How Not To Fall (24 page)

“Why is that funny? It's awful.”

“Oh, my termagant, my shrew.” He pulls away enough to put his hand on my cheek, and he smiles into my eyes. “It's not genocide or famine or disease. It's just the two of us, in a comfortable room, in our comfortable lives, with everything anyone could want except one tiny, immaterial thing. And all either of us is thinking about is the one thing we don't have. That is fucking
hilarious
.”

He hugs me again, laughing still, and says, “Let's go to bed, sweetheart.”

So we do.

The sex that night is amazing to me. He leads me by the hand to the bedroom, takes off our clothes methodically, and then lays me on the bed and kisses and caresses every inch of my body—every inch, the webbing of my fingers, the soft curve under my toes, the hidden, tender spot behind the top of my ear—and talks to me the whole time, telling me what I feel like, what he likes about my body. He doesn't make me come; he doesn't even try. He touches me almost worshipfully, and I'm left in a haze of pleasure.

Then he tells me I'm in charge, so I do the same to him, touching and kissing his beautiful body and talking to him, and I find I've made myself feel so in love with him, I can hardly stand it.

I shift gears, wrangle us so I'm on top. I grab his wrists and pin them above his head, thrust my tongue into his mouth. When I feel him smiling through the kiss, I stop.

“Can I try something?” I say.

“Anything,” he answers, grinning.

I sit up, turn around, and straddle him, facing his feet. I lean forward with one hand on his shin and I reach between my legs to position his cock.

“Brace yourself, Bridget,” I say, and he laughs out loud.

“Don't laugh!” I say, laughing myself as I press down and he pushes into me. “Oh, that's interesting. That is very interesting.” All my attention turns to the sensation of him inside me at this new angle. I can touch my clit as much as I want, exactly the way I want, this way. I move on him, one hand on my clit, one at his ankle, and ride him slowly.

“I really, really like this,” I say. I sit up to use both hands on my clit.

“That is magnificent,” he says, and I feel his hands on the backs of my thighs, on my ass. “You are magnificent.”

“I feel magnificent,” I say, eyes closed, all my attention focused on how it feels. I make myself come—a surprisingly solitary experience, considering his cock is inside me and his hands are on me. But it's my hands on my clit and breasts. He can't see my face; all he can see is how, when I come, my head tilts back.

As the pulsing fades, I lean back and lie over him, my back to his chest as I breathe in recovery. He wraps his arm around me. “You are spectacular,” he says into my ear, and he fucks me that way. He knits his fingers between mine and uses my hands to touch me, my breasts, my clit, my belly. When he's using one hand to press steadily against my clit, he moves the other hand to wrap around my throat.

All the while, he's murmuring into my ear, “You are so fucking amazing. I could never have enough of you. You're the most beautiful woman, the sweetest, funniest, sexiest woman I'll ever know. The way your body moves when you come, god, Annie. Touching you. Tasting you. I love the taste of you.”

And that, I think, is as close as I'll ever get to hearing him say it.

I turn my head to kiss him, he grunts in pleasure, and I come again, thrusting against our entangled hands.

P
eople who say, “Live every day as if it's your last,” have not taken into account the fact that if it's your last day, you may very well be too miserable with grief about the impending loss to enjoy what you still have. I bet a “last meal” doesn't taste like anything.

But maybe it's a kind of, I don't know, educational experience. A “teachable moment,” my mom would call it. It will make me a better person to walk through this day, aware that it is what it is, and just let it be hard. Not try to make it anything it isn't inclined to be.

I spend Monday packing my rented moving truck while Charles is at work. That afternoon I clean my apartment for the last time, leave my key at the desk, and drive the truck up to Charles's place.

We have twelve hours, and I have to sleep for some of them. So maybe four hours together? Six? Not more.

I let myself in and shower off the sweat and grime of packing, then lie on the couch with
Right Ho, Jeeves
. Predictably, I'm asleep when he gets home. I wake to the sound of the door opening and then sit up.

He doesn't come over to me, but leans against the wall, looking at me with that soft, warm smile that tears me inside out.

“What would you like to do tonight?” he says. “What can I give you that will please you?”

“Your heart,” I answer without thinking.

“Oh, Annie.” He comes forward and kneels in front of me by the couch. “Is it selfish of me to say I need my heart more than you do?”

I shake my head, and my chin wobbles.

Charles sits beside me then and pulls me against him, wraps me up in his arms. “I've been trying to find the moment when I could have prevented this,” he says. “Maybe if . . . that first night, when I found out how inexperienced you were, if I had listened to the part of me that said stop. If I had known, that night, that it would end like this, Annie, please believe me, I would have sent you home.”

I roll my eyes. “Do you honestly think I'd have just accepted that and gone away? Have you met me?”

He kisses my temple and tucks me into the crook of his shoulder. “Maybe the day you came to practice your defense and you kissed me. I should have said you were wrong about The Thing.”

“But I wasn't wrong, and you don't lie to me.”

“No.”

“I'm not wrong now, either.”

He's silent.

“Why did you come to the lab that night with the veggie burger?” I ask.

“Why did I come?” Charles sighs massively. “I'd begun thinking about you differently. I'd begun to see—I hope this doesn't sound arrogant—but I saw myself, a bit, in you. And I recognized that you're about to launch into the world and you'd be joining the same field, and I wanted a stronger connection with you than just being your research supervisor. I suppose I was thinking about it as mentorship.

“I've always liked you, Annie. You were the most competent of the ducklings when I arrived in the lab, and you were funny, and then it turned out you weren't just competent, you were brilliant—I have worked with brilliant people and you are . . . It's slightly terrifying how clever you are. I had been, er, harboring lustful thoughts, as you know, but I had no doubt I could keep them in check. That day in Soma when—”

“The Bread Fiasco.”

“Yes. I wanted to say, ‘Yes, we have A Thing, so please, yes, let me make you come six times, and then we'll go our separate ways.' But I didn't.”

“Because you're a responsible adult.”

“I am. Then you came in that day to practice your defense and you kissed me and you were
determined
to have me acknowledge The Thing. I wanted to lay you out on my desk and—well.

“But never, never did it occur to me—not even when it turned out you had no experience at all—not until Diana brought it up, did I consider the possibility that there would be emotional risk for you. It really never occurred to me that you might fall in love.”

“Or that you might.”

He's silent.

“For fuck's sake, Charles.” I rest my forehead on his chest and sigh.

He's silent for a moment, and then he says, “I know.”

I look up at him. “That's it? You know?”

“This is always what it was going to be. You were always going to leave. You knew that as well as I.”

“Well, I didn't know it would feel like this.”

“And I let myself be selfish.” He puts his hand on my face. “Even after . . . even after you said you loved me, I thought it might be all right, that it could just be a learning experience for us both and a lot of pleasure, with memories you could take with you, rather than regrets. In fairness, I confess it's not . . . that is . . .” He stops. He's embarrassed. “It's difficult for me too. I feel like . . . the lights are going out.”

I grab on to his shirt, then notice what I'm doing and let go.

Then I think,
Fuck it,
and I grab it again.

Charles says, “It's the family bloody motto, you know? Has your family got a motto? Mine's ‘
par la souffrance, la vertu.
' ‘Virtue through suffering.' But whose suffering, and whose virtue? Questions the motto does not see fit to address.”

“Doesn't anyone have the motto ‘Virtue through pleasure'? Why isn't feeling good just as noble and valiant as feeling like shit? I mean, god knows there are plenty of times when it's easy to feel like shit and really difficult to experience pleasure.”

“Perhaps that's what it means after all. Virtue is finding something worth liking in the swamp of human experience.” He pauses, his lips on my temple, then whispers, “Will you spend tonight with me, Annie?”

“Of course.”

Of course. How could I do anything else?

 

We make love sitting up, my legs wrapped around his waist and his arms wrapped around my waist and my arms wrapped around his neck. He's as deep inside me as it's possible to be. I let him all the way in. And I'm as deep inside him as he'll let me.

The word for this hovers at my lips, between our mouths, inside our kiss. I can taste it.
Love
.

It's hard to stop touching. He makes me come, over and over, until I cry, and then holds me and murmurs wordlessly into my hair. I fall asleep on his chest and wake in the middle of the night, with him curled along my back. I wake him with kisses and say, “Please.”

In the thick darkness, he's ready for me. He turns me onto my stomach and pins me to the bed by my wrists, outstretched. He fucks me hard in the dark, from behind, almost without noise. My head is turned toward him and he kisses me, never letting my wrists go. He wants to make me come this way and it's not going to happen—not because I'm holding anything back, not because I haven't utterly surrendered to him, but because I am not built that way.

He takes my hand in his and tucks our fingers between my legs, where his thrusting moves my pelvis over our hands. I'm slippery and sensitive. His other hand tugs at my hair, turns my face fiercely to the side so he can kiss me more deeply, his tongue in my mouth. My arousal rises quickly with the friction of our two hands against my clit, and I begin to rock my pelvis into the rhythm of his thrusts, into the pressure of my own palm pressed against my vulva. As I approach the threshold, I give a sharp high gasp—and he pulls out, away from me.

“I want—”

“I know what you want,” he says.

With a grunt, he turns me over and fucks me again, his pubic bone grinding deliberately against mine. His hands are on either side of my face, I can feel his breath on my cheek, and he's fucking me hard, touching me exactly the way I like. He can read the tension of my body, he feels me sprung around him, and he lets it grow slowly. In a month, he has learned every nuance of my body's rhythms, every tremble of muscle, every suspension of breath.

I relax my body into his, surrendering again, surrendering always, and he fucks me in a fast, steady rhythm that presses on my clit, growing the arousal inside me, slow and massive, to an expansive scale that bottlenecks inside me.

He grips both fists in my hair and says, “Look at me.”

When I do, I find him watching my face, a wrinkle of concentration between his eyebrows.

When I finally peak, with agonizing slowness, I kiss him, my eyes still open, watching him watch me, and I clutch my arms around his shoulders as I breathe against his mouth, “Don't let go, please.” And he says, “I won't let go,” and I'm rocked with thunderous, slow waves of spasms that won't end and I'm kissing him with my eyes open and then begging him, “Don't let go, not yet, please not yet,” and he keeps saying, “I won't let go, Annie, I won't let go.” His forehead is against mine, his eyes watching mine, and I'm still there, suspended in the dark, shuddering, as if the aperture of my orgasm is too small to release all the tension inside me. I dig my nails into his back, panting, “I can't stop, god. Fuck, I can't stop it.”

“Don't stop,” he says, and my entire world is his eyes on mine and the slow explosion happening inside my body. “Don't stop.”

“I can't stop.”

“Don't stop.”

“Charles. It hurts.”

“God.” His eyes close and he lowers his face to my ear. He says, “Hurt me, Annie.”

I close my eyes and bite into his shoulder, still coming, and dig my nails into his shoulders. I scratch hard, wanting to make him bleed. I beat on his back with my fists, and I scream, I actually scream.

“More,” he says into my ear, and then I'm wild and flailing around him, hitting and scratching, and he's holding fast, inside me, all around me, my entire universe is Charles, and then he's coming too, coming inside me with a cry just as vicious as my own. Only then does my release widen and break into soft, rolling waves, and we rock against each other, break against each other, rolling and pushing and wetness and kisses.

Our bodies gradually soften together, still clinging to each other.

“I fucking hate you,” I whisper, and I caress and kiss the spot where my teeth made dents in his shoulder. I wrap my arms tight around his neck and say, “I love you so much. I love you.”

He's holding me so tight and close, his arms are shaking. He whispers my name. I kiss his ear. He shudders against me, tightens his arms even closer around me, and says into my shoulder, “I can't.”

And I murmur nonsense into his hair—it's okay, you're okay, we're okay, everything is going to be fine. Nonsense. He kisses my neck and my ear and then my mouth very softly, so softly.

And then he withdraws, pulls away to his side of the bed. He pulls me with him, spooning me to him, his arm around me.

“Don't let go yet,” I say.

“I won't let go,” he whispers, and he tightens his arms around me.

 

Charles is asleep when my phone alarm vibrates at six. In his sleep, he has turned onto his back and let me go. I've been lying here, feeling him breathe and making a to-do list in my head. Get out of bed. Put on clothes. Get your bag. Leave the book and the key. Get out.

Go. Go now.

I get out of bed. I put on my clothes. I stand in the bedroom doorway, watching the rise and fall of Charles's chest. He's sleeping on his back, one arm over his head, one on his belly. The gold hair on his abdomen glints in the bare light of early dawn.

Get your bag. Leave the book and the key. Get out. Go.

I get my bag and retrieve the book and the key. I press the book to my lips and feel my eyes burn with tears. I don't want to get the book wet. I put it on the coffee table. For less than a second I watch the gilt lettering in the early dawn light, and then I walk away, out of the apartment, locking it behind me.

I drop the key into an envelope, together with a note, and I leave it in his mailbox.

I get in my rented truck and I drive away, into the sunrise.

There's how you feel about someone. And there's what relationship you can have with them.

Maybe this is all it was ever going to be. Maybe this is what there is for us. A few weeks in May.

I think . . . You guys, I've tried to be honest this whole time, but I think I may have been ignoring some things. I think maybe I've been in love with Charles all along—I mean
all
along, like all two years, yes, but
always,
like maybe his heart and my heart were built from the very beginning to fit neatly together, but people were careless with his, they damaged it, knocked it out of alignment, and so now we don't fit, when we should have. We should have.

My heart was treated with care my whole life. There are bruised places now, little tears and sore spots where I tried to jam it into a fit with his jagged edges. And we've both bled.

In principle, I know mine will heal.

People don't fear heights. They don't even fear the fall. They fear the consequences of the fall. The greater the height, the greater the consequences, and so the greater the fear.

How not to fall is to not mind falling; and how not to mind falling, is to fall a lot.

It's about a twelve-hour drive from Bloomington to Manhattan.

How can you know for sure the sun will come out again?

How can you
know?

And what would you do, how could you live, if the rain never stopped?