40
“It’s not true that married people live longer than single people . . . it only seems longer.”
The next morning we woke up at around noon and I immediately snuck to the bathroom to degrease my face. Looking in the mirror, I could have sworn you could fry an egg on my T-zone. While I was brushing my teeth I felt a hunger pain in my stomach; I was dying for anything, and I had nothing in the fridge since Miles was away. I came back to bed (hair brushed, teeth minty) and flopped on Elliot, who smiled and hugged me like a little bear cub. I felt so happy and needed and couldn’t believe how easy it was to wake up with him or that it was our first time waking up together. It felt so normal.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“Feed me, Seymour, feel me AWL night long,” I sang from Little Shop of Horrors.
He laughed and looked up at me and patted my face.
“Do you want to go out for a big yummy brunch?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well, I hate to tell you this, but I’m not some pancake-flipping Betty Crocker type.”
“That’s okay. I am.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Do you have pancake mix?”
“No. I have nothing. I have mustard.”
“Mustard, huh. Looks we’re going to order in.”
“I have a single girl’s fridge.”
“I don’t think you’re a single girl anymore.” Did that mean he was my . . . boyfriend? I thought so. My heart did a Nadia Comaneci. I excitedly scampered to get my little pail of menus. There were hundreds.
“Holy shit, what did you do, go through Zagats and demand menus from every place in town?”
“Kind of.”
“You are very organized.”
“I know: Martha Junior.”
“This looks good to me,” he said, producing a big one with a sun. “The smiley yellow guy is telling me this is our place.”
I dialed and Elliot kept yelling out more stuff to add until finally I put my hand over the receiver and said, “Yo, this could feed a family of four!”
By the time I had hung up, we had ordered a quasi buffet. We smooched in front of cartoons for a while (Miles had left my TV on Nickelodeon), and I learned that Elliot was a massive SpongeBob fan even though he had no kids. Odd-slash-cute. We smooched and watched until my buzzer rang.
I spread out all the goods for us, which made me feel like I was preparing something for him by peeling off the tinfoil on his egg and cheese on toast and flopping it onto a plate. So domestic! Mrs. Brady, dream wife. Okay, maybe not. But at least I made everything look nice. I even found a tray my mom gave me and laid everything on it with OJ poured into glasses and coffee in mugs and brought it to him in bed.
“Wow, lucky me; look at this spread you made!”
We ate and watched the screen, a trance of dancing starfish and choruses of underwater weeds, corals, and bubbles. The funny voices made him smile and I saw in his zone-out that he was still like a little kid in there, which I loved. Just as long as he didn’t start hanging with the Culkin brothers and buying an amusement park and elephant-man bones. After an hour more of lounging, I hauled out of bed to draw the blinds. I gasped.
“Come look at this!’
Sometime between midnight and noon, the city had been covered in a blanket of sparkling snow. There was a full-scale blizzard in progress, with wind and flakes whipping the window, making our bedside perch even more romantic. We basically spent the whole day in bed, as one eighties movie rolled into another, and the next thing we knew, it was dark again around 4:00 p.m.
I went to hop in the shower, and as the hot water fell on me, I secretly fantasized that he’d surprise me by coming in and joining me. But he didn’t, so I got dressed in a soft cashmere sweater and skirt and plopped beside him and asked what he wanted to do.
He didn’t say anything; he just looked at me. He sat up and reached for me, kissing me gently at first, then more and more intensely as we got lost in each other’s embrace to the point of dizziness. He calmly unbuttoned the cardigan I’d thrown on; his slow, methodical motions made me practically swoon. He kissed my chest above my bra and back to my mouth with vigor. But just as he’d ratchet up the hotness factor, he’d slow down and be calmly doting again. He delicately pulled one bra strap down, kissing my shoulder where the strap had been. He kissed across my collarbone to the other bra strap, which fell beside my elbow as he kissed my shoulder and unhooked my bra. The surge of need for him pulled through my entire body as he slid a hand under my skirt, up my thigh. I gasped when he touched me, feeling at once total freedom and unbridled anticipation. While he had the appetite and fervor that John had, I saw something more in Elliot, like an emotional need, like he really was deeply into the moment, body and soul, as opposed to just trying to get off. I took his T-shirt off over his head and rubbed my hands along his chest and stomach, kissing him as we lay against each other. Having sex with him at this point was something I was even more excited for because he had prolonged my cravings. Although I have to admit, I oscillated between a) wanting him to want me so badly that he couldn’t help but throw me across the bed and climb on me, and b) wanting to keep the wait going so that we’d relish it all even more.
I knew this time would be it, and while my heart was racing, my mind was calm. He stopped kissing me and took the rubber band out of my hair and ran his hand through it, bringing his lips to mine again. I could feel chills down my arms and back, and as he unzipped my skirt I felt like the perfect combination of a swooning schoolgirl and a complete va-va-voom woman being seduced. He slid off my panties and looked into my eyes.
“It’s not quite evening yet but I figured you’d give me a green light,” he said, holding my hands.
“Green.”
I laughed, and when he kissed me again, I knew this was as right as anything was ever going to be. He seemed to carry me in one of his arms as he moved my comforter down with the other, always making me feel like a total goddess. But he wasn’t some too-gentle “lover” type that was all about snail-paced makin’ love—he started out slow and lovingly, but then the sex parabola spiked and he grabbed me harder so I knew he had his own needs, which gave me even more of a kick. I put my arms around him, and he looked into my eyes, then kissed me as we moved together in a perfect rhythm as my hands moved down his back. As he moved, he held me in one of his strong arms and wasn’t scared to show he was enjoying it; he was quiet but breathy, and as his inhalation quickened he held my hand in his and squeezed it hard. I was so turned on by his being turned on that I thought I would melt into the sheets.
I could feel my orgasm coming in the distance, like waiting on a platform and seeing the train approaching from far away. It grew closer and closer and rose until I knew it would roar next to me, and when it did, after all I’d been through, it felt like a miracle. Elliot was beyond hot in bed. But it was way more than that. I felt bound to him like we were the same unit, those conjoined twins attached at the heart. Except not tragic. We had taken such different paths but somehow gotten to this moment together, our parallel roads finally converging. It was a big emotional salad of pleasure and relief and love and wanting to squeeze him just short of bruising his skin, Angelina and Billy Bob-style, minus vials of blood.
Even some of the most satisfying “thunder under the covers,” as Sir Elton put it, can lead to nervous post-coital interaction, but luckily we shared no heinous silent pauses post-rumpus. Instead, Elliot grabbed me and kissed me quickly several times on the lips, and then my cheeks and forehead. It was crazy but it almost felt like he was already family. I was so into him that I was afraid I was getting ahead of him in my vision of us as a couple—it took every fiber of my being not to yell out “I love you!” I truly wanted to scream it out, though obviously I would never. I beat down the urge with a reach for the glass of water on my bedside table and swallowed away the need to confess that I was head over heels, besotted, utterly smitten. I stared at his flushed, gorgeous face and could not believe this perfect creature was somehow with me. Then came the inevitable question that I tended to ask out of fear of post-first-sex silence, which instantly made me into every woman in New York.
“What are you thinking about?”
Loser. Bad. Dumb.
“I’m thinking . . . that you are very . . .” He paused.
Gorgeous? Sexy? Fabulous? “. . . Yes . . .”
“Familiar.”
I smiled.
“Seriously, you feel like . . . I’ve known you all my life or something. It’s weird,” he said. I looked at him and rubbed his side. “In a good way, weird,” he added. He moved a strand of hair out of my eyes and looked at me before kissing me again.
My alarm clock sounded the next morning for my first day of work; Randy wanted me to get my feet wet during the crickets period of the holidays, when no one was around and I could ease in, and Elliot and I could barely move we were so wearied from the mad passion of the weekend. The sheets were in a tightly knotted ball and there was raw mattress beneath me.
“Wow, we must have really done some damage; there’s exposed mattress.” He smiled and, shocker of all shockers, started to make the bed. As IF Tim would have ever lifted a finger; it was always me running around to the other side and back again, flattening out every last crease so you could bounce a quarter off it. With two pairs of hands, it was so much easier! And really having two people, not just feigning couplehood and then truly feeling alone. As the white sheet billowed above the bed before we matted it down, I had to blink back tears in my eyes. Sherry Von was wrong—I did find someone. Someone who seemed perfect for me. And even if he dumped me, he was proof that I was capable of falling in love again. I just hoped he wouldn’t shatter my heart into a trillion tiny shards.