The feeling became too much. His arms began feeling itchy around me, the warm glow became sticky. The euphoria became terrifying. I pushed him away and slipped off the counter. The spell was broken. Maybe I had broken it. Which was fine, I shouldn’t have let go like that. Letting go was not safe. It exposed me in a way that I didn’t like being exposed. It exposed that part of me where my feelings were too big, too uncontainable, too everything. I needed to reel it in before I let him see me like this.
‘I . . . uh . . .’ I raced into one of the toilet cubicles, pulled my clothes back on, peed and wiped myself clean.
‘You okay in there?’ he called from the stall next to me.
‘Fine. Just . . . cleaning up.’ We flushed at the same time, and then emerged from our respective toilets at the same time.
‘You okay?’ he asked again.
‘Mmmm,’ I mumbled, nodded and tried to arrange my features into a ‘fine’ look, whatever that was.
‘You sure?’ He looked worried now. Everything around us that had previously been out of focus and almost non-existent rushed back in. Cold, hard reality seemed to settle in around us, pushing away the magical moment that had existed seconds ago. And the reality was that I’d shown Andrew too much of myself. And that was terrifying. He was sure to disappear now. Like all the others had at that moment when I revealed a little more of myself. The part of myself that seemed so unpalatable to others.
‘Should wenothave done that?’ he asked, trying to make eye contact with me. I dodged it.
We should not have done it likethat, is what I wanted to say. But instead, my words came out coldly. ‘We did do it, though.’
‘This will complicate things between us,’ he said softly. ‘Unless . . . you want it to complicate things? Do you?’
I frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You and I. Maybe you want to . . .’ He looked at me as if hoping I would fill in the blanks.
‘To become complicated?’ I asked.
‘Well?’
‘Why would I want something to be complicated?’ I said, and his face crumpled.
‘I thought you said, the other day at the pool, that you knew why it had been awkward under the tree?’
I had said that, hadn’t I? But I didn’t answer that question. ‘I don’t want things to become complicated between us,’ I said. ‘Our arrangement is proving so successful, I would hate anything to come in the way of that.’
‘Sex always complicates things.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s sex.’
I was about to open my mouth and argue with him, but I think I knew what he meant. I didn’t agree with him that sex in general complicated things. I’d had uncomplicated sex before, but with Andrew I wasn’t sure that was possible. Something felt like it had fundamentally changed between us. I could feel it in the way that my body was now hyper-aware of him. As if I had tuned into his radio frequency and was receiving transmissions.
‘So, let’s decide not to complicate it,’ I said. Synonyms forcomplicateincludedimpede, muddle, convoluteandperplex. I didn’t much like this.
‘You can do that?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you?’ I turned to face him now.
He nodded. ‘Sure. Why not? Click my fingers and uncomplicate things.’
‘Are you being sarcastic?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I just thought that maybe this was starting to evolve beyond our “arrangement”.’ He did that thing with his fingers in the air. I never knew what that meant. It always implied that words had other meanings, hidden meanings that I was not privy to. But I had understood the part where he’d said ‘beyond’. Synonyms includedabove, apart from, beyond the bounds of, over and above, in addition to. I inhaled sharply and then put my hands on my ribcage. Thinking about what our relationship could be outside of the confines of this arrangement was terrifying. It was the unknown. The drop off the cliff when you couldn’t see the bottom. I had not prepared myself to think about that. Panic seized me.
‘We’d better get back to the wedding,’ I said, walking towards the door.
His face had a deadpan quality to it now. As if he hadn’t bothered to arrange his features into any kind of expression, which seemed even more confusing to me than an actual expression. And then his face changed again; I think it was sadness, or anger. I often found those two emotions hard to tell apart. They seemed to do the same things to people’s lips, pulled them tighter and then bent them down at the edges. He finally shrugged after looking around a little, as if trying to find an answer on the walls or the carpet.
‘Okay!’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to the wedding.’
