His building is an old walk-up with so much paint chipped away on the hallway walls that it reminds me of a moonscape. As we climb the steep stairs, I smell fried chicken. Somewhere on a lower floor there’s a baby crying and the sound of people arguing. When we get to his apartment on the fifth floor, I’m breathing hard. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I didn’t run.
“It’s a hike,” he says, looking back at me, amused.
“I’m in decent shape. I run five miles a day.”
“You surprise me,” he says. “We can run together.”
“And I box.”
He smirks. “I don’t. I’ll remember that.”
It’s a one bedroom apartment with bare white walls. In the living room there’s a beige tweed couch and a matching club chair with an ottoman, the kind of furniture that comes from Craigslist. There’s a small, neat kitchen with tarnished copper-bottom pots hanging on a pegboard above the small stove. I haven’t seen the bedroom yet because it’s off to the side down a small hallway. If he owns any posters or art, they’re hidden away. What I do see is a wall of CDs, which is not what I expected, only how did I know what to expect?
Michael opens the refrigerator. He reaches inside and holds up a beer.
“Do I need to show you ID?”
“No, but if you say yes I’m going to bust you.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding.”
He opens a beer and hands it to me and opens another one for himself. He leads me to the couch.
I sit in the corner and take a swig of the beer. “I never thought I’d be here.”
“I never thought you’d be here either,” he says.
“You remember the first time you saw me, in the car?”
He nods.
“What were you thinking?”
He smirks. “When I saw who you were? I thought I was fucked.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
“Well?”
He stares at me intently and I feel as though I’m going to ignite.
“I thought,” he says, his voice deep and husky, as he slides closer and starts to kiss the side of my face, “that you were the hottest girl I had ever seen.”
Before I can answer his lips are over mine and his tongue is inside my mouth and he tastes all beery and good and I’m kissing him back and he pulls me onto his lap and it feels like we’re about to swallow each other up, and everything I ever thought about the instantaneous attraction between me and Michael Cross comes to this combustion point, and he’s breathing hard and so am I and his fingers are slowly unbuttoning my shirt and helping me out of it.
“Look at you,” he says, eyeing me appreciatively as he slides one finger under the strap of my bra and slowly slips it down so he can kiss my bare shoulder. I try hard to catch my ragged breath as the tension inside me builds and I reach up and slide my fingers through his hair and then grab it tightly, all the time trying to ignore that nagging voice in my head: Say something, do something now, because this is it, and I know what’s coming and everything is moving too fast.
“You on the pill?” he whispers, “otherwise no worries, I have—”
I pull back. “I…”
“What?” he says. “What is it?”
Is this going to ruin everything? “I…I’m not. On the pill. I haven’t needed to…”
He tilts his head to the side. “What do you—”
I inhale and climb off his lap. “I’ve never…I’m a virgin, Michael.”
His eyes widen, the surprise so clear on his face. Gone is the straight-faced cop whose face gives away nothing about what he’s thinking. I’ve definitely shocked him.
“Whoa,” he says, leaning back and catching his breath, then exhaling sharply. “I didn’t think…you seemed so…”
For a painful few seconds, neither of us says anything. “Are you mad?” I say, barely able to get the words out.
He narrows his eyes. “Why would I be?”
“Because you didn’t expect it, I…I don’t know.”
“Gia…” he says, reaching for me. “I’m surprised, baby, that’s all. It’s fine. We don’t have to—”
“That’s not why I stopped, Michael…I just wanted you to know…first.”
He catches his breath. “I don’t want you to feel pressured…”
I hate this, all the talk, the explaining. It now feels like the temperature has dropped from a hundred and ten to like forty in the shade.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I say because now I’m feeling stupid and hurt and getting mad and I don’t know what else to say, and he’s probably totally turned off because he’s convinced I’m some kind of tease, which guys hate. I stare out the window.
“Gia,” he says, reaching for my chin and turning my face back to his. He kisses me lightly on the lips. “You don’t know how much I want to.”
“Then okay…”
He stands up and reaches for my hand, leading me into the bedroom.
Ever since I met Michael, I’ve fantasized about what it would be like to be with him. How it would feel to have him kiss me. How it would feel to have him undress me and see me in front of him, undressed. I’ve fantasized about what he would look like. How he would feel inside me. And how it would feel to finally lose the V-card so I could be like everyone else and move on with my life and think that sex is cool and all right and not a huge deal.
Even Ro’s done it—Ro who never seemed to go crazy over any guy. Once when we had a sleepover she finally told me. I knew even before though because after she met up with Chris Ruggio, a gorgeous friend of Dante’s who sold grass but also did some modeling, she couldn’t stop talking about him. One day she ran into him on the street and he took her out for coffee and she hung out with him for the afternoon, even though she never told me where they went.
She acted quieter after that day. Not herself. Like she had to process it on her own before she could talk about it.
I read stuff online that girls wrote about what it felt like the first time. You’re there but you’re not, some of them said. It felt like they were in another place watching themselves play the part of the virgin. I understand that now, the self-consciousness. The super-awareness.
Michael pulls his sweater over his head and tosses it on the floor. He leaves his jeans on and then gets into the bed next to me, leaning up on one elbow, his head resting in his hand.
I finally see the lean, hard body. He’s the one who’s perfect. He’s ripped and strong and totally hot. I wait for him to undress me, but he doesn’t. He reaches out and touches my face, using just the tip of his finger to trace the outline of my jaw before running his thumb back and forth lightly across my bottom lip.
“I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” He kisses me softly, playing with my hair, running his fingers through it as if it’s made of delicate strands of silk.
I smile back at him, shy and embarrassed, and wait, but he stops touching me and rests back on the bed, closing his eyes.
“What is it?”
“This is tough,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut.
“What is?”
“To go slow with you, not to jump you,” he says, removing the hand over his eyes and turning toward me, the slightest smile on his face. He pushes a strand of hair away from my face on one side and then the other before he slides his hand behind my head and tightens his hand around my hair. His touch is hypnotic.
I edge closer until our lips meet and we start kissing again. It’s almost painful when you’re trying not to go crazy, but you are. It’s like denying that you have to inhale when your body needs oxygen. We are skin to skin, still partly dressed, only it doesn’t feel that way and I’m in a place I’ve never been before, feeling more toward Michael than I’ve ever felt toward anyone.
But my brain can’t be quiet and I’m wondering if this is different from what he felt with other girls before because I want it to be singular and special for him too, more intense than with anyone else so that he’ll remember it, no matter what.
We kiss until we can’t just kiss anymore and he slides out of his jeans and I’m wearing only my thong and Michael has touched me past the point of combustion and now it’s time. He slides the thong down over my hips and reaches for the foil packet.
This is it, this is it, are you sure? my conscience asks, catapulting me back from that other world. But before I can think, Michael is over me then inside me, moving slowly at first.
“You okay?” he says softly.
I nod because I can’t speak and his mouth is over mine while his body moves insistently in a slow, hypnotic rhythm until I feel something that I’ve never felt before, at least not in that way, and he calls my name with an urgency that sends me over the top, and then he stills and drapes himself over me and we lie there breathing hard, two bodies that have become one.
Tears run down my cheeks as he lifts his head and softly kisses my eyes.