for a walk along the beach and I’ll see them later.
I go to the end of the road, climbing the long wooden steps to the beach, taking deep breaths and trying not to think about the fact that Jason just heard me say I wasn’t interested in sleeping with him.
I suppose it’s marginally better than hearing me say I was interested in sleeping with him.
Sleeping with him.
Oh, how I loved sleeping with Jason.
Jason has always made me feel safe. I had never been able to sleep comfortably in a bed with anyone before Jason. Granted, I don’t remember most of my one-night stands and brief relationships in my youth, only remember waking up the next morning with a sinking feeling in my stomach, but the few I do remember, I remember not wanting to be touched.
I never understood spooning, for example. How could anyone sleep pressed into someone’s hot body? How could anyone sleep even touching someone else? No thank you. I wanted to be all by myself, on my pretend island on my side of the bed.
Until Jason. The first night we spent together was in my apartment, not his. It wasn’t a drunken falling into bed but a sober experience, in more ways than one. I still remember everything about it. How we had spent the evening kissing, and kissing, and kissing on the sofa. How I knew then that this was it, that he was the one for me.
I remember that I got up and went to the bathroom and started getting ready for bed. I brushed my teeth, took my hair down, and got undressed. I pulled on my pajamas and padded back into the living room, where I think Jason was shell-shocked, wondering where on earth I’d gone, what I was doing. He never expected me to come back into the room in my pink and white flowery pajamas.
I walked over to him, sitting on the sofa, took his hand, and saying nothing at all I led him into my bedroom, sat him on my bed, then straddled him, taking his face in my hands and kissing his face everywhere but his mouth. I wanted to remember this. I wanted to remember everything.
And finally, gently, I kissed his lips, back to his neck, and back to his lips, and it was the sweetest, slowest, most loving kiss I could ever remember.
He buried his face in my hair, in my neck, murmuring my name. It had been such a long time coming, Jason and I, friends for so long, this unspoken attraction unspoken for so very long, that allowing it to emerge was an almost spiritual experience.
He unbuttoned the buttons of my pajamas very slowly, kissing all the way down, as I moved my hands under his T-shirt, unable to believe I was able to do this, feel his skin, feel his tongue in his mouth, when it was all I had thought about for so very long.
It was soft, and sweet, and slow. Loving. It was the first time I had ever known the difference between sex and fucking and making love. This was making love, and when he was above me, moving inside me, leaning down to kiss me all over my face, in just the way I had kissed him all over his when I first sat him on the bed, I was astonished to feel tears leaking their way out of my eyes.
He stopped moving. “You’re crying. Why are you crying? Am I hurting you?”
I shook my head. I had no words. I had no idea how to explain that these were tears of joy, because I had never cried tears of joy before.
Afterward, he pulled me in tight, spooning into him, and I sank back into his body, wanting to drink in his taste, his smell, his strong arms wrapped around me.
I woke up to daylight streaming in through the cracks at the sides of the curtains, Jason’s arms still around me, still holding me tight, and I had had the best night’s sleep I had ever had.
It was how we always slept. No matter how bad things were between us, we slept together, in the middle of the bed, Jason’s arms wrapped tightly around me, and however bad things had been, however much we had fought, as soon as I felt his arms, I knew everything would be all right.
* * *
I stay on the beach for a long time. I wish Jason hadn’t heard me say it. Even though