*
I expand into love. This man named Daniel is mine. I own him; I love him. From his tumbled brown-blond hair to his long, stretching limbs to the arching span of his belly to the uplift of his cock that grows against my fingers or my lips. The smooth, flat expanses of his skin are like cream to my kitten tongue. I can’t stop touching him. Suddenly I understand all the pop songs with their terrible love lyrics. I don’t want to slow down this slide and tumble. I am high on brain chemicals, oxytocin flooding my system.
He is slow and careful with me. He lets me want him. I have never wanted a man before. Now with him my body is at ease enough to hunger. A bud closed tight since childhood explodes into full blossom. All through me surges a rush of chemicals attuned to his scent, his lean long frame, his skin. My whole self glowing, growling, ready—it wants such things. It accepts the adulation of his mouth and fingers and skin and desires more.
He pulls me astride him so that he is below, perfectly still, and I start to move. The bounce of my body, a specific friction, a mounting of heat and flush. As if our two bodies are kindling, this friction causes a fire to catch and spread all through me. He watches my face rapturously, waiting for that telltale shudder. A bursting open as if he has reached in and clasped my soul and thrown it outside my boundaries so that I am flying free, rising outward into the boundless dark. I gasp and fall upon him. As I fall asleep he runs his fingers along my skin, and it is as if his fingers and not his mouth have said, “Beautiful.”
*
Later I’m sitting sedate on the bus on my way to work and am overcome with the memory of his breath on the pulse of my throat. My blood jumps and I am wet and throbbing and tumescent from the thought. I have to squeeze my thighs together, shift in my seat, try to look respectable, responsible. I hunch over my hospital notes, scribble tiny lines covered by my other hand. I don’t think I’ll have the courage to give him this scrap, but it reads: “You make me cream my undies; your tongue makes me insane; the memory of your body on mine bucking like a wild horse drives me to distraction; I want to ride you for hours; I want my nipple between your teeth; I want to bite you and scratch you; I want your blood in my mouth; I want you.”
Who am I? Someone I barely recognize. Someone driven by lust, bold and brazen. A stranger to the way I used to be. He has split me apart and released the fibers of my being so thoroughly that they reach into him and pull us skin to skin. At my apartment that night, I cover my face with a napkin and hand him the torn scrap of paper. I watch from behind the cloth as he squints to take in the tiny writing, his lips moving. When he is done he looks at me with a shine in his eyes, an admission of the hugeness of this thing between us. He reaches for me, pulls me onto his lap, and covers my mouth with his.
All through the days I carry the smell of him. On the weekend, I shower, am ready to head out to a shift, scrubbed clean and dressed, but he pulls me back into bed, groans, “Don’t go, stay here with me. Fuck me all day long.” And I do, and afterward there is no time to shower again; soon I realize how glorious this is. At work I catch just the tease of a scent, a cobweb wisp floating in the air to my grasping nostrils. If I open my legs a little wider, sniff the air, the scent of us mixed together—a potion, a seduction, an obsession—carries up to me.
I wonder if he carries me around in the same way. On his skin. Perhaps for a while. But it’s not the same, is it? It’s not this tiny scent parceled out bit by bit all day. I have a secret, a heady pleasure that makes my head spin when I go to piss and drop my head between my knees, inhale the soft silk of my panties.
Can other people—my fellow nurses, my patients, the doctors—smell it? The subtlest hint of our mingled sex? I don’t care. I had always felt cold in this foggy city, my circulation slow. But now the very temperature of my body seems to be raised, my skin alight like a match has been struck from the inside.
*
He moves in after three months. It makes more sense, since I own this apartment while he has always rented. I make more money than he does. We both know this and I don’t mind it. He’s supremely talented. It’s only a matter of time before other people see this. I am convinced of it. I have never accumulated much, so it’s easy to nestle his books among my own, to hang his clothes in half the closet, install his canvases and paints and turpentine in the back room, put up his paintings everywhere. I introduce him to Godzilla, who stands on a rock and waves his antennae in a friendly seeming way, making us laugh and hug. This is what it means to be happy, like letting the river take me effortlessly into its broad, warm embrace.