Skin I've Never Seen Hands That Wrote My Desire

The letter arrived on a Tuesday that tasted like rain. Mara held the envelope between her palms longer than necessary, feeling the slight indentation of his handwriting through the paper—those familiar slants she had traced with her eyes for two decades. The postmark read Seattle, but the voice inside remained pure Devon: that mixture of curiosity and confession that had sustained her through three cities, two degrees, and the slow erosion of her only serious relationship. It had also outlasted the tenure-track professor she’d been seeing for eight months, a man whose intellectual confidence dissolved into a kind of quiet panic whenever she mentioned the letters. “It’s a fantasy you’re feeding,” he’d said, not unkindly, the night he left. “One day it will starve you.” She’d packed his books in silence, her throat tight with a defense she couldn’t articulate: it wasn’t a fantasy she fed, but a reality she inhabited, one made of ink and time.

She slit the envelope with the same bone-handled knife her grandmother had used on letters from the Western Front. One sheet only. Devon had never been wasteful with words.

M—

I’m coming to Boston. October 23–26. Conference at the Marriott Long Wharf. If you’re free, I’d like to buy you dinner. Or coffee. Or simply stand on the same patch of sidewalk and discover whether gravity behaves differently when letters turn into lungs.

No pressure. After twenty years, another few decades of speculation won’t hurt us.

—D

She read it three times before the kettle boiled. October 23 was ten days away. They had never exchanged photographs—an agreement reached in their first year, when they were both shy undergraduates who feared appearance might puncture the delicate balloon of their correspondence. Back then, the omission felt romantic; now it felt like a religion she wasn’t sure she still believed in, a vow of chosen blindness that risked looking, at forty-one, less like principle and more like fear.

Mara brewed tea she didn’t taste and sat at the kitchen table where she had composed approximately two hundred letters to Devon. She knew his mind more intimately than any lover’s body: his hatred of pretension, his weakness for Bach preludes, the way grief had carved a second heart inside him when his brother died at thirty-three. She could forecast his opinions on books he hadn’t yet read. She could sketch the constellation of freckles across his left shoulder—except, no, those were her own memories misfiled under his name. They had never touched.

The sensible reply would decline politely. They were forty-one and forty-three respectively; their mythologies were too large for one elderly human to inhabit. Furthermore, a lucrative, multi-year contract to translate a series of German oncology texts was due on her editor’s desk in three weeks; the work required a monastic focus she could not afford to shatter. This meeting was a professional risk. Yet the thought of not going, of letting this chance slip back into the realm of the theoretical, felt like a betrayal of the very self those letters had helped her build.

Instead, she opened her laptop and booked a dinner reservation at a seafood place on the harbor, then typed:

D—

October 24, 7:30. I’ll be the woman wondering why the moon looks different through shared air.

—M

She mailed it before courage could evaporate.

---

The next ten days passed like a held breath. Mara catalogued every physical fact Devon had ever disclosed: brown hair (early onset silver, he’d admitted at thirty-five), six-foot-one, wears a 42-long, once broke his nose falling off a bicycle in Marseille. She tried to assemble these fragments into a face and came up blank. Her own reflection offered no hints. She was, by most accounts, attractive—olive skin, dark curls threaded with premature white, the kind of angular frame that photographers called striking and her mother called tired. But Devon’s letters had never lingered on her appearance; he claimed to love the cadence of her clauses, the way she tasted ideas before swallowing them whole.

She worked long hours, the clinical German terms for metastasis and remission forming a stark counterpoint to the lyrical, anxious anticipation thrumming beneath her skin. She found herself re-reading old letters, not for content, but for texture. One, from her late twenties, stood out. He’d described a librarian at his college who kept a parakeet on her shoulder as she shelved books. It’s like working alongside a tiny, feathered conscience, he’d written. She whispers to it in Latin. I think they’re plotting a coup against the Dewey Decimal System. It was a minor, silly shared reference, but it grounded their history in a specific, granular reality. They had a past, woven from such threads.

On the morning of the twenty-third, a courier delivered the final chapter of the oncology text. Mara set it aside, unopened. The deadline loomed, a concrete wall at the end of the month, but today and tomorrow belonged to a different kind of translation.

By evening, Boston had turned its collar against a damp wind. Mara walked to the harbor an hour early and stood outside the restaurant watching gulls orbit the masts of docked boats. She wore the blue sweater that made her eyes look dangerous and the silver earrings that caught streetlight like scattered coins. She tried not to catalogue every approaching pedestrian—six-foot-one, brown hair, broken nose—but her gaze kept slipping into measurement.

At 7:25 she surrendered and went inside, choosing a table that afforded view of the entrance. She ordered sauvignon blanc and pretended to read the menu. Each time the door opened, her pulse performed a small, incompetent pirouette.

He arrived at 7:34. Mara knew him instantly, though not for any reason she could name. He was shorter than advertised—maybe five-eleven—and his hair had completed the journey from brown to pewter without stopping at salt-and-pepper. The broken nose had healed slightly crooked, giving his whole face a permanent air of amused skepticism. He scanned the room with the same methodical calm she remembered from his description of birdwatching in the Skagit Valley.

Then his gaze found her and stopped. Something rippled across his expression—surprise, recognition, adjustment. He crossed the room with the careful steps of a man walking on ice he trusts but cannot see.

“Mara,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

She stood. “Devon.”

They hovered an inch apart, uncertain whether twenty years of intimacy permitted handshake, embrace, or nothing. Mara smelled cedar and ink and the faint metallic trace of airline cabins. She lifted her hand—not to touch, merely to gesture toward the chair opposite hers. He sat.

“You’re taller than I imagined,” he said at last.

“Platform heels.” She lifted her foot beneath the table, forgetting he couldn’t see. “You’re shorter.”

“Gravity’s cruel joke.” He smiled, and the room tilted three degrees. The waiter appeared, explained specials, retreated. Mara watched Devon watch the menu, noting how his eyes snagged on descriptions the way they had once lingered over her metaphors.

They ordered. The wine arrived. Conversation began haltingly—weather, flight delays—then found its rhythm, like a record player warming. He asked about her translation work (medical journals, mostly: the secret sexiness of lymphatic systems), she asked about his teaching load at the community college. They compared notes on student excuses across two decades. Mara laughed until her ribs ached, surprised by the corporeal sound of it—how her body interpreted joy as seismic activity.

“Remember,” she said, spearing a seared scallop, “that librarian you wrote about, the one with the parakeet? Whatever happened to her coup?”

Devon’s eyes lit with delighted recognition. “Mrs. Gable! She retired. The parakeet, I’m told, got a gold watch. The Dewey Decimal System remains tragically intact.” He shook his head. “You remember that?”

“I remember everything,” she said, and the truth of it hung between them, warm and substantial.

Halfway through entrées, Devon reached across the table and brushed a crumb from her sleeve. The touch lasted perhaps half a second, but her skin filed it under permanent acquisitions. She wondered if he felt the tremor that traveled through her sweater, the way her pulse leapt jurisdictions.

“Tell me something you never put in a letter,” she said.

He considered, swirling chardonnay. “I own three sweaters identical to this one. I buy them in bulk because I hate shopping.”

“That’s cheating. You told me you hate shopping.”

“I never specified the sweaters.” His grin turned conspiratorial. “Your turn.”

“I’m allergic to strawberries but eat them anyway. I like the risk.”

Devon’s gaze dropped to her mouth, lingered, moved away. “We should order dessert.”

They split a lemon tart that tasted like sunlight rationed. When the check arrived, they both reached for it; their fingers collided above the leather folder. Mara expected him to yield—Devon’s letters had been full of old-world courtesy—but he held firm, his thumb pressing lightly against her knuckles.

“Let me,” he said. “I’ve been imagining this moment since dial-up internet. Compounding interest applies.”

Outside, the wind had settled into a softer conspiracy. Streetlights painted wet pavement copper. They walked without destination, shoulders occasionally brushing, talking about the first albums they loved and the last books that made them cry. Mara’s apartment lay in the opposite direction, but her feet ignored geography. The ten-day wait, the twenty-year wait, had distilled into this fluid, walking tension. The conversation deepened, turning to the loneliness that sometimes crept into their respective lives, a loneliness their letters had both alleviated and, in their perfect understanding, somehow underscored.

At a traffic light, he stopped. The red glow bathed his face. “I’m staying at the Marriott.” He paused, his expression uncharacteristically uncertain. “Would you like to come up? For a drink. Or just… to see the view.” He exhaled a laugh that fogged briefly in October air. “I don’t know the etiquette for this. I didn’t come here expecting—”

She knew what he was offering, and what he was not presuming. The air between them grew thick with unsaid things. Mara looked at him, at this man whose soul was a familiar country but whose body was still a rumor. The risk was vertiginous. It could collapse everything, or it could fulfill it. She thought of her deadline, of the sterile pages waiting on her desk, of the professor’s warning about being starved by a fantasy.

“Are we sure?” she whispered, the question leaving her lips before she could vet it.

He didn’t smile. He met her gaze with profound seriousness. “I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”

The light turned green. She slipped her hand into his. “Then show me the view.”

They walked the remaining three blocks in a silence that felt like held applause. In the elevator, Mara watched their reflections in burnished steel: two middle-aged people pretending composure while standing closer than strangers ought. His cuff touched her wrist; neither moved away. The elevator chimed, the doors slid open on a hushed corridor.

The room was generic—maid service and neutral art, a landscape of beige and navy blue—but the window delivered on its promise: the harbor glittered under a moon thin as archived hope. Devon hung his jacket on the back of a chair, rolled his sleeves. Mara recognized the gesture from his description of grading papers at 2 a.m., the way he approached every task with methodical patience.

She crossed to the window. Behind her, the soft click of the door locking sounded like punctuation. Devon joined her, close enough that she could feel heat radiating from his shirt. They stood watching a ferry carve light across black water.

“In my letters,” he said quietly, “I never told you that sometimes I address them to the version of you that lives in my head. She’s twenty-three and wears red scarves and isn’t afraid of subway grates.”

Mara turned. They were inches apart; her reflection hovered in his pupils like a moonlet. “The woman in your letters has perfect grammar and never eats cereal for dinner.”

“Cereal for dinner is a virtue,” he murmured. “May I?”

He lifted his hand—not presumptuous, merely asking permission to trespass. Mara nodded. His palm settled against her cheek with the familiarity of something returned after long absence. She closed her eyes. Time performed a small, private collapse.

When she opened them, he was studying her face as if annotating marginalia. His thumb traced the curve beneath her eye—a gesture so precise it felt like reading aloud. She wondered what he saw: the fine lines mapping twenty years of laughter, the scar from a cat she’d owned in grad school, the faint freckles that emerged only in summer.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, voice rough. “But that’s not—the surprising part is how much like yourself you are.”

Mara laughed, shaky. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I recognize you even where I’ve never been.” His hand slipped to her neck, thumb resting against the hinge of her jaw. “It means I’ve been missing you without knowing the shape of the absence.”

She kissed him then, because language had reached its credit limit. His mouth tasted of citrus and the last syllable of her name. The kiss began careful—two people accustomed to ink negotiating the variables of skin—then deepened, turned explorative. Mara felt the moment his restraint snapped; his arm came around her waist, pulling her flush against starched cotton and the solid fact of him. She hadn’t expected the small noise he made, half surrender, half relief, or the way her own body answered as if echoing.

They undressed each other slowly, reverently, in the uneven light from the harbor, their shadows large and merging on the wall. Each revelation was accompanied by a soft gasp or whispered confirmation—yes, I have that scar, yes, my hair does this when humid. His chest carried a constellation of freckles she’d imagined differently; her left breast bore a birthmark shaped vaguely like Italy. He traced it with his mouth, murmuring “terra incognita” against her skin. She laughed, then stopped laughing when his hand slid between her thighs, finding her already wet and wanting.

He led her to the bed, its crisp white duvet cool against her back. The room’s ordinary details—the hum of the mini-fridge, the glow of the alarm clock, the faint smell of industrial carpet cleaner beneath the salt air—faded into a haze. There was only the map of him under her hands, the weight of his gaze, the patient, thrilling discovery. When he entered her, it was with the slow precision of someone turning a key they had crafted themselves, a perfect fit that drew a long, shuddering sigh from them both. There was no hurry, only a deep, rolling thoroughness, a conversation conducted in touch and rhythm and broken breath. The world narrowed to the point of connection, then expanded to contain the entire, silent history that had led them here.

Later, Mara lay curled against his side, her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat settle from a gallop to a steady, strong trot. The room smelled of sex and salt air drifting through a cracked window. She felt simultaneously dismantled and completed, as if twenty years of correspondence had been prologue to this silent aftermath. Her body hummed with a pleasant, deep fatigue. She became aware of the texture of the sheets against her calf, the rough weave of the hotel blanket tangled near her feet, the distant, rhythmic groan of a boat’s horn on the water.

Devon’s fingers drew idle spirals across her shoulder. For a long time, they just breathed together in the semi-darkness. The profound dialogue of their letters hovered, but in this raw, vulnerable aftermath, words felt too grand, too structured. Instead, he broke the silence with something simpler, more fragmented.

“Your skin,” he whispered, his voice husky with disuse. “It’s warmer than I thought it would be. Here, just below your ear.”

Mara smiled against his chest. “Your hands are exactly as I pictured them. But the calluses are in different places.”

Another comfortable silence settled. The digital clock flipped from 1:14 to 1:15. Then, as if emerging naturally from that quiet, the deeper thoughts rose.

“In the morning,” Devon said, his fingers stilling, “I’ll have to pretend I know how to teach sociology to eighteen-year-olds who’ve never written a physical letter. And you’ll translate sentences about spleens. We’ll send emails that begin Dear colleague.” He let out a long breath. “How do we go back to being verbs in each other’s margins?”

Mara propped herself on an elbow. Streetlight painted silver across his collarbone, illuminating a small scar she hadn’t noticed before. She traced it lightly. “We don’t,” she said. “We write new margins.”

She reached for the hotel notepad on the nightstand, its cheap ballpoint pen tethered by a plastic coil. She tore off a sheet, the sound loud in the quiet room, and wrote:

D—

You taste like the moment before a sentence finds its period. I would like to sample the rest of the paragraph.

—M

She folded the note, slipped it beneath his pillow. Devon’s grin flashed wicked in the gloom, then softened into something more dangerous. He pulled her down, kissed her with leisurely intent, a kiss that promised this was not an end but a new syntax. Outside, the ferry sounded its horn—one long note crossing black water, carrying news no email could deliver.

---

Dawn was a slow, bruising process at the horizon. Mara stood at the window wrapped in the hotel’s white robe, its terrycloth rough and impersonal against her sensitized skin. The room behind her was a landscape of intimacy: the rumpled duvet, his discarded shirt over the chair, two empty water glasses on the nightstand. Devon slept deeply, one arm outflung as if reaching across time zones, his breathing a steady meter in the quiet.

She watched light slowly define the harbor: masts becoming distinct from shadows, gulls becoming solid shapes against the pewter sky. The water shifted from black to deep grey, flecked with early morning gold. Soon she would dress, collect her scattered clothes from the carpet, walk home through streets that now knew the shape of her satisfaction. Soon he would fly west, her next letter—perhaps this very one she was composing in her head—tucked into his briefcase beside conference pamphlets.

But for now, she savored the exquisite limbo—how the city looked both foreign and familiar, how her reflection in the glass overlapped with the ghost of his shoulder on the bed behind her. She thought of all the words they had yet to write: the stories this night would spawn, the sensory details she would archive for future letters—the exact pressure of his palm on the small of her back, the sound of his laugh muffled against her hair, the way the morning light was now revealing the faint pattern of vines in the hotel room’s wallpaper. Twenty years of anticipation had not prepared her for the simple fact of continuity—that desire, like correspondence, could be serialized, renewed.

Behind her, Devon stirred. She felt his approach as warmth along her spine before his hands settled on her hips, the soft cotton of his T-shirt brushing her robe. He handed her a cup of terrible hotel coffee, the steam curling in the cool air, then wrapped his arms around her waist, his chin resting on her shoulder. Together they watched Boston finish inventing itself in morning light, brick by brick, wave by wave.

“Still recognize me?” she asked, leaning back into his solidity.

His chuckle rumbled against her back, a sound she already knew she would crave. “I’m learning to recognize us.”

Mara closed her eyes, holding the sensation, the scent of him mixed with cheap coffee and impending day. The work on her desk, the flight he would catch, the miles between them—they were real, but they were also just punctuation. The story, she understood now, was far from over. It was simply turning a page. She leaned into him, into the future arriving one letter, one touch, one ordinary miracle at a time.