The Last Morning
A Bend for Me Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North
Set six months after the epilogue. The morning of Kira’s hip surgery. Her POV. As raw as you would expect. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Kira
I wake up at 3:47 a.m.
I wake up at 3:47 a.m. because my hip has been talking to me since one, the kind of talking that started as a low hum and has, over the last forty minutes, become a yell, and because I have an alarm set for 4:30 that I am not going to need.
My wife is asleep against my back.
She is on her side, facing my side, her arm over my ribs and her hand splayed flat across my belly. She has been sleeping like this for eight months, since the wedding in October, and she has been sleeping like this in some form for more than a year, since the first time she fell asleep against my chest in a cedar room in Ojai with my forearm under her head.
I do not move.
I do not move because I do not want to wake her, and I do not want to wake her because the second she wakes up the day starts. The second she wakes up the day is the day. The second she wakes up I have to put on the loose pants the orthopedic office told me to wear. The second she wakes up I have to drink the small bottle of pre-op clear liquid. The second she wakes up I have to brush my teeth without swallowing any water and I have to walk down the side stairs of the apartment with my overnight bag in my hand and I have to get into the car she has had ready since last night. The second she wakes up I have to go.
Surgery is at seven a.m.
I have been fasting since midnight.
I have not had a drink of water in three hours and forty-seven minutes and I will not have one for at least seven more.
The hip is yelling.
I lie in the dark and I let it yell. I let it yell because there is nothing to do about the yelling. I have, in eighteen months, made peace with the yelling. The peace has not been a peace exactly. The peace has been the slow daily acknowledgment that the joint that was put back together when I was twenty-four and that has been the joint I have walked on for twelve years is not the joint I will be walking on tomorrow.
Tomorrow it will be a piece of titanium and ceramic in a polyethylene cup.
It will not yell.
It will also not be the joint I learned to dance on, or the joint I tore in a stage rehearsal in 2014, or the joint that took eighteen months at an ashram in Rishikesh to rebuild, or the joint that has been with me through every six a.m. class for ten years on Abbot Kinney. The joint that is mine is the joint that hurts. After today the joint I have will be a joint that does not hurt and that is also not mine.
I think about that.
I let myself think about it for one full breath. Four-count. Four-hold. Eight-count. Four-hold.
Maya stirs.
She stirs and she does not wake. Her hand twitches on my belly and resettles. Her breath warms the back of my neck. I stay still. I let her have what is left of it.
3:51 a.m.
3:52.
3:54.
I cannot do it anymore.
I turn, slow, in her arm. I turn so I am facing her. The arm follows me. She does not wake. The bedside lamp is off. The window is open and the May night is cool and the Pacific is muttering three blocks west of us, and Maya’s face on the pillow is — Maya’s face on the pillow is the face of a thirty-year-old woman who got married eight months ago to a thirty-eight-year-old woman who is going to be on a surgical table in two hours and twelve minutes, and her mouth is parted slightly and her hand is curled at the line of my throat and the small jade engagement ring on her left hand is catching what little light is in the room.
I look at her.
I look at her for a long time.
I think about waking her.
I think about not waking her.
I think about the fact that I have been awake for ten minutes and I have already lost all of my discipline about what I am going to ask her for this morning, and I know — I know it the way I know my own count — that if I do not ask her for it, I am going to lose my nerve at the curb of the surgical center, and I am going to walk into that pre-op room having not asked for the thing I want, and I am going to come out of anesthesia at noon with a new hip and an old regret.
I lift my hand.
I tuck the hair behind her ear.
“Petal.”
She sighs.
“Petal.”
Her eyes open.
She is not, I have learned in a year and a half, a slow waker. Maya wakes the way Maya does everything. Fully present in two breaths. Her eyes find mine in the dark. Her hand at my throat tightens.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“What time.”
“…three fifty-seven.”
“Are you okay.”
“Yes.”
“Hip?”
“Yes.”
“Bad?”
“…yes.”
“Kira —”
“It’s all right, petal. It is going to be replaced in three hours. It can yell.”
“…oh, Kira.”
She lifts her hand from my throat. She presses it flat against my cheek. Her thumb traces my cheekbone. She is very awake. She is also still half in the warm of sleep. She is the warmest woman in the world at four a.m. in our bed and I am about to ask her for something I have not asked her for in this exact way before.
“Petal.”
“Yes.”
“I want something.”
“Yes.”
“I want something this morning. Before we go. I want to ask you for it now because if I do not ask you for it now I am going to chicken out on the way to the car and I am going to be at the front desk of the surgical center in two hours regretting it and my regret is going to do nothing for me on the table.”
She watches my face.
She watches my face the way she has, in eighteen months, learned to watch my face when I am about to say a thing that costs me. She does not interrupt. She does not nod. She waits.
“I want you to put your mouth on me.”
“…yes, Kira.”
“I want you to put your mouth on me on this body. The one I have. The one that is going on the table. The one that is mine. Before they cut it open. Before they take it out. I want — I want one more memory of this body, of this hip, of this body, the one I have walked into class on and stood in front of three hundred people on and lifted you off the ground on, before they put me to sleep and they hand me a different one. I want it to be your mouth. I want it to be slow. I want it to take a long time. I want — Maya. I want to remember it. I want to remember it under the anesthesia. I want to be on the table thinking about it. I want to wake up in recovery and have the last good thought in this body have been your mouth on me, and not be in the recovery room.”
Her eyes are wet.
“…yes, Kira.”
“Will you.”
“Kira — yes, of course, yes, Kira.”
“And petal.”
“Yes.”
“I am — I am asking you to top me this morning.”
She closes her eyes.
She closes her eyes and she opens them and she looks at me, and her face is composed, the way her face has learned, in eighteen months, to compose itself when I have asked her for something that costs both of us.
“Yes, Kira.”
“I have not — I have not done this. I have not — I have not been on this side of it.”
“I know.”
“I have been thinking about it for two weeks.”
“I know.”
“I am — I am scared.”
“I know, Kira.”
“Will you take care of me.”
She makes a small wet sound.
“Yes, Kira. Yes. Yes, Kira.”
“Good girl.”
The words are wrong in my mouth. The words have been her words for eighteen months. The words were my words to her, every single time, and now I have said them to her, and her face does the small uncomposed thing, the same small uncomposed thing it did on the bench the first morning, and she presses her face into my throat and she breathes once, hard.
“…Kira.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, petal.”
“Lie back.”
“…what.”
“Lie back, Kira.”
“…yes, petal.”
I lie back.
She sits up and she pulls the duvet off both of us and she folds it back to the foot of the bed. She turns on the small lamp on her nightstand. The lamp is the warm one. The light is amber.
She looks at me.
I am in the long-sleeved cotton shirt I have been sleeping in since the surgeon told me I needed to keep my hip warm at night, and a pair of soft cotton boy-shorts. She runs her hand down the front of the shirt. She lifts the hem. She pulls the shirt off over my head, slow, careful with my arm, the way I have asked her to be careful with my arm in the morning since the cortisone shot two weeks ago.
She kneels next to me.
She bends down. She kisses my collarbone. She kisses the slope of my shoulder. She kisses the line of my sternum, between my breasts, the soft skin where my ribs meet. She kisses each rib. She kisses the small flat plane of my stomach. She kisses the inside of my hipbone — the left one, the one that is going on the table — and she kisses it with her mouth open and her tongue flat, and she lingers there, and a small wet sound comes out of me before I can stop it.
“Petal —”
“Shh.”
“Petal —”
“I am going to take my time, Kira.”
“…yes, petal.”
“I am going to take a long time.”
“…yes.”
“You are going to lie there. You are going to keep your hands above your head. You are going to keep your eyes on me unless I tell you to close them. You are not going to come until I let you. Do you understand me.”
I close my eyes for one breath, and a tear rolls down my temple into my hair, and Maya bends down and kisses the tear and waits for me to open my eyes.
I open them.
“…yes, petal.”
“Yes what, Kira.”
She has never, in eighteen months, said it back to me.
She has never, in eighteen months, been on this side of the count.
I open my mouth.
“…yes, Maya.”
She closes her eyes.
She closes her eyes and she presses her forehead to my sternum and she breathes — four-count, four-hold, eight-count, four-hold, the count, my count, the count I taught her on a bolster in my studio fourteen months ago — and I feel her ribs do it against me, and I let her have it, and I count with her, and at the bottom of the count she lifts her head and her eyes are jade-wet and on mine, and she says, very low, in a voice I have not yet heard her use:
“Hands above your head, Kira.”
I lift them.
“Stay.”
I stay.
She stands up off the bed. She undresses. She undresses unhurried. She pulls her sleep shirt off. She is naked under it. She stands at the foot of the bed in the amber lamp light, and the wedding band on her left hand catches the light, and she looks at me lying naked in our bed with my hands above my head and my hip yelling and my eyes wet, and she takes one breath.
She climbs on.
She kneels between my thighs.
She does not, this time, lower her mouth.
She runs her hands first.
She runs both her palms, slowly, from the soles of my feet to my knees, up my thighs, over my hipbones — over the left one, which she lingers on, and presses her thumb into the small place beneath the surgical scar where the cortisone needle went in two weeks ago — and up my belly, and over my ribs, and across my collarbones, and to my throat, and back. She does it three times. Each one is slower than the one before. Each one is — I have to admit it — each one is better than the one before, because she has watched me do this to her so many times that she has built it in her own muscle memory.
She is using my own technique on me.
The understanding lands in the middle of my chest like a stone.
I have taught her, without meaning to, the exact shape of how I want to be touched.
She has been studying me.
For eighteen months, she has been studying me, and tonight she is using the file.
“Petal —”
“Shh, Kira.”
“Maya —”
“Quiet.”
I am quiet.
She lowers her mouth.
She does not put it on me first. She kisses the inside of my left thigh. She kisses the inside of my right. She kisses the soft place at the top of each thigh where the crease meets the heat. She kisses the soft hair there. She breathes once against me, a long warm exhale, and my whole body jerks against the sheet.
She runs her tongue, flat, up the length of me.
I make a sound I have not made in this bed in eighteen months.
It is not a word.
She hums.
A small low considering hum at the back of her throat, the same hum I have been making at her since pigeon pose fourteen months ago, the hum I made to tell her yes, this is what I expected, slightly better, and she has — she has been collecting them, she has been keeping them in a pocket somewhere, and she is putting them on me now.
“Maya —”
“Yes, Kira.”
“Petal — petal, please —”
“I have you.”
“Maya —”
“I have you, Kira. I am going to have you for an hour.”
“…oh —”
“Lie there. Hands up. Eyes on me. Breathe, Kira.”
I breathe.
She lowers her mouth.
She works me.
She works me slow. She works me in the count. She works me in the four-and-four-and-eight-and-four, and her tongue moves with the count, and her mouth is hot, and her chin is wet, and her hand is splayed flat across my low belly, anchoring me, holding me, the same way I have anchored her on the cabin table, on the deck in Ojai, on the floor of my office, on the wet sand at the cove in May, on the white duvet after the wedding in October.
She is anchoring me.
She works me up. She does not let me come.
She has me at the edge for what feels like an hour. It is not an hour. The clock on the nightstand says 4:14 when I look at it, which means it has been seventeen minutes, but the seventeen minutes is a different shape than seventeen minutes. The seventeen minutes is built out of breath. The seventeen minutes is built out of my count, slowed, and my count is not a count anymore, my count is a tide.
“Petal — Maya —”
“Mm.”
“I — I am close —”
“I know.”
“Maya —”
“Not yet, Kira.”
“…please —”
“Not yet.”
She slows. She drags her mouth from clit to entrance and back, slow, gathering me, and her two fingers slide inside me and she crooks them and she finds the spot — my spot, the spot I have been saying here, petal, do you feel it about for a year — and she works it slow.
I am crying.
I am crying and I do not stop. I cry quietly. I am not sad. I have no word for it. She lifts her face an inch and looks at me, and her chin is wet, and her face is the open face, and she does not stop her fingers, and she does not stop the slow drag of her mouth, and she watches me cry.
She lowers her mouth back. She seals it on me.
“Now, Kira.”
I come.
I come without a sound at first, which is — which is the sound I have made in this bed before, which is the sound she has heard me make before, except this time the sound at the bottom of the silent come is a small wrecked Maya that gets out before I can swallow it, and Maya makes a small sound at the back of her throat, and she keeps her mouth on me through it, and she keeps her fingers crooked, and she does not let me go.
I come for a long time.
I come for the four-count and the four-hold and the eight-count and the four-hold and three more cycles after that, and Maya rides me through it, and gentles me, and brings me down, and works me up again — of course she does, of course she does, she has been studying — and I come a second time on her mouth in the shape that she has come on mine, with my hand fisted at the back of her head, and the back of her head shaved short, the way mine has been shaved for fourteen years, and I come into her hair and into her mouth and into her name, and she does not stop.
The second one is longer.
The second one is so long I lose the count.
The second one is so long I forget the body.
I forget the hip.
The hip is gone for the count of the come. The hip is gone for thirty seconds, and forty, and fifty, and the only thing in this body is her mouth on me and her fingers inside me and the warm amber lamp on the wall, and I am crying against the inside of my own arm above my head, and Maya is humming against my clit, and my hip — my hip — my hip is silent.
I sob.
I sob once, openly.
She lifts her head. She crawls up. She gathers me. She does not, this morning, ask me to come a third time. She knows. She has been studying. She gathers me, naked, into her chest, and she pulls the duvet back up over us, and she presses her forehead into the side of my neck and she breathes me in, and she does not say anything for a long time.
The clock says 4:31.
I am supposed to leave at 5:30.
I have an hour.
She holds me, and I cry against her chest, and she does not shush me, and she does not say it is going to be okay, and she does not perform anything, because she has, in eighteen months, learned not to. She holds me. She presses her mouth against the crown of my head. She holds me.
Eventually, my breath evens.
Eventually, I can speak.
“Petal.”
“…yes.”
“You said something. On the bed. Before. You said yes, Maya.”
“I did.”
“…how did that feel.”
She laughs. She laughs, wet, into my hair.
“It felt like — Kira — it felt like I had been waiting eighteen months to say it.”
“…oh.”
“I had been waiting, Kira.”
“…petal.”
“Yes.”
“Will you say it again. Now.”
“…yes, Maya.”
I close my eyes.
“…thank you, petal.”
“Thank you, Kira.”
She holds me.
The clock says 4:38. The hip is still silent.
The hip is still silent, and I do not know if it is the orgasm or the grief or the two of them together that has finally — finally — quieted the joint that has been yelling at me for two weeks, but I do not, in this moment, care. The hip is silent. My wife is in my arms. The lamp is amber. The Pacific is muttering. The window is open. The May morning is cool. We have an hour.
We lie there for the hour. We do not have sex again. We talk.
We talk about the surgery. We talk about the recovery. We talk about the twelve-week protocol. We talk about the small ugly rented house Priya found us in Brentwood with the one-story floor plan and the shower bench. We talk about the wheelchair Maya is going to push for six weeks and the walker for the six weeks after. We talk about how River is going to take the seven a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday for the three months I am out, and how Juno is going to keep the lights on, and how Ines is going to fly down twice from Santa Fe.
We talk about Devi, who is going to send a voice memo every morning of recovery for ninety days because she has, last week, said she is going to.
We talk about the second studio in Ojai, which is doing well, which Maya has been running mostly remotely from this apartment, which is going to be fine for three months without me.
We talk about the cat we are going to get when I am out of the chair.
I have not, in eighteen months, agreed to a cat.
I agree to a cat.
Maya laughs into my throat.
“Kira. You are agreeing to a cat at four forty-six in the morning of your hip surgery.”
“Mm.”
“Is this the post-orgasm haze.”
“Mm.”
“Do I have to get it in writing.”
“No, petal. I have been thinking about it. For three months. His name is going to be Birdie. After the dog.”
She makes a small wet wrecked sound into my throat.
“Yes, Kira.”
“Yes, petal.”
“…yes, Maya.”
I close my eyes.
The clock says 4:48. The May morning is going gray-blue at the edges of the window. The Pacific is muttering. The hip is — the hip has started, again, very faintly, to talk. Not the yell. The talk. The familiar talk. The talk I have been listening to for a year.
I let it talk. I will not be hearing it again.
I press my mouth against the crown of Maya’s head. I close my eyes. For five minutes, I sleep.
When I wake — Maya wakes me at 5:03 with her mouth at my ear and her hand on my hip, gentle — the room is gray-blue, and the amber lamp is still on, and my wife is in our bed in soft gray sweatpants and a Lotus Hour Ojai sweatshirt, and her hair is wet from a quick shower, and she has put my soft pants on the chair, and she has the small bottle of pre-op clear liquid in her hand, and she is smiling down at me.
“Petal.”
“Yes, Kira.”
“Thank you.”
“…yes, Kira.”
“Yes what.”
“…yes, Maya.”
She kisses me. She kisses me with the small bottle of clear pre-op liquid in her hand and the wedding band on her left ring finger, and she breaks the kiss, and she taps my cheek lightly.
“Let’s go fix your hip, my wife.”
“Yes, petal.”
I get up. The hip catches. I stand. It holds.
It holds the way it has, in eighteen months, learned to hold for the people who love me, and for the room I built, and for the studio I almost lost, and for the woman who put a placeholder ring in my palm a year ago on a wet beach at sunrise and asked me to pick a stone.
I have picked.
I will keep picking.
I will keep picking after the surgery, and after the recovery, and through the first six weeks in the chair, and through the next six in the walker, and through the year of physical therapy that the surgeon has told me will be hard, and through the years that come after the year, and through the cat we are going to call Birdie, and through every morning of every life we are going to have together that will not, after today, contain this exact joint.
I dress. I drink the clear liquid. I brush my teeth.
I walk down the side stairs of the apartment with my wife at my elbow, and the May morning is gray-blue and gold at the edges, and the studio downstairs is dark, and Juno’s note is on the front desk that says I love you, see you tonight, K, and we get into the car, and Maya buckles me in, and Maya drives.
The hip is talking. The hip is talking, and I am listening, and I am saying goodbye to it, and I am holding my wife’s hand on the gear shift, and the amber lamp in our bedroom, two stories up, is the last warm thing I will see today, and the lamp will be on when I come home, and Maya will be the one to turn it off, and I will be in our bed, and the hip will be quiet.
For the rest of it.
For the rest of it.
Yes, Maya.
That’s it — the last good thought she has in that body.
Thank you for reading.
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