“I don’t see some big-brainy girl beside me. I see a clever, creative, and beautiful girl. Maybe I’ll say something stupid every other sentence, maybe she’ll know so much more than me about everything there is, but I don’t think I’ll care. I lost my ego somewhere outside Kansas.”
“What if I can’t stop thinking, even when you kiss me? For example, there is clinical evidence that a kiss has health benefits. It triggers a whole spectrum of physiological processes that boost your immunity. What if I couldn’t stop rattling off information and ruin everything romantic between us?”
He smiled with an air of self-confidence that took her breath away. “Oh, I think I can make you stop doing that,” he said, and he kissed her.
Before Alan Taylor had made love to her, she had drunk more than she should have. It had made her even more vulnerable. She was sure that before she and Leo would stop, she would think deeply despite what she had promised herself, but she would be thinking that Shakespeare was right when he had the porter in Macbeth describe the effect of alcohol on lovemaking: “It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”
That wouldn’t happen here. They were drunk only on each other. His first kiss was soft but determined. He held his lips millimeters from hers right afterward, drawing her in, giving her the taste that would drive her to be the aggressor, forcing her to make an even greater commitment. She pressed her lips harder to his. He moved his hands under the blanket, caressing her shoulder with his left hand, gently lifting her breast with his right, exploring her nipple with his thumb as he pressed his lips to hers and brought himself over her, leaning to kiss her breasts. There was no rushing, no sense of the forbidden that would cause either of them to hurry before it was too late. That had been her only experience; it wouldn’t be now.
Every time some fact about the process tried to invade her thoughts, she pressed it down. He had no idea how hard she was battling herself. If he sensed it, he would get it wrong. He would think she was struggling with her conscience, but morality never had entered the room. All her doubts came from different places, and none of them was strong enough to weaken her desire. It came in little explosions inside her. The excitement she had sought was rushing over her in waves. She wanted to drown in it.
When he finally entered her, her first thoughts weren’t about what was going to happen physiologically. Her first thought was, as strange as it might seem, I am becoming a woman, not a teenage girl who has been violated, not a gifted student who knows twenty times as much about her sex as a woman three times her age, just a woman being touched so deeply inside herself in places no textbook describes.
Her pleasure wasn’t as great as her satisfaction. She realized she really was quite different from the other girls at Spindrift, even Corliss and Donna, both of whom she believed had the wherewithal to reach this place. She was simply there first, and she wouldn’t retreat. There were so few times in her life before this when she hoped something would never end.
Afterward, she and Leo lay back and stared up at their own thoughts floating above them.
“Okay,” he said finally, “now I am worried.”
“About what?”
“You, lying there, reviewing everything in ways beyond me. I’m afraid of the conclusions, especially if you’re measuring me by some scientific ruler.”
“I’m not reviewing or measuring anything. I’m soaking in the afterward, just the way any woman should. I don’t want the feeling to end too soon. I like the feeling of floating in the afterward.”
“That’s really nice. I could easily get addicted to you,” he said.
She laughed. “Careful. The rehab for that could be long and painful.”
He leaned over and looked down at her. “What should we do? I mean, in the afterward?”
For once, she did not want to be the one with all the answers.
“You told me when you get to point A, you simply go to point B. Maybe we’re at point A.”
“You sure of that?”
“No, but you know what?”
“What?”
“I suddenly like being unsure. It’s something I rarely, if ever, felt. It’s like . . .”
“Like what?”
“Being reborn.”
He laughed. “I knew I had powers . . .”
He lay back, and they were quiet for a while. Someone’s headlights washed across the window and the opposite wall. Darkness quickly closed in again. They heard a car door close and some mumbling voices. Another unit was entered two or three doors from where they were, and it was very quiet again.
“Seriously, do I take you back now?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“And you like that, the uncertainty?”
“Do you want to take me back? Is that why you’re asking?”