You hope that Celia doesn’t pick up a single rag with your face on it. You think she’s smart enough not to. You think she knows how to protect herself. But you can’t be sure. The first thing you’re going to do when you get home, when this is all over, is to make sure she knows how important she is, how beautiful she is, how much you feel your life would be over if she were not in it.
“Let’s get married, baby,” he says into your ear.
There it is.
For you to grab.
But you can’t look too eager.
“Mick, are you crazy?”
“You make me this crazy.”
“We can’t get married!” you say, and when he doesn’t say anything back for a second, you worry that you’ve pushed slightly too far. “Or can we?” you ask. “I mean, I suppose we could!”
“Of course we can,” he says. “We’re on top of the world. We can do anything we want.”
You throw your arms around him, and you press against him, to let him know how excited—how surprised—you are by this idea and to remind him what he’s doing it for. You know your value to him. It would be silly to waste an opportunity to remind him.
He picks you up and sweeps you away. You whoop and holler so everyone looks. Tomorrow they will tell the papers he carried you off. It’s memorable. They will remember it.
Forty minutes later, the two of you are drunk and standing in front of each other at an altar.
He promises to love you forever.
You promise to obey.
He carries you over the threshold of the nicest room at the Tropicana. You giggle with fake surprise when he throws you onto the bed.
And now here comes the second-most-important part.
You cannot be a good lay. You must disappoint.
If he likes it, he’ll want to do it again. And you can’t do that. You can’t do this more than once. It will break your heart.
When he tries to rip your dress off, you have to say, “Stop, Mick, Christ. Get a hold of yourself.”
After you take the dress off slowly, you have to let him look at your breasts for as long as he wants to. He has to see every inch of them. He’s been waiting for so long to finally see the ending of that shot in Boute-en-Train.
You have to remove all mystery, all intrigue.
You make him play with your breasts so long he gets bored.
And then you open your legs.
You lie there, stiff as a board underneath him.
And here is the one part of this you can’t quite come to terms with but you can’t quite avoid, either. He won’t use a condom. And even though women you know have gotten hold of birth control pills, you don’t have them, because you had no need for them until a few days ago when you hatched this plan.
You cross your fingers behind your back.
You close your eyes.
You feel his heavy body fall on top of you, and you know that he is done.
You want to cry, because you remember what sex used to mean to you, before. Before you realized how good it could feel, before you discovered what you liked. But you push it out of your mind. You push it all out of your mind.
Mick doesn’t say anything afterward.