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“Hey you,” he said. “How was the interview?”
“Good, I guess. I think they’re going to offer me the job.”
“Really? So soon? That’s unusual.” I thought I detected a faint note of jealousy—the same edge I’d heard in his voice when I got into Columbia and he didn’t and when I’d gotten a publishing contract for my thesis just after his thesis had been turned down by his reading committee. “What are you going to say if they do?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine living here and it seems ridiculous to leave the city when you’ll be applying for jobs there next year. I suppose I could just turn it down…”
“Hm…better to try to put them off until you have a firm offer from NYU. How far did you say it was from the city? A couple of hours? I could visit weekends.”
“It’s three hours over mountainous roads,” I told him. “It’s really the back of beyond. The place where I’m staying is called the Hart Brake Inn.” I spelled it for him and he laughed. “And there’s a place across the way called Honeysuckle House…”
“Let me guess, there are plastic cows everywhere and the town bar’s called the Dew Drop Inn.”
“Plastic deer,” I said, yawning, “and it’s the Tumble Inn.”
“Yeah, well, it does sound pretty unbearable. I bet it’s freezing in the winter, too. Still, better not burn your bridges until you’ve got a firm offer in the city. I’m sure you’ll think of a way to keep your options open.”
We talked a little more and then said good night. When I turned off my phone a wave of dejection swept over me as random as the gusts of damp air that were coming through the open bedroom window. I supposed it was just the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship—the uncertainly of not knowing when we’d ever manage to be together for longer than the summer or winter vacation. But we’d known what we were getting into when we agreed, during our senior year of college, that neither of us would compromise our careers for “the relationship.” We’d done better than most of our friends, and we had a good chance of ending up on the same side of the country next year. Really, it made sense for me to hold out for the job at NYU. If Dean Book offered me the job I’d find some way to hold her off, and then I’d call NYU and tell them I had another offer. Maybe that would propel them into giving me the job.
The decision made, I felt a weight lift off me, a lessening of tension that made a space for sleep to enter. As I began to drift off my last thought was that I should get up and close the window to keep the rain from coming in…but I was already too far gone to move.
I couldn’t move. I should get up and close the window but I couldn’t move an inch. There was a weight settled on my chest, pinning me to the bed, pushing me deep into the soft mattress, which surrounded me in an enveloping embrace. I couldn’t move a muscle or draw in a breath. Even my eyelids were pasted shut. I struggled to open them against the light.
Light?
The rain had stopped. Instead of wet gusts of air, moonlight streamed through the windows. It was the moonlight that had pinned me to the bed. I could see it spilling across the wide pine planks, a white shaft carrying on its back the shadows of tree branches that quivered in the breeze, trembling to reach me. I recalled the tangled trees and shrubs surrounding Honeysuckle House and had the confused impression that the moonlight was coming fromthere. There was something wrong with that idea, but I was too tired to figure it out and the moonlight was so bright I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. They fluttered shut and I sawhim. The fairytale prince from my teenaged dreams. With him came the scent of honeysuckle and salt air I remembered from those dreams and the longing I’d always felt. He stood on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always hesitated…
He stepped forward into the moonlight. Itwashim, the man from the house across the way. I forced my eyes open and he was still there, hovering above me, looking down at me, his face thrown into shadow by the moonlight cascading over his back like a silver cape. I could only see the places the moonlight touched: the plane of one cheekbone as his head tilted sideways, a lock of his hair falling over his brow, the blade of his shoulder. Each piece of him took shape and weight as the moonlight touched it. It was as if he were made of shadow and the moonlight was the knife sculpting him into being, each stroke of the knife giving him form…andweight.
The moonlight sculpted a rib and I felt his chest press down onto mine, it rounded a hip and it settled onto my pelvis, it carved the length of a muscular leg and it pressed against the length of my legs.
I gasped…or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath because of the weight on my chest. His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked in my breath and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh.Moving flesh. I felt his chest rise and lower against mine, felt his hips grind into mine, his strong legs part mine…He inhaled a long draft of my breath and I felt him harden against me. He rocked against me, pushing his breath into my lungs just as he pushed himself between my legs and then inside of me. He felt like a wave crashing over me, a moonlit wave that sucked me down below the surf and pulled me out to sea, onto a crest, and then back under again…and again and again and again. We rocked to the rhythm of the ocean until I lost all sense of what was me and what was him, until we were the wave cresting, then crashing onto the flat hard sand.
Then I lay panting like a drowning person, slicked in sweat, alone on the bed in a pool of liquid moonlight.
