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“You’re really good at that, Cal. I wanted to tell you that you were doing it perfectly, but I didn’t have the power of speech. That was incredible. Thank you.” I slid up her body and kissed her full on the mouth.
“You don’t have to thank me, but hearing that I’m doing it right makes me feel like I can lift a fucking car or run a marathon or enroll in grad school.” She giggled.
“Do you want to go to grad school?” she asked.
“I don’t know, that was just a thing I said. Maybe? But I have no idea what I’d go for and I’m still in so much debt that it would be irresponsible to go without a goal and an intention.” I hated the way those words sounded. I sounded like my disapproving parents, or my sister. She’d gone to grad school, but they’d completely supported that. Of course.
“You could, you know. You can do anything you want to. I want you to feel like you’re supported. I know that your parents haven’t been the best. We’re alike in that at least.” That was one of the things that had made us so close. Our parents weren’t the best. They weren’t the worst, but there was a long way from the worst to the best, with a lot of mediocre parenting in between.
“I don’t know. I’m always just trying to keep my head above water. I never feel like I have time to breathe. Except when I’m with you.” I kissed her cheek because it seemed like the right thing to do.
“That’s how I feel about you. Like everything is spinning and with you I can stand still.” I rested my head on her chest, right on top of her beating heart. It was racing, as was mine.
“I love you, Callyn. I know I’m probably not supposed to say that with all that you’re thinking about, but I needed to say it. I love you, so much.” I felt her lips on the top of my head and I wanted to cry again.
I did love her. I did. I just didn’t know how much or in what way. Instead of running on that hamster wheel of thoughts again, I raised my head and kissed her.
“Fuck me again, please.”
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MUCH MUCH LATER, Iwoke up completely naked in Emma’s bed. Fortunately, she was right next to me, so I was able to remember why I was naked and why I was in her bed. Right. The sex. We’d had the sex again. Twice in twenty-four hours. That was a record for me. I’d never had a sexual relationship like this before. All other encounters seemed like pale practice for what I did with Emma. What we had was on a whole other level of sex.
I needed to think about what was beyond the sex. Sure, that was fun and great and lovely and wonderful, but was it just sex? Clearly I had sexual feelings for her. That had been made clear by this second time and the fact that I wanted to wake her up and fuck her again and again until we both passed out from too much sex.
Okay, so I had that one figured out. I wanted to have sex with her. All the time, any time that I could. Forever.
I looked at her face in the glow of the still-lit salt lamps. The candles had burned themselves out long ago. It was that amorphous time between night and day, that gray in-between where everything seemed strange and unsure.
I watched Emma sleep, wondering what she was dreaming about. Was she dreaming about me? I hoped she was. I hoped she was thinking about what we’d done tonight and the night before and how she was finally getting what she wanted with me. Not all of it, though. I knew what she wanted. She wanted everything.
Was I ready to give her everything? I heard whining and went to the door to let Vegas in. I picked him up and put him on the bed, hoping he wouldn’t wake Emma. He looked at her and seemed to realize that he should be quiet, so he put his head on his paws between us and I curled myself around him and stared at them both.
Here was my world. These two. In the past few months, everything had changed for me. I was living with my best friend, we were married on paper, we’d gotten a puppy, I’d gotten a new job, and now . . .
Now?
I let myself, just for a moment, picture a future with Emma. Instead of thinking of a wedding with someone else, with another person where Emma would stand next to me as my maid of honor, I thought about a wedding with her standing beside me. As my wife.
I thought about Christmas together, about buying a house together, doing life together. With Vegas and then maybe with kids. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted them, but I went ahead and thought about it. Watching Emma teach them to ride bikes and swim in a pool. Wrapping presents from Santa and hoping they wouldn’t wake up and catch us. Instead of stopping myself from seeing it, I let myself see it all in excruciating detail. I thought about waking up next to her ten years down the road, twenty, thirty, more. What would she look like as she aged? Of course, she would always be the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. That would never change.
What would that life be like? I had never expected it, never planned it, but here it was, in front of me for the taking. I could have all of those things if I just let myself have them.
It would be good. It would be wonderful. It would be more than I ever expected or could have imagined for myself. It would be more than I deserved, that was for sure.
I was scared too. Scared shitless. What if we tried this thing and it didn't work? I could understand why Emma had hesitated for so long. Because what was done couldn’t be undone. If we didn’t work out together, our friendship would be over. I didn’t think I could be friends with someone I was once in love with. Breaking up with her would break me. I would never recover from that. It could all go wrong, it could all go bad.
But what if it went right?said a little voice in my head. What if we worked out? What if we looked back at this time and laughed about how foolish we were for so many years? What if we spent the rest of our lives together and lived happily ever after? Did such fairytales exist? Could they exist for us?
I didn’t know the answer, but I did know one thing with clarity as I watched Emma and Vegas sleep: I wanted to give it a shot. I wanted to try. I wanted to see where this would go. The regret of “what if?” would kill me more than trying and then not having things work out. Regret would be worse than failure.
I also thought about other things as the light changed in the room and my eyes got heavier as exhaustion tried to take me under to sleep.
Maybe I could go to grad school. Maybe I could figure out what I really wanted to do with my life, with my time. I’d always just kind of bumbled around, but my parents had always been there, telling me what I could do and what I couldn’t do and basically stomping on any kind of ambition I ever had. They gave all their support and attention to Dani, and it was like they didn’t have enough left over for me. I still loved them, of course, but they hadn’t been the parents I had needed them to be and I was going to be seeing the consequences of that for years to come, probably for my whole life. I should probably get myself into a therapist’s office again to work some more of this shit out.
I’d always shied away from discussing my parents in therapy and that might have been a mistake. I was so tired of being scared and hesitant about things. It wasn’t like me at all. I always wanted to do everything, right now. I would make a decision and then want to go full-throttle. Strange how I was hesitating with this whole Emma situation. This was one of the only times I hadn’t just closed my eyes and jumped off the cliff.
I rested my head on the pillow that still smelled faintly of sweat and sex and closed my eyes finally. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I woke up.
