But once again, I did nothing. I simply said, “Oh, I don’t need to sleep in the pool house.”
We crossed again through the entry hall, and then we were definitely in the master suite: twice as large as the guest bedrooms, with its own sitting area—it seemed so predictable as to almost not be worth noting that the bedroom was bigger than my entire apartment in New York—and the adjacent bathroom featured double sinks in a quartz countertop and an enormous quartz shower and a huge, oval, freestanding bathtub. As in the guest rooms, this bed was tidily made with a white coverlet, but, on the bureau and bedside tables, there were personal objects—an iPad and a legal notepad and a heavy-looking cylindrical silver clock with a lit-up face of shifting light-and dark-brown geometrical shapes. There really wasn’t much clutter, though; either he was a tidy person or Margit or Glenn cleaned up after him, or both.
It occurred to me to point at the bed and say, “Is that where the magic happens?” But I managed to suppress this unhelpful impulse as well and instead said, “I feel like something is missing in here.”
We were standing with our backs to the bathroom door, just inside the bedroom, and he glanced at me with an alert expression.
“An Indigo Girls poster,” I said.
He laughed. “I guess people buy posters online now, right? I used to go to a music store at the mall and page through those giant plastic racks.”
“Same,” I said. “And then get an Orange Julius.”
I felt conscious of having come to the end of the tour, conscious of being in his bedroom, conscious of the intimacy of our conversation. Even as I was exquisitely aware of his nearness, I also was thinking in an abstract way about how I had been one kind of person up until my divorce, a resigned and constrained person. Then I had been another kind of person for the last decade, a cynical and compartmentalized person. Was there any reason I couldn’t now become a third kind of person, made more confident by experience and braver by the current reminder of how fragile and tenuous all our lives had been all along? And still Noah’s head was turned to look at me, and my head was turned to look at him.
He smiled at me in a way I had never before been smiled at, a smile of such tenderness and openness and warmth. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied.
We still were making eye contact as I brushed the back of my right hand against the back of his left one, and then our fingers intertwined a little. This, his complicity, bolstered me, and I stepped around so that I was facing him. The shift made it easier to properly hold hands, not just on the one side but, almost without my realizing it, on the other side, too. “So,” I said, and I really did feel like I might disrupt the space-time continuum with the hugeness of what seemed to be about to happen. I had never initiated a first kiss with someone I cared about, and I had never initiated a first kiss while sober.
“So,” he said, still smiling.
I took one more step toward him—again, the closeness of him, the mammalian smell of him, made me swoony—and then I stood on my tiptoes and leaned in and pressed my mouth against his.
There was, of course, a part of my mind narrating the action, declaring, It’s happening! Holy shit, it’s happening! But as we kept kissing, as we alternated between pursing our lips and pulling back and smiling and setting our hands on each other’s shoulders and backs, as his tongue slipped forward and touched mine, my inner narrator receded, or went somewhere else. And then there was just the sheer physical pleasure and excitement of my mouth touching his mouth and the skin on my hands and arms and face and neck touching the skin on his hands and arms and face and neck and the rest of my clothed body pressed to the rest of his clothed body. It felt like a relief, like something I’d been waiting for since TNO and much of the world had shut down in March, and also like something I’d been waiting for since he’d shown me his tattoos in 2018, and also like something I’d been waiting for my whole life. And it felt like an astonishing miracle. If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I’d never stop wanting more of it.
And then he pulled his head a full foot back, and also took a step back, though his hands were still cupping my jaw on either side and his expression was still tender. “I have something to show you,” he said.
It was because I was a comedy writer, and not because I was sexually fearless, that I was tempted to say, “Your penis?” Instead, I said, “Is it better than this?”
He laughed. “It’s in the kitchen.”
“Is it sourdough bread?”
“No, although I’ll make dinner if you’re hungry, like some salmon and a salad, or else Margit left some premade stuff for us.”
Who cares about dinner? I thought.
I said, “Is it an NDA for me to sign?”
He laughed. “Also no.” He placed a hand on the small of my back to steer me toward the bedroom door. “It’s kind of a present, but it isn’t key chains.”
Did he think I was a bad kisser? Was the kissing not supposed to have happened? Was the kissing supposed to have happened, but when it wasn’t some guy off a dating site, was it paced differently and the subsequent stuff didn’t occur as quickly? Was it weird that I didn’t know how this all worked even though I was thirty-eight years old, or did nobody know? Counting Martin Biersch, my ex-husband, two earlier guys in college, and the assortment of online serial hookups, I’d had sex with a total of nine men. If someone had told me of this figure when I was in high school, I’d have thought it sounded like an embarrassment of riches, but surely it was nothing compared to Noah’s number. Even a pop star who eschewed the term playboy had to be, by normal standards, a playboy.
Back in the kitchen, on the wood-topped island, I noticed a shiny black folder. He pulled a single sheet of paper from it, with printed words I couldn’t read, and said, “It’s something I made as a surprise. Not a song. More of an activity.”
“This is very intriguing.”
“You’ll know what it is pretty quickly. Okay.” He cleared his throat. “I need you to give me a noun.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “A noun? Like a person, place, or thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Any particular kind of noun?”
He shook his head.
“Let’s see,” I said. “How about door?”
He used a ballpoint pen to write then said, “Verb ending in -ing?”
“This is like Mad Libs. Fidgeting.”
He looked sheepish. “It is Mad Libs. But personalized for you.” He began reading. “I just drove my door from Kansas City, Missouri, to Los Angeles, California. As I drove, I was fidgeting about whether I’d—” He looked up from the page. “This is incredibly corny, huh?”
“Well, we’ve barely started. Don’t give away the punch line.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“I’m happy to. Do you need an adjective?”
His brow furrowed. “I thought this was clever before you got here, but now it seems very contrived.”