Save me from the rest of my life

I said this hotel has a Reagonomic shower while I jammed a towel in my ear and watched her read Anna Karenina on that pastel paintbrush bedspread. She hummed a basal acknowledgement, which I don’t know what I expected when I thought that up in the shower but a realist would say that what I got was about right.

Earlier we had kissed in the ocean and later we would eat in view of the beach, but those things were relative to this moment. I scrubbed the towel over my head, thinking how hotel towels were always so worthless and it’s always which one of these is the bath mat or is there not one. She had her chin tucked into her chest, brows furrowed and eyes flicking across pages, one leg resting on the other, and I realized I should find something to do but didn’t want to.

I said we should have gone to Russia and she barely said the word why. I said you’d like me better in a bread line. She said I love you dummy, and I went into the bathroom without saying anything back. I wondered how many chapters I would be waiting out, which wasn’t fair at all because I liked to read too just not on vacation.

I was brushing my teeth when she started screaming oh shit oh shit like she was on fire. I hit my shoulder into the doorframe on the way out of the bathroom and lost my towel, got toothpaste down my chin. When I saw her she was in the same position, book open on her chest, but she was smiling into the pages. I had that shaky nervous feeling, like my body was ready to put a rapist’s eye out with a toothbrush, and I stood there dumb and naked watching her smiling face and waiting for her to look up at me. She did, but she didn’t look for long before she went back to her pages and said really quiet, she said do you love me, and the way she asked it was with a frailty I hadn’t known from her, and I knew I did and she did and that those photographed vacation moments weren’t at all worth remembering compared to this.