mine, expectantly, and it’s only a tiny shift forward for my mouth to meet his in this new, lazy relief.
It’s both familiar and foreign. His skin is coarser with stubble, his lips stronger. Inside me, I know, he’s thicker.
I start to move off him—worried about making a mess of his tuxedo—but he holds me steady, his hips to mine. “Not yet,” he says against my mouth. “I want to stay here. I still don’t believe this is happening.”
“Me either.” I am lost in the lazy sweep of his tongue, the tiny kisses that melt into deeper ones.
“I might want to do it again.”
I smile. “Me too.”
He moves his mouth to my neck, his left hand coming up to cup my breast.
“Is it weird,” I begin, “that I felt like I was having sex with someone new and old at the same time?”
This makes him laugh, and he bends, kissing my chest. Leaning back, he whispers, “Want to know something even weirder?”
My eyes fall closed. “I want to know everything.”
And for the first time in over a decade, I really do.
“It was years before I was with someone other than you. You were the only woman I was with until I was . . . well, for a long time.”
His words hit the blank wall of my sex haze, and then dread falls over me like blackness.
“I’ve loved you my whole life,” Elliot continues, his lips moving against my collarbone. Slowly, I open my eyes, and he looks up at me. “At least from the minute I ever thought about love, and sex, and women.”
He’s still inside me.
He smiles, and the moonlight catches the sharp angle of his jaw. “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. It took a long time before I wanted anyone else, physically, at all.”
It’s a little like being in the eye of a tornado. All around me, things are happening, but inside my head, it’s so quiet.
At my silence, his eyes widen first, and then fall closed. “Oh, my God. I just realized what I’ve said.”
then
monday, january 1
eleven years ago
Just off the Richmond Bridge, I called Elliot, listening through the speaker as the phone rang and rang, eventually going to voice mail. About ten minutes into my drive it had occurred to me that I didn’t know where in town Christian lived, and I didn’t know how long Elliot would be there. It was after one in the morning now—he might even just be home, in bed, and I wouldn’t be able to get to him without waking up the rest of the house.
Highway 101 stretched out dark ahead of me, dotted with the occasional burning taillights of another car. It was otherwise empty, with clumps of drivers getting on and off the freeway around the dotted small towns: Novato, Petaluma, Rohnert Park . . . In Santa Rosa, I tried calling again, and this time an unfamiliar male voice answered.
“Elliot’s phone.” Noise blared, drunken and raucous, in the background.
A sour combination of relief and irritation twisted in me. It was nearly two in the morning and he—or at least his phone—was still at the party?
“Is Elliot around?” I asked.
“Who’s calling?”
I paused. “Who’s answering?”
The guy inhaled, and his answer came out tight, like he had just taken a giant hit off something. “Christian.”
“Christian,” I said, “this is Macy.”
He let out a long, controlled breath. “Elliot’s Macy?”
Someone in the background let out a sharp “Dude.”
“Yes,” I confirmed, “his girlfriend, Macy.”
“Oh, shit.” The line went quiet, muffled, as if someone was holding a hand there. When he came back, he said simply, “Elliot’s not here.”
“Did he go home without his phone?” I asked.
“Nah.”
Confused, I pressed, “So how is he not there if you know he didn’t go home?”
“Macy.” A slow, drunken laugh, and then, “I am way too high to follow that.”
“Okay,” I said calmly, “can you just give me your address?”
He rattled off an address on Rosewood Drive, adding, “Second house on the left. You’ll hear it.”
“Chris,” someone protested in the background, “don’t.”
Christian let out another low laugh. “What the fuck do I care?”
And then he hung up.
Christian’s house was new, and therefore large for the Craftsman-modest Healdsburg, set on a hill and overlooking a vineyard. He was right: I could hear it as soon as I turned onto his street. Cars jammed the long driveway, fanning out messily toward the curb. I parked in the first empty stretch of street, several houses down. Zipping my puffy jacket over my dress, I left my heels