curtain and felt, young as I was, the particular ache of hearing something meant for someone, anyone, and wondering if it might have been meant for me. He listened the way I had always wanted to be listened to and rarely was, without reaching for his own story to fill the silence, without waiting for his turn.

"You've been so careful," he said at one point, turning his jar in slow circles on the table, "cataloguing everyone else's signal. When was the last time someone listened for yours?"

I didn't have an answer, and the not-having sat in my chest like a stone dropped in still water, rings moving outward long after the stone itself had gone still.

He reached across the table then, not for my hand but for a strand of hair stuck damp to my jaw, and tucked it back with two fingers, slow enough that I felt every fraction of the movement, the drag of his knuckle along my cheekbone, the pause before he withdrew his hand entirely instead of letting it settle where I wanted it. My breath caught and broke, small and involuntary, and I hated myself a little for how transparent it was.

"Not yet," he said again, gentler this time, and something about the repetition, the way he clearly meant to keep saying it until I understood he wasn't teasing so much as building something with more architecture than I was used to, made my whole body go tight with wanting.

"You're going to be the death of me," I said, which was meant to be wry and came out unsteady.

"I'm going to be very good to you," he said. "That's not the same thing, though I understand why it might feel like it right now."

The storm broke properly then, thunder close enough to rattle the trailer's thin walls, and the last of the porch light guttered and died, leaving us the kerosene lamp and its small circle of gold. He rose and came around the table, and I rose to meet him because staying seated while he approached felt like a concession I wasn't ready to make, though the moment I was standing I understood I had walked myself directly into range.

He didn't kiss me. He put one hand flat against the trailer door behind my shoulder, caging me there without ever actually touching me, and looked at me with an attention so complete it was its own kind of contact, and I felt my back find the door, felt the cheap hollow-core wood give slightly under my shoulder blades, and understood I had been pinned by a man who hadn't laid a finger on me yet.

"Ask me," he said.

"For what?"

"You know for what."

I did know, and pride kept my mouth shut for three full seconds before the ache low in my belly overruled every instinct toward composure I had left. "Kiss me," I said, and it came out rough, nothing left of the dry professor's voice from an hour before.

He kissed me then, and it was not what I expected from a man who had spent an hour proving how much restraint he owned. It was slow at first, the barest drag of his mouth against mine, testing, and then I fisted my hand in his still-damp shirt and pulled and he made a low sound against my lips and gave me more, his free hand finally, finally sliding along my jaw to tilt my head where he wanted it, his mouth opening mine with a thoroughness that left my knees genuinely unsteady. I felt the door at my back and his body a scant inch from mine, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, not yet close enough to press against, and when I tried to close that inch myself he caught my hip in one hand and held me a fraction back, a wall of controlled distance I strained against and could not close.

"Patience," he murmured against my mouth, amused, wrecked-sounding himself now, which was the only thing that kept me from telling him exactly what I thought of his patience.

"I have been patient for three years," I said. "I have logs. I have tape reels. I am fresh out."

That startled a laugh out of him, low and real, and something in his control cracked enough that he finally let his hips find mine, let me feel exactly how unaffected he was not, and I gasped at the hard, unmistakable line of him against my stomach through wet denim. His mouth found my throat, my pulse, the same spot his thumb had traced an hour earlier, and he bit gently there, soothed it with his tongue, and I heard myself say his name for the first time, testing the shape of it, wanting.

He walked me back from the door with his hands finally, finally moving, working the buttons of my damp shirt with a deliberateness that felt engineered to drive me out of my mind, one button, a pause to watch my face, another button, his mouth finding the new skin he'd bared before his fingers moved on. By the time we reached the narrow bed at the back of the trailer I was in nothing but my underwear and gooseflesh, and he still had his shirt half-buttoned, and I reached to finish the job myself because if I had to watch him take his time with one more fastening I thought I might actually combust.

He let me undress him, standing patient under the kerosene light while I worked, and when I got my hands finally, finally on bare skin I found him warmer than any man had a right to be after walking a mile through cold rain, warm like something that generated its own weather. I ran my palms up over the planes of his chest, catalogued a scar at his ribs I didn't ask about, felt him hold very still under my hands the way I imagine something wild holds still when it has decided, deliberately, to be gentled.

He laid me back on the bed with a hand spread wide against my sternum, easing me down rather than pushing, and knelt over me in the lamp's small gold light with an expression I did not have an instrument sensitive enough to read. "Still cataloguing?" he asked, low, and I realized I'd been staring.

"Trying to," I admitted. "You don't run like anything I know how to measure."

"Good," he said, and bent to kiss a line down my sternum, unhurried, his mouth finding my ribs, my navel, the crest of my hip, each stop lingering far longer than strictly necessary until I was arching under nothing more than the drag of his lips and the promise of where they were heading.

When he finally settled between my thighs I thought, foolishly, that the waiting was over. I was wrong. He kissed the inside of one knee, then the other, worked his way up with maddening slowness while I fisted the sheet in one hand and reached for him with the other, and he caught that hand and laced his fingers through mine and held it against my hip, a gentle, immovable anchor.

"Vlatko," I said, half plea, half warning.

"I know," he said against my inner thigh, breath warm, and it was the first time all night his voice had lost any of its steadiness. "I've wanted this longer than you'd believe."

Then his mouth found me properly, and every thought I had about instruments and measurements and three years of tape reels went white and formless. He was thorough the way a slow scan across a dial is thorough, unhurried and exact, slow open-mouthed pressure exactly where I needed it, drawing back the instant I got close, and I sobbed out something between a laugh and a curse because of course, of course the man who'd made me wait an hour for a kiss was going to make me wait for this too, circling my clit with unbearable patience, retreating to press worshipful, maddening kisses to my inner thighs whenever my hips started to rise too fast, gentling me back down with a broad palm flat against my stomach until I was shaking, until I had stopped bargaining with him in words and started simply making sounds, until "please" had worn a groove so deep in my mouth it had stopped meaning anything but him.

"There," he said finally, when I was strung tight enough to shatter at a breath, and gave me exactly what I'd been begging for, steady pressure and no more retreating, his tongue working in slow devastating circles until the tension snapped all at once, arching me clean off the mattress, a cry tearing out of me that the thunder outside swallowed whole. He didn't stop, gentled me through it instead, soft, unhurried presses that drew the aftershocks out long past where I thought my body had anything left to give.

I lay boneless and stunned while he kissed his way back up my body, and when he finally settled his weight over me, finally, I felt the full hard line of him against my thigh and understood how much of his own patience had cost him. I reached down and found him, drew a slow stroke that made his breath catch audibly, the first sound of real want I'd heard crack all the way through his composure.

"Now," I said, and this time it wasn't a question.

He came into me slow, watching my face with that same terrible attention, and I felt every inch of the slow slide, felt him pause when I gasped, wait until I nodded before easing deeper, until he was seated fully inside me and we both went still, breathing hard, foreheads together in the lamplight while rain hammered the roof above us.

"Sandra," he said, my name sounding different in his mouth than it ever had in anyone else's, and began to move.

He kept the same unhurried rhythm he'd used all night, deep unbroken strokes that built rather than rushed, and I wrapped my legs around him and met every one, felt the second climax building faster than I would have believed possible so soon after the first, helped along by the drag of him inside me and the low sounds he made against my throat, half-words in no language I recognized. When I came again it was with his name and a curse tangled together, and he followed some measured, deliberate distance behind me, holding out with a control that finally, finally broke on a low groan against my collarbone, his whole body going rigid and then loosening over mine as the storm outside rolled on toward the mesa.

We lay tangled together afterward while the rain gentled to a steady patter, my head on his chest, listening to a heartbeat that ran, I noticed with the part of my brain that never entirely switches off, at an interval I couldn't place against any species I knew.

"I have a question," I said into the dark, "and I want a real answer, not another 'not yet.'"

He was quiet a moment, his hand tracing slow circles at the small of my back. "Ask it."

"The signal. Three summers. Two a.m., monsoon season, gone by dawn." I lifted my head to look at him. "Was that you?"

"Yes," he said, simply, no hedging in it at all.

"Trying to reach who? Anyone? The Array?"

"You," he said. "I heard you listening before you ever heard me answer. It took me a long time to find the frequency you'd actually catch, and longer still to find the courage to walk the rest of the way instead of staying a signal on a tape reel." He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, the same gesture from the kitchen table, and I understood now it hadn't been idle. "You were the most patient thing I found in this whole part of the sky. I wanted to be patient enough to deserve it."

I lay there in the lamplight with rain sliding off the roof and my whole professional life rearranging itself around one impossible sentence, and instead of the panic I'd have predicted for myself, I felt something closer to relief, the particular relief of a hypothesis finally, finally confirmed. Three years of being told I was chasing noise, and I had been right the entire time. I had just never imagined the message would end up with its hand at the small of my back.

"I'm going to have the worst time writing up my field notes," I said, which made him laugh, real and unguarded, and pull me closer.

I don't know what he is, Lilith, not fully, not in any way I could defend at a conference. I know what three summers of tape reels taught me, and what one storm-soaked night taught me after, which is that the things worth listening for rarely announce themselves the way you expect, and that patience, real patience, the kind that waits an hour to kiss you and an entire year to knock on your door, is its own kind of proof. He stayed until first light and left the way he'd arrived, on foot, into a desert gone soft and steaming under new sun, and I have not heard the signal since. I no longer need to.

I used to think desire was something you measured after the fact, cross-referenced, footnoted. I don't think that anymore. Some nights the only honest instrument you have is your own skin, and I intend, from here on, to trust its readings.

With more gratitude than my discipline generally permits me,

Sandra