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He’d made me angry. I was angry.
He’d driven me away, and I still felt the distance, even with his cock pushing hard inside me, his face in my neck, his tongue in my mouth.
It wasn’t the same. We weren’t. Maybe we could never be the same.
I’d told West there are no beginnings, middles, and ends. Think about it, I told him, because I wanted him to listen to me.
I said to him that life is complicated, people are complicated, because that’s what I believed. That’s what I had to believe. But saying that to West–even if it’s true—didn’t change the fact that he’d written an ending over top of us. Written it with his mouth on another woman’s body.
He pushed inside me, crashed into me, loved me and kissed me and fucked me until I came hard enough to see stars, only it turns out that seeing the stars when you’re alone in the wilderness doesn’t mean you’ll know how to follow them to safety.
He was my north star once.
That night of the party, I cried because the skies had changed. There were stars scattered across the black night, bright and gorgeous as jewels, but I couldn’t read them.
What I didn’t understand right away—what I figured out that winter, trusting my instincts, trusting myself until I could believe it down deep inside—was I didn’t need to know the way.
The wilderness is life. There’s no way out of it.
That’s not important.
The important thing is that from that night, West was with me.
West was with me all the time.
When I come back to awareness of myself, the quality of the sound from downstairs has changed. It’s not so raucous now, the music slow-moving and trippy, voices conversing, laughing rather than shouting.
The party is winding down.
I cried myself to sleep, or into some kind of stupor.
West’s got one arm over me. It’s good—not too heavy, not too much. Different, though. He’s so much bigger than he was in the spring. I can feel the weight of the difference against my breasts, snugged into my ribcage.
From where I lie, I can see out the window to the sky.
He’s awake. I can tell by the way he feels against my back.
I turn over, lifting the arm that’s between our bodies and letting my wrist drop against my forehead as though it might be some use in shielding me from the sight of his face so close.
It isn’t any use.
There’s the scar through his eyebrow, the no-color color of his eyes, his hair too short, his ears too small, his mouth so wide, and everything about him just exactly as it should be.
I guess he could say, That was fun, but I’ve got to get going.
I guess it’s possible he could act like a douche, like Krishna might act, smiling and chattering while he backs toward the door and makes an exit.
But there isn’t any part of me that expects him to.
“Can we talk?” he asks.
That’s West. My West.
I reach up on an impulse and slide my hands over his neck. Lift my shoulders off the bed, cool air leaking through the window on my naked shoulder blades as I set my mouth against his.
I do it because he’s here. Because I can.
His palm finds my waist under the blanket he must have put over me. It rests there on my skin as he holds still and lets me kiss him.
