The Whole World: A Novel - By Emily Winslow Page 0,14

show of his interest was the way he looked at me. But he’d looked at me that way for as long as I had known him.

When my old boyfriend Jeremy and I had started having sex, when I was sixteen, the most awkward part had been finding where to do it. I was too tall to manage in his car. Our parents were all home in the evenings. We had siblings with varying schedules in and out of our houses after school. My cousin Rain had solved the problem by letting us use her house when her dad was away on business. Rain didn’t have a mom, and her dad traveled a lot. She was in college and spent a lot of time at her boyfriend’s anyway. So that gave us the place to ourselves on some afternoons or weekends—whatever we could arrange around my cello lessons and Jeremy’s soccer.

I refused to do it in Uncle Joe’s bed or Rain’s bed; that would just have been gross. So we’d put a sheet on the couch in the TV room. We had to bring our own sheet. This is what I mean about it being complicated.

The TV room was on the back side of the house, with the lumpy couch. The good couch was in the front room, but being there would have necessitated closing all the blinds, which would have looked suspicious. There was no air-conditioning, so when it was hot we had to be quiet because of open windows; all the windows had to be open for a cross breeze if you didn’t want to choke on the heat. We’d turn on the TV to further mask the sound; we’d have sex to cartoons or talk shows and sometimes we’d just crack up. It was all very cloak-and-dagger. And of course we used condoms. Preparing to do it was this huge effort of planning each time, which means sex, to me, had this incredible lead-up with logistics and scheduling and packing. I don’t think of it as improvisational.

So, unless he sent me an explicit invitation, Nick was going to take me by surprise.

It was daytime when we visited the Sedgwick. It wasn’t like a dinner date, or anything else self-conscious. The Sedgwick has dinosaurs and fossils and rocks. I like geology.

I flitted around the gem room, admiring the bright colors and natural sharp facets. I took off my jacket. He watched me. He leaned back on the red cushion of a window seat.

“You are gorgeous,” he said, and it wasn’t casual.

I was really pleased. I wasn’t thinking ahead. I did that duck-the-head-shyly thing, to show I was both modest and delighted.

“Come on,” Nick said, tugging my arm. He pulled me past the plesiosaur and iguanodon skeletons and unlocked a stairwell. He prodded the button to call the elevator. When the thing came it had one of those old iron grilles, which he shoved aside for entry. He pressed me against the back wall of the box and kissed me.

I didn’t see him again, even though he wasn’t yet gone. We avoided each other. Of course we did. I’d made an idiot of myself. He’d offered me something, and I’d acted like I wanted it, and then I’d gotten angry, and sick, and who does that? Who acts like that? Who’s going to kiss a girl he’s watched throw up, who’s going to want a girl who throws up over a kiss? I’d messed up everything. I’d messed up something good.

I think I did it to protect myself. Which is roundabout and stupid, but I think it’s what I was trying to do. I remember long ago thinking about Jeremy, “He means the whole world to me.” I meant that at the time, really meant it, and that was how big my world was: It was as big as the ten blocks between my house and his. You could have told me there was more, you could have drawn me maps and told me myths of a bigger world, or other worlds, or however you wanted to define whatever there was outside of that space, but the whole world as far as I could perceive it and touch it and cared about was the size it was. It had him and me in it, and my parents, who made a mess of things. And that—not him, or my parents or the mess, but really the size of my world—is why I’ve done everything I’ve done since, and why I came