Joel comes in and takes off his coat. “Can I hang this up?”
I point to the hooks behind the door. Inside, the air is warm and humid and smells of toasting cheese. Joel is tall, taller than me, which is always a nice surprise. Dmitri wasn’t, but I didn’t mind. It’s just nice when a man is. Like now.
Okay, stop.
But I think he might be as nervous as I am, because as I turn to close the door properly, he turns from hanging his coat and we bump into each other, my left shoulder against his middle chest and belly. A puff of scent comes off his shirt, the faintest tinge of cologne mixed with soap and fresh shaving. It nearly buckles my knees.
He catches my elbow, as if I might fall. “You smell amazing,” he says, and the timbre of his voice is ever so slightly rough.
“So do you.”
For a beat, we don’t move, as if noticing these things is something that should be acted upon. And I’d like to act. All I can think about is acting. Reaching for him, kissing him, pressing our bodies together. It both feels like a million years ago and like last week that we knew each other so intimately, learning every corner of each other’s bodies, the sounds we made and the things that—
I swallow, so awash with desire that I feel I might evaporate. “Um”—I gesture—“let’s go to the kitchen.”
He drops his hand and we move as one being toward the kitchen and a pool of light waiting there. Maybe it’s safer, in the light, in the ordinariness of counters and a table and the scent of macaroni and cheese, but I don’t think so.
I pick up my tea and take a long swallow as if fortifying myself. For what? I feel him standing beside me. An atmospheric pressure rises in the air, born of love and loss and longing and the purest desire I have felt in a very long time.
I’m trying to think of something to say, and then he’s standing behind me, sweeping the hair off my neck before he bends to place a kiss at my nape. I close my eyes, flooded with a thousand memories and emotions and hungers, the ache of missing him when I was in the unwed mothers’ home, the hundreds of times I thought I’d glimpsed him in a street, the dreams that woke me up for years. They all fill me. A very small sound escapes my lips.
“Is this okay?” he whispers, fingers light against my skin. I feel the vibrations of his touch through my hair, and his mouth is dry and warm.
“Yes,” I whisper, and lean backward into him, feeling him along my back, my legs. My heart is beating too fast and a tremble moves below my skin, setting it alight. His hands move on my belly, his lips along my skin.
I turn.
He looks at me, hands on my waist. His eyes are dark and liquid, the same eyes I remember, and I reach up to pull the tie he has used to contain his hair. It spills free, thick and cool. It smells the same, of forest and pine and his own notes of health, a fragrance that belongs entirely to him.
When he bends in to kiss me, that hair falls around us, brushes my cheek, and even before our lips meet, I feel grounded, as if I’ve been flying out in the ether somewhere and my feet have come to land on the earth. Here. With Joel. We kiss and disappear into each other, kiss lightly and deeply, and with great care.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, my hands on his face, my index fingers on cheekbones, pinkie along the edge of his jaw. In the middle, the long-ago acne scars left on his cheeks.
His precious, precious face. He looks at me, brushes hair from my brow, touches my mouth, the corner of my eye. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he says softly.
We stand there, swept into our own weather system, pulsing with time and loss and desire. Memories wash through me, wave after wave of them—meeting the boy who had the locker beside mine, also a newcomer to the school, dressing up for Halloween. Going to movies, watching TV in his basement, playing kickball on the hard sand of the beach, the heat of his hands on my body, the way we cried out in sorrow when we were torn apart.
We rest our foreheads together. I breathe him in. My hands are on his neck and his have stayed on my waist, and I both want to kiss him until we’re both oblivious to anything else, and don’t. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been so many years,” I say quietly.
“I know.” He lifts his head. The long weight of time and knowledge shows in his eyes. “We probably shouldn’t do this.”
“Do what? Have sex?”
He nods.
“I guess it would be the prudent thing,” I say, and stand on my tiptoes to press my lips into his. “To wait.” I kiss him again. And again. Until he kisses me back, and we’re both ravenous. I take his hand and lead him into my bedroom. Skylights provide even, pale light as I take off my shirt. He takes off his. His skin is the color of pine bark, and he’s never had any chest hair. I press a hand to his heart. “I’m a little afraid,” I say. “I’m not as well preserved as you are.”
“I’m a grown man,” he says, reaching for the front clasp of my bra. “I know how grown women look.”
Then my breasts are bare, and in his hands, and he doesn’t seem to mind at all, because he bends his head and kisses them, and then we’re falling together to my bed. The pale light burnishes his body, a body I make my way around, remembering, discovering new valleys and marks and scars with my fingers, with my mouth. He traces my waist and my arms and the hollow of my throat and the scar low on my belly.
We move together, within and without, and some wild thing, pressed down for such a long, long, long time rises up in me, expands through my heart and my mouth as he fills my body with himself, as we move and murmur and kiss and twine together. I find myself weeping as he moves within me, and I taste my tears on his lips, or perhaps they’re his tears, I don’t know.
Hours later, we get up and go to the kitchen, both of us ravenous. The macaroni and cheese is on the counter, cold, so we dish up big bowls and microwave them and I pour us big glasses of sparkling water over ice.
We curl up on the banquette looking toward the ocean. It’s completely black outside, but the sound rises up to us, steady and roaring. The rain has slowed, but it still patters on the windows and the skylight. “This is so good,” I say, taking a breath.
“You’ve always been a good cook.”
“Mmm. Thanks.” Our toes are side by side and I reach for his, wiggling. He wiggles back. “It’s really pathetic that you never learned.”
He grins, and it’s wolfish, and I think it’s really quite unfair how gorgeously he’s aged. “Mostly somebody is always willing to do it for me.”
“Huh. I’m so thrilled to join the crowd.”
He leans into me, rests his hand on my thigh beneath the kimono I’ve tossed on. He’s wearing his T-shirt and jeans. His feet are bare. “You could never be one of the crowd.”
“That’s what you have to say, isn’t it?”
He leans against me, rubs his cheek on my shoulder. “Not in this case.”
I let it go. I’m going to enjoy right now, whatever this is. The rest can work itself out later.
He raises his head and starts to eat again. “It’s a little weird that you’re so famous and you’re also this person in my heart.” He presses his fingertips to the middle of his chest. “Like, always.”
“Me too,” I say quietly. “Do you still draw, Joel?”
“I do,” he says. “More painting now. Just had a show at a gallery in Astoria.”
“Really. I wish I’d known.”
“Good way to get girls,” he jokes.
“No doubt.” I shift so that I can look at him more easily. “Can I see them?”
“Sure.” He picks up his phone and opens his photos, then an album, and hands it over.
The paintings are abstract landscapes and animals, rendered in vivid colors. “How big are they? They look huge.”
“Some of them are. The biggest are six feet by seven.”
“Wow. You need a lot of wall space for that.”
He nods, raises an eyebrow. “You’d be in my target demographic, actually.”
“How much does this one cost?” I show him one of a swirl of feathers and leaves, like an autumn wind sweeping everything ahead of itself.