The Push & the Pull Read Online Free PDF

hit with a feeling of intrusion that quickly flipped into a palpable bond with her. They were smiling as the engine threw its muffled roar. Foot bottoms, buttocks, backs of thighs and tailbones felt a roar their ears heard only distantly. Half-deaf, they slipped back onto the black highway.
    Twenty, thirty minutes into the mute, buzzing drive, darkness wrapped around them, they were raked by vibrations, two spines and all limbs sprouting from the same crossbar of felt sound. The right half of the back of his pelvis was indivisible from the inside of her left knee because of movement, metal and a sound buried in touch. As soon as he reached fingers to her knee, another circuit opened from his shoulder blade to that stretch beneath her ear. This stir possibly his alone, Grandpa Death and his rickety bones still riding in the backseat, Andrew kept his eyes tunnelling into the road as he raised his hand. Betting this brief farm, he planted his fingertips in a crescent around her ear and dipped his thumb to stroke her neck. Down and up again, a fat swimmer doing three-inch laps, kick-turning off her earlobe. When two became five, when thumb became a whole hand clasping the back of her skull, he finally risked a glance, sending his eyes, but not his face, in two shotgun passes. Her eyelids were fully dropped, but there was no disapproving scrunch around the sockets. The visible nostril had sharpened into an arc. So, up went the whole hand, each fingertip a salon wash, the palm a tilting crown. Nearly deaf, he could now feel each hair, swept worlds with a scouring nail. Provinces of her body sent or received fibre-optic flashes of greeting, challenge and need. Did he tend, or light, the fire in her far hip? Was her solar plexus pulsing before, or after, he plucked its central jewel?
    Nothing was said as he took a dark exit, finally moved his head in search of an isolated lane. She slid her seat back, lowered it. When he climbed the Pyrenees of the handbrake, she reached first for his ears and thumbed the plugs in deeper while dragging his mouth into neck, chest. After just six weeks, this wordlessness was already strange. Here in the deaf blackness there were no requests or proposals, no worded bait given or chased, not a single joke. Only after, her last kiss cooling on his neck, as the night’s chill air reasserted itself along fogged windows, was speech risked. “It’s called the euphoria of survival,” he said, his mouth to her full ear.

13
    In the climb out of one valley there is always a distinct point at which curiosity about the next valley is abandoned. These recurrent, successive Maritime climbs are, and are not, his bike trip. As the burn of a climb lengthens and deepens, he is exiled from his past. He starts each climb as an individual ego with unique memories, specific hopes and a destination. But then, legs aflame, he bikes out of subjectivity and into pure pain. In ways, every onerous half-metre of inclined asphalt is a mirror. He chose this suffering. He wants it. But he can’t want this. Eventually, he is only a sweaty binary of more or less pain. The bike is a switch on the wall of the hill, inching its passage from
climbing
to
climbed
.
    His switch flicks just before the apex of a hill. The triumph of a climb. Memory and rationality return to him as he surveys the next valley. Already, just three days into this trip, he has developed a habitual gaze for each new valley. First, he checks out the next climb, appraises the next hill from atop the current one to get his pain forecast. Then, his eyes glance along the middle of the valley, not actually looking at what’s there, just sweeping through to check for a restaurant. Can I get more water? Time for eggs? What are the odds of a milkshake? Only then does he finally examine the descent he’s rolling into, weighs his conqueror’s spoils. Descending, he is washed by speed. His eyes avoid lingering on any single point, as if staring too