her hands to block me. “No! Don’t you come back here unless you’re ready to be a person. A real person, I mean—the kind who feels things and tries things and wants things. Can you do that? Because if you can’t, then you should just throw in the towel right now. Both of us should.”
I knew she was right. For such a long time, I hadn’t let myself want anything, or nothing important anyway. It felt safer that way. But the truth is I did want things now: I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to speak, and I wanted Zelda to stay with me. And maybe more than anything, I wanted to tell her that I wanted her. And I couldn’t hide behind not having words, because I didn’t need words for this.
I reached out and pulled her down into the roadway with me. I looked into those ocean eyes, and pushed her silver hair back over her ears. And then I kissed her, a kiss that went on and on until she couldn’t misinterpret what it was I wanted. And when she finally pulled away, she didn’t laugh or smile. It freaked me out, actually, how utterly serious she looked.
“So take me home, Parker.”
SAUDADE
DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on the fucking birds and the bees. Like, why would we teach kids about sex that way? I assume you already know this, but it still blows my mind that when people talk about that shit, they’re not actually talking about birds having flappy beaky sex with other birds, or bees having buzzy stingy sex with other bees. They’re talking about how birds and bees help flowers have sex by unintentionally picking up pollen on their bodies when they’re flying around collecting nectar. As far as I know, that is not how people do it.
My mom on sex: “Try to do it mostly with people you love. Use protection. Don’t be an asshole.”
My dad on sex (from an article he wrote in some magazine): “Having sex is twenty times easier than writing about it.”
D’Angelo on sex: “My darling/You aren’t the average kind/You need the comfort of my lovin’/To bring out the best in you.”
So what to do? Writing about what happened between me and Zelda seems like the very definition of TMI. But wouldn’t passing over it completely be a pretty serious (dare I say it?) anticlimax? I mean, people say they like stories where boy meets girl and then boy gets girl. But I think people don’t care so much about the “get” part as long as there’s a “gets it on with” part. And I promised at the beginning of this whole saga that I wasn’t going to pretend sex didn’t exist just because I’m who I am and you’re who you are. So let’s just take it nice and slow. Don’t be nervous. I know you aren’t the average kind.
When we got back to the house, I saw my mom’s car in the driveway, which was bad news. I’d either have to totally ignore her, or else hash out the fight all over again. But I got lucky (pun entirely intended): the house was empty. I didn’t know where my mom was, and honestly, I didn’t care. Zelda and I went straight up to my room and sat down on the bed, and I thought about how less than two days ago we’d been right here and she’d said, “I’m not going to have sex with you tonight,” and there was a part of me that wished she’d say it again, because the moment of truth was coming and I was terrified of it. But she didn’t. I started to take off my shirt, but Zelda stopped me.
“Let me do that. It’s always better to be undressed than to undress yourself.”
I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my face, so I just sat there, still as a mannequin, while she unbuttoned the shirt she’d bought for me. It flashed through my head that this girl was actually older than my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother would’ve been. And was it weird that I wasn’t more weirded out by that fact?
“Hey,” Zelda said. “Get out of your head. I’m right here.”
Yes, she was. We finished undressing each other and got into bed. The house was just cold enough that it felt really good under the covers, skin to skin. And then we were kissing, and then it was happening, and I’ll just leave the gory details