When I woke, I reached out immediately. My first concern was that Jessica was still in my bed. She was beautiful, intelligent, funny, unique—and she was also hard to predict. She was like one of those spin tops I’d played with as a kid. Sometimes, they’d spin in place. Other times, they’d suddenly veer off without warning. I think this was one of the reasons I loved her so much. Yes, loved her. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anybody at the time. It was mad, of course. We hadn’t known each other long enough. We were too young. There were all the usual reasons why it didn’t make sense. And yet, I did love her.
When I reached out, my hand found her shoulder. I moved into her, wrapped my arms around her, pushed my groin into her ass. We were both naked and aching from last night. I closed my eyes, and I must’ve slept, because when I opened them she was facing me, and sunlight filtered into the room.
I smiled at her. It was the nicest thing to wake up to. “Are you watching me sleep, you freak?” I laughed.
“No,” she said, with the cutest smile I ever saw. “Don’t be a weirdo. Why the hell would I want to watch you sleep?”
She looked so beautiful and cute as she laid beside me, her cheeks slightly red, her lips parted, her eyes seeing everything. I brushed her hair from her face and kissed her on the forehead. Then I pulled the blankets over us and made it so we could pretend that the outside world didn’t exist. Even in this perfect moment, traitor voices whispered. They whispered about how wrong this was, about how what we were doing would cause other people pain, about how we were evil.
You are related! the voices whispered. This is wrong! Stop it! Stop it now!
But they couldn’t convince me that waking up next to a beautiful woman whom I loved was wrong. They would never be able to convince me of that. “Let’s go somewhere today,” she said, sitting up.
“Where?” I asked.
I would’ve been happy to simply lie in bed with her all day, to hold her, maybe make love later, but if she wanted to go somewhere, I would gladly go with her, too.
“For a walk,” she said. “I saw some woods on the drive here. Let’s go there.”
She was right. The Leigh Woods were just outside Clifton, toward the city, near Brunel’s Clifton suspension bridge. I think I’d been there once, when I was young, but I couldn’t remember. “Okay, let’s do it.”
That morning it felt like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. It was in the simple act of getting ready to go out together. First, Jessica told me to take a shower, kissing me on the nose. After the shower, I found her in the kitchen, making a lunch for us, and then she asked me to get my backpack to carry it. It was a mundane conversation, and yet I couldn’t help but feel pleased at the whole thing. It felt like we were becoming a couple over the simple act of her making a few sandwiches and me agreeing to carry them.
We could’ve driven or caught the bus to the woods, but it was a sunny day, and we decided to walk. The walk there wasn’t exciting or picturesque in any way. Leigh Woods were city woods, the kind of woods that are surrounded on all sides by roads and motorways and buildings. We walked through an industrial estate and more houses than I cared to count on our way to the woods. It was a boring, plain walk. And yet, when Jessica reached down and took my hand, when she turned and smiled at me, I felt like the luckiest man alive to be the one taking this mundane walk today.
Maybe I’m cheesy. If so, I don’t care. When I looked at her I felt happy, happier than I’d thought it was possible to feel with a woman. We hadn’t said anything for half an hour, and that was the part of the magic. We didn’t need to say anything. We could just walk, in silence, and not feel compelled to fill the silence with random small talk. No, I was content to feel her hand in mine, and when we waited to cross the road, to feel her lips on my cheek.
Jessica
We entered the woods through Leigh Court at the east entrance (the entrance furthest away from the city and Clifton suspension bridge, as I understood it). There were a few people in the woods, I saw. Mostly they were couples, and when one older woman, holding her husband’s hand, smiled at me, I thought the world might not be so bad after all. All she saw was a young woman and her man, nothing more. And maybe, I thought, that was what today could be. Eli and I could just be a woman and man who had been struck by love, who had been tackled by it, who had been utterly captured by it without expecting to.
I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine.