“Nothing!”
“I don’t fake orgasms.”
“I didn’t say you had!”
“I know I told you about that time I faked enthusiasm over miso soup on that terrible date, but I never faked orgasms.”
“Nor should you have.” He lifted the arm that was slung over me and showed me his palm, a gesture of peace. “I absolutely was not complaining. I was merely making an observation.”
“All right. But also, that wasn’t normal. On a number of fronts.”
He laughed. “What do you mean? Tell me about these fronts.”
“Well, first, the only other times I’ve had more than one orgasm have been by myself.” And even then, it hadn’t been a frequent occurrence. It had always seemed like a lot of work to chase subsequent ones. They didn’t usually justhappen. But I didn’t need to tell him that. He had a big enough ego as it was.
Well, no, that wasn’t right. That was my reflexive thought based on my initial impression of him. I needed to stop doing that. It wasn’t that he had a big ego so much as he was… a bit prickly. Hmm. People said that about me, sometimes, too. I filed that away to think about later. “Second, normally, the answer to the foreplay question is going to be yes.”
“Noted.”
“I mean, if we’re going to be doing this again,” I said hurriedly. I didn’t want to assume. I had, after all, given him my crone speech. More than once.
“Oh, we are going to be doing this again.”
I feared my grin was as dopey as they came—way worse than the previous one. “Yeah?”
“Are you kidding me?” He grabbed one of my thighs andslung it over his legs, reversing our positions so he was lying on his back and I was on my side draped over him.
From this angle, I noticed that one of his shoulders was covered in mosquito bites, a dozen or so of them. “Wow.” I ran my hand over them.
“Oooh, ohh, do that again but with your nails.”
I switched to scratching, and he made comically exaggerated noises of relief. “That batch is from swimming earlier.”
“It wasn’t dark yet.”
“What can I say? I guess you were right: I’m too sweet to resist.”
I snorted and stopped scratching. “Back to the concept of doing this again.”
“Damn, woman, give me five minutes, maybe?” he teased.
“Notnow. Just… theoretically. I feel like some clarification is in order.”
“By all means, clarify.”
“This is still my last hurrah. I’m just being a bit more expansive in how I’m defining that. A camp affair, if you will. I want to put that on record.”
“You’re saying you don’t want me to follow you back to your regular life in Minneapolis and hold a boom box over my head outside your bedroom window?”
“That is exactly what I’m saying.”
“No danger of that.” He grinned. “But if we’re putting things on the record here, allow me to register that I do believe in kissing.”
“What?” I laughed. “I’m not sure kissing is something you can believe in or not. It’s not like God. Or, I don’t know, the COVID vaccine.”
“Sure it is. And I believe in it. Therefore, I’m starting to be alittle too aware of the fact that we’ve had two episodes of horizontal hugging now and there hasn’t been any kissing—mouth kissing, I’m talking about—involved in either of them.”
“OK, so there’s a work order for next time.”
