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Her parents kicked her out of the house when she was twelve. I would never have guessed that to look at her. Maria is smart, self-assured, confident. I would never have known her shoes were armor, not until she took them off.
I’d catastrophize everything if I were her, too. Little beads of water trickle down her face.
“Are you getting cold?”
She nods.
“Come stand under the showerhead.”
She takes a tentative step toward me. Then another. She lifts her face into the steaming fall of water.
Liquid cascades down her shoulders, flattening her hair, darkening it to an almost black. She takes the soap, and works up a lather.
It takes her five minutes and a washcloth to get the last of her mascara off. Without her makeup she looks…young. Vulnerable, even. Although that might be the look in her eyes.
Somehow, her letting me see her like this seems like a measure of trust, maybe even more so than actually having sex.
“Are you making a list of things you need to leave on my counter?”
She looks up at me.
“Because you’re allowed.” I brush her wet hair off her shoulders. I don’t let go. We lean into each other, forehead to forehead.
“After one date?”
“It’s been two years, Em. We had a long date zero.”
Her eyes shiver shut. Our lips brush when she lifts her chin. I inhale the scent of soap. I taste warm drops of water. I’m not sure when Em became as necessary to me as air. Our mouths meld under the heated stream of water. My hands slide down the side of her body, rib by rib, hip, thigh.
She’s not cold, but she gasps under my touch.
I let her lips go only to kiss my way down her neck. She pulls me closer. Our naked bodies tangle and slide under the water—breast to chest, belly to belly, hip to hip.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible so soon, but I rise to the occasion—getting hard slowly, surely. Kiss after kiss, skin against skin.
I haven’t recovered so fast since I was a teenager.
I lift my head. I wonder if she sees in my eyes what I see in hers—the burn of hope, the unspoken wants.
The water washes away all the extra trappings, and we kiss again. And again. And again, my hands tangling in her hair, pulling her close. The air is humid and warm and her skin is hot. She kisses me as if it’s the last time. As if breath is unnecessary, as if all other wishes have failed and these are our final moments together.
“Hey, Em.”
She looks up at me, liquid glittering on her face. Not tears, I don’t think—but the fact that I can’t be sure twists inside of me.
She’s not worried about making a mess in my home. She’s worried I’ll leave one in her life. I’ve been the catastrophe in this relationship, and we both know it.
I fucked this up. I hurt her. And once again, all I know how to do at this point is…everything. Do everything right, and hope that if I do it long enough, someday she’ll expect more of me.
“Wait.” She pulls away from me a moment. A wave of cool air hits me as she opens the shower door.
I hear her rustling around in the cabinets, but her form’s a blur of hair and skin through the steamed glass.
She comes back with a condom.
“You see?” I smile at her. “And here you were thinking there was no good reason to keep the medicine cabinet alphabetized.”
She bursts into laughter. Every smile I win from her, every heartfelt expression of mirth, feels like a victory.
“It was not!”
“Maybe not.” I want to do everything right. But her hands are on my cock, gliding in sure, sweet strokes. Touching the underside lightly, then more heavily, the water lubricating everything.
This time when her eyes meet mine, she smiles.
I return the favor. It would be stupid to say she’s wet, because she’s dripping water. But she must have found the lube in the bathroom, too, because she’s slick inside and out. Her eyes shiver shut as I run my thumb over her clit.
“Oh, god,” she whispers. “There.”
“One second.”
I give thanks to genetics that she’s tall. That the angle works so perfectly for us, with me pressing her into the tile, pushing up into her, her leg curling around my thigh.
There’s just room for my hand between us. She lets out a little noise.
If I do this right, maybe one day she’ll expect this of me. I push the growing sensation of pleasure away. Refuse to let my desire pull me into mindlessness. I find the angle where I can tease her. Her chest expands against mine.
“Em. Sweetheart.”
She makes a ragged noise. Her hands clench hard on my hips. “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I don’t. Not until she’s shaking in my embrace. Not until I feel my own orgasm coming. It’s like lightning seen at a distance—a flash of light, signaling the inevitable, and then a low rumble that shakes my entire world.
I return to reality. To the feel of water hitting my back. To my knees, scarcely holding my weight up, and Maria around me, looking into my eyes.
I touch my fingers to her cheek. Something about statistics and path-dependence flits through my mind. I am so lucky to be me, here, with her.
And because I want this to work, I tell her exactly what I’m feeling.
“Months ago,” I say, “you told me I was enough. I didn’t want to keep hold of it. I didn’t let myself believe it. But I kept wishing it would be true.”
My fingers trace her jaw.
“What I want,” I tell her. “What I really, really wish for at this moment, is that I will be your enough.”
I want her to say it now. You are enough. I want it more than anything.
Instead, her eyes round. Her lips part. I think my heart breaks just a little in the two seconds that pass.
Then she touches my face. “I want that, too.”
* * *
MARIA
* * *
It’s seven in the morning when I slip into my house to change.
Tina is, unfortunately, awake. She’s sitting at the breakfast table with a mug of coffee, reading the news on her phone. She looks up when I come in.
Our eyes meet, and I feel myself inexplicably flush. There is no such thing as a walk of shame, not unless you buy into moral disapproval from a half-century ago, and neither of us do. It’s not even the fact that she knows. I texted her that I was staying last night. I don’t know what this stupid emotion is.
Tina holds up a hand. “Way to go!”
I raise my own hand almost reluctantly. My fingers meet hers halfheartedly. We manage something more like a somewhat-elevated four than a high five.
She looks at me, then at her coffee. “So, that turned out. I guess?”
“I guess.” I know myself too well. I’m quick to care, quick to
forgive, and slow to let go after everything’s burned to the ground. It’s a dangerous combination.
“I need to change and get ready.”
She nods. “I’ll make more coffee.”
I bury my feelings in routine. I don’t have to think about anything except picking shoes. Choosing a blouse. I make choices deliberately, perfectly, as if they had as much weight in my life as…Jay.
It’s eight thirty by the time I’m ready, and that means there’s not a lot of time to talk before we have to get to campus for our first class.
Tina knows precisely how long it usually takes me, but she doesn’t call me out on my foot-dragging. Instead, she hands me coffee in a thermos. I know before I take the first sip that she’s adulterated it with condensed milk and cinnamon—coffee the way I make it for her when she’s feeling like crap.
I’m not feeling like crap, but I take another sip as we set off for campus at a walk.
“You okay?”
I nod.
“Come on. Spill. Was it good, bad, terrible?”
“It was great.” That’s the simple truth.
I think about Jay last night, about the way he looked at me, the way he held me.
“And it’s serious,” I say instead. “Even if it doesn’t last. Let’s be honest—I like him. And…there’s this weird forced vulnerability between us because we have this history. But give us enough time in real life, and we probably won’t get along. We didn’t, after all.”
“Okay, but does he like you? Is he treating you well? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. And…I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t know.”
She frowns and looks at me.
“It’s like a rollercoaster,” I tell her. “It’s going to end, and you’re going to feel like you’re falling, so you might as well throw your hands in the air and scream the whole way down. There’s no point talking about it now.”
We’re nearing the edge of campus. I can see the dark green tiles of the computer science building where Tina’s first class is.
Tina has no thermos of coffee to occupy her hands, and so instead, I see them fluttering at her side. But she knows there are some times she can’t push me. I’ve put my foot down; the conversation is over.
