he guides me toward the door with his hand on my lower back before reaching for my fingers. I feel the attention of the entire room on our joined hands as we leave, and Alex’s confused “I thought she had a boyfriend?” followed by Miss Dina’s sharply hissed “Shhhh!” and Andreas’s “They broke up, remember?” in our wake.
Elliot looks down at me, grinning. “Is it just like you remembered?”
I lean into his shoulder. “Better.”
then
saturday, september 9
eleven years ago
The first trip after the summer—after our declaration that we were together, after that sweet, aching kiss—was in mid-September. The air was thick with the relentless heat of Indian summer, and I used it as an excuse to spend the entire weekend in my bikini.
Elliot . . . noticed.
Unfortunately, Dad noticed, too, and outright required us to spend our time reading downstairs or outside, and not in the closet.
That Saturday, we spread a blanket out on Elliot’s scraggly front lawn, beneath the enormous black oak, and gave our updates on friends, and school, and favorite words, but it had a different weight to it. We whispered it now, lying face-to-face on our sides, with Elliot’s fingers playing with the ends of my hair or brushing against my neck, his gaze dancing across the swell of my breasts.
According to rule number twenty-nine—When Macy is over sixteen and has her first serious boyfriend, make sure she is being safe—Dad put me on the pill almost immediately after that visit. I was still several months away from turning eighteen, and Dad told me he planned to call my “female doctor,” but only after giving me a stilted, awkward lecture that it wasn’t permission to have sex with Elliot, per se, but that he was trying to protect our futures.
Not that he had to worry. Despite seeing each other every weekend throughout October, Elliot and I never came that close to sex. Not since that day on the floor of the closet, his body over mine, working on instinct. And Elliot was the one taking things slow, not me. He kept telling me it was because every tiny step was a first, everything we did together we would only do for the first time, with this one person, our whole lives.
It seemed a foregone conclusion that we’d be together forever. We hadn’t said love yet. We hadn’t made promises. But it was as impossible to imagine falling out of love with Elliot as it was to imagine holding my breath for an hour.
So, we were winding our way carefully through exploration. Kissing for hours. Swimming together in the river: my legs slippery and cold around his waist, my stomach covered in goose bumps, sensitive to the feel of his bare torso pressed against me.
Weekdays back at school became infused with this desperate anticipation. We agreed to Skype once a week—Wednesdays—which made it painful to sit through classes that day. Those nights, he would look at me through his camera, eyes wide. I’d think about kissing him. I’d even tell him what I was thinking, and he’d groan and change the subject. Afterward, I’d climb into bed and imagine my fingers were his, knowing he was doing the same.
And weekends, whenever we had the smallest window, were a blur of kisses on the floor, our mouths moving together until our lips felt raw, our breaths shallow from the exertion of wanting.
But that was it. We kissed. Clothes stayed on, hands stayed put.
Until they didn’t.
Late October. It was pouring rain and miserable outside. Dad took the car into town to get groceries, leaving me and Elliot alone in the house. It wasn’t premeditated. He didn’t even spare a glance back at us, reading in the living room by the wood-burning stove. He simply called out that we were out of milk, and he was getting stuff for dinner.
The door closed with a quiet click.
The car tires crunched on the gravel until the sound disappeared.
I looked up at Elliot across the room, and my skin flushed hot.
He was already crawling across the floor to me, and then he was hovering over me in the shadows of the flickering fire.
I still remember the way he lifted my shirt, kissing a path from my belly button to my collarbone. I remember how—for the first time ever—he figured out the clasp of my bra, laughing into my mouth as his fingers fought with the elastic. I remember the reverence of his palm as it slid from the open fastening, around my ribs, beneath