The movie began, dominated throughout by a steady ebb and flow of mournful piano music. As far as she could tell, the movie’s main thesis seemed to be that marriage would slowly kill you. That it would sap your physical capacity for any joy, metaphysical or otherwise. There was one fairly tame, if awkwardly violent, sex scene. She began to wonder why neither one of them had realized this might be an uncomfortable thing for them to watch together, side by side, in silence. Her beer bottle was sweating into her palm.
When they’d seen movies together at the theater, Chip had whispered almost continuously, tickling her during quiet scenes, putting his finger to his lips and admonishing her loudly when other moviegoers urged them to be quiet. But that had been a while ago, now. Months.
About thirty minutes in, he stood up and left the room, returning with two more beers after a suspiciously long absence. He sat down on the couch, right next to her, and opened the bottles on the scuffed edge of the wooden coffee table. He passed one bottle to her without taking his eyes off the screen. Then he leaned back and stretched his right arm out across the back of the sofa.
“I didn’t know you could open beer like that,” she said.
He took a swig from his beer and carefully set the bottle down on the floor before turning back to her.
“I can do it with my teeth, too,” he said. “But it’s really bad for them. Your teeth.”
She reached out with one hand to trace his bottom lip, letting her fingertip hover near his two front teeth, and waited.
He turned off the movie, tossing the remote onto an armchair.
“Come here,” he said, lying back and pulling her toward him so that her chin rested on his chest. He took her beer from her hand and placed it on the floor, beside his. Then he put both hands to her waist, just above her hips, and hoisted her up, so that their noses were touching. It took a moment of fumbling, but she dug her knees into the couch and pinned him beneath her. He reached up, letting his hands sift through her hair, fitting her jaw snugly into his palm, and pulled her down to him.
It took, she was pretty sure, a long time for him to do anything more than that. But once he had decided to, suddenly, it was all happening quickly. She felt his fingers scuttling at her hip bones and then her shirt was off, his fingertips were nicking at the clasp of her bra, he’d picked her up again by the waist and flipped her onto her back and he had her jeans down and off, over her ankles. And then she was aware that she could feel his erection through his sweats, that it was pushing between her legs in rhythmic thrusts. Eventually, a few minutes after that had already started to seem silly to her, he stopped and twisted his body so that he was lying next to her, turned onto his side, which pushed her into a perilous position on the very edge of the couch. He put both hands on her shoulders and pressed down on them; she’d liked it better when his hands were in her hair or on her face, but this was fine. But then the pressure continued, strong enough so that she actually had to square her shoulder muscles to keep from buckling under the weight of his hands, and she realized what was happening. Just to test it, she stopped resisting. And he was pushing her down, quite clearly, toward his groin.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t, I don’t think—”
He stopped kissing her and torqued his neck at an awkward angle so that they could see each other’s faces.
“Oh, I just thought,” he said. “Or, I’ve got a condom, too.”
She froze, faithfully certain that if she refused to move any part of her face or body, then time, too, might not move forward, might give her a chance to find the combination of words to dissolve this situation.
“I’m just not,” she tried, willing him to meet her somewhere in the now-clouded middle. He was still moving every few seconds, pushing against her and then retreating. But he didn’t say anything. He let his neck droop, a little, so that his face fell into her hair, spilled out across the cushion. Sweat had gathered at the back of her neck. And then he turned his head toward her and kissed her hair, kissed her on the temple, beneath all her hair. She closed her eyes.
“I can’t,” she said.
“I would do stuff to you,” he said. “I would do stuff, too.”
“Oh,” she said, struggling to conceal her breathless panic. “I can’t.”
His voice had been soft, thick with the preceding fifteen minutes of silence and clotted with the fact of their kissing, the inhaling through his nose and the quickened breath and the tamped-down excitement. But now it turned, somehow. He sighed, and not in the way he’d sighed into her hair only moments earlier.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, do you want to totally stop?”
Yes, she thought, yes, isn’t that obvious, but then she realized she did not want to stop, she just wanted to hold still, to remain where they were. Or to put her bra back on and maybe at least take off his shirt so that she wasn’t basically naked while he was fully clothed. And then stay where they were. She wanted to just kiss him for another hour or two or however many hours they still had. Couldn’t they agree, decide on this together? Just make out? Kissing him was like being caught in free fall in amber; nothing changed, no surface ever interrupted your delicious flight. It was the absolute freedom of no other choice.
Chip bent to kiss her again, and for a moment it seemed like exactly what she wanted to happen would happen. He took her hand in his, and pulled it down toward his pants, which was fine. And a moment later, she felt warm skin that she knew, without having to look, wasn’t the skin of his stomach, and she understood what was happening. That this was a bargain she’d made; that this was, technically, as close to winning as she would get this afternoon.
After another few seconds, he stopped kissing her. He reached up above them to the accent table that ran behind the length of the couch, and produced a bottle of lotion—from where? He took her hand without asking and squeezed some lotion into her palm. It smelled overwhelmingly of gardenias, which seemed absurd, but you didn’t need boys’ and boys’ worth of experience to know that you weren’t allowed to laugh, not at this particular moment.
He rolled away from her and turned his head into the back of the couch, his hand cupping her shoulder, squeezing it periodically.
Before it was over he said, hoarse, “There are Kleenex over on the bookshelf, can you go get some?”