How Not to Let Go

The morning is damp but sunny, clear and crisp. Orange light filters into the tent with the birdsong and noises from the camp. I’m achy from climbing but bursting with happiness. Charles isn’t awake yet; I want to wake him up, see his eyes again, hear him say it again. I bite my lips between my teeth and remember his face as he said the words—words I’ve suspected were true since his birthday. Words I’ve known were true since he kissed me in my kitchen and then looked at me like I was holding a gun to his head.

He wasn’t afraid when he said it last night, though. That little smile appeared and I knew what he felt, and that was all I needed . . . and then he said the words. He said it. I watch him now, and I’m in awe. This beautiful man is in love with me. And this is it. He’s it. This is the rest of my life, asleep on his back beside me, in a tent in Upstate New York. I wonder what he’ll look like when he’s seventy-seven and asleep.

I don’t wake him up. Instead, I quietly leave the tent and walk to the bathhouse for a shower, letting the hot water ease the post-climb aches.

When I return, scrubbed clean of climbing grime, Charles is awake, but dilatory and amorous. He pulls me down to lie with him again.

“ ‘How is’t, my soul? Let’s talk. It is not day,’” he says, rolling me to my back and kissing my shoulder as he adds, “Let’s stay in the tent.”

“For how long?” I giggle.

“Oh . . .” he ponders, as he pulls off my shirt and leggings, leaving me in just my panties and socks, “just until . . . ,” and kissing one breast, “forever?” His lips move to my other breast and I touch his head, put my arm around his shoulders.

“I love you,” I tell him.

“Beyond breath,” he says, but then he shakes his head and says, wonderingly, “Can’t be real.”

I nod—not agreeing, but understanding—and ask, “What would prove it?”

“Dunno.” He rests his stubbly chin on my sternum and looks up at me. “Maybe if I . . . broke a bone or something. We haven’t really settled a thing until one of us is bleeding or broken.”

I laugh, and then he does, too, but then he kisses me and kisses me and kisses me.

Then he sits up suddenly.

“Have I ever told you,” he says as he pulls off my socks, “of my fascination with your feet?”

“My feet?”

He kneels between my knees, my thighs draped over his. As I lie there in nothing but my panties, his hands caress my legs and feet. He says, “When you stand barefoot, it’s as if your feet are already half lifted from the floor; I could fit almost the whole of my hand in the space between your plantar ligament and the floor. There is energy in that space, forward movement.

“And when they’re all pink like this, after a shower . . .” He’s kissing them now, and he matches action to word. “The abductor hallucis bulges from the side, firm, bitable. The joints of your first metatarsal protrude, bony, calloused. The rest of them are flat and sinewy, leading to long, bony toes. Your heels, the balls of your feet, and even your toes are calloused. Yet the whole of your foot is sensitive like nothing I’ve ever known. Sucking your toes is the next best thing to sucking your clit; you squirm and moan and go helpless with arousal. Yeah, just like that. My favorite thing, though, is to kiss the arch of your foot with my tongue, like it can kiss me back, while I hold your instep in my palm. You see? Your toes flex while I do it, and I can watch the tension sharpen through your whole body.”

I’m heated and restless by now. He pauses . . . and very deliberately tickles my foot.

“Aaugh!” I shriek, and I yank my foot out of his hand, kicking at him—laughing, “Fuck you, buddy!”—but he grabs my ankle—I twist to get my limb back, but he won’t let go.

“Oh yeah? Fuck me?” he taunts as I try to grab his wrist and he grabs mine instead. “Bet you can’t. Bet I can pin you before you can pin me.”

“Oh, you are on, asshole,” I say.

For a while, the only sounds are the heavy slaps of our bodies against each other and our huffing, grunting laughter in the confined space of the tent. I learn quickly that his arms and shoulders are just too strong for me to pin him with my hands, and the only reason he hasn’t got complete control is that I haven’t stayed still long enough for him to catch me.

I switch tactics. I roll him onto his back, but this time I kneel on his shoulders, facing his feet, and before he can flip me, I lean down and put my mouth around his half-erect cock, my hands on his knees.

“Oh, Christ,” he breathes.

I laugh with his cock in my mouth and his abdomen contracts hard under me. I feel his hands on my thighs, on my butt, on my back, all over me, not trying to force me off, but caressing me, trying to touch every part of me. I cooperate when he pulls off my panties—I figure I’ve won, at this point. Gradually my knees slide off his shoulders to lower my pussy closer to his mouth, and then his mouth is on me, a fingertip inside me, and I grunt and thrust in response. My hands slide up his thighs and I suck him enthusiastically, loving the taste of him and the feel of him in my mouth, as his mouth is on me, a finger of one hand inside me, his other hand caressing my foot and ankle above his head—and then he tickles my foot again!

“Gah!” I yank my foot away with a wild kick that bruises my instep.

“Gah!” he yelps, and his hands release me.

I turn, straddle him, and shove his cock into me with a celebratory “Ha!” only to realize that Charles has both his hands folded over his nose. He is laughing silently, even as his eyes tear.

My jaw drops. “What happened?”

“I think you broke my nose,” he wheezes through his laughter.

My hands clasp over my mouth. “Oh my god!”

“Just a little,” he gasps, helpless with laughter. And then he laughs out loud, his belly shaking under me, his cock beginning to soften inside me.

“Let me see,” I say, leaning down on one hand and trying to pull his hands away with the other.

“Careful careful,” he says. “It’s not bad, don’t worry about it.”

It isn’t bad. There’s no bleeding, and no swelling yet . . . but it does make a troubling clicking noise when he prods it tentatively.

“The bone’s intact—I think it just detached from the cartilage,” he says, as if this is all the reassurance anyone could possibly need.

“There’s got to be ice somewhere,” I say, and I try to move away.

“Oh no you don’t.” He grabs me and in an instant he pins me to the tent floor and slides his half-erect penis back into me, his fingers laced into mine.

He holds my gaze for an instant—and then he snorts with laughter and collapses over me in helpless giggles.

And now I can’t help laughing, too, feeling how he moves inside me when he laughs. I pant through my giggles, “I’m sorry, Charles, I’m sorry,” but he just whoops again, and I laugh all the louder.

“It’s hopeless,” he gasps, and he begins to move inside me, even as he laughs, even as tears of laughter leak from my eyes. “So much for romance.” His face is against my neck and he’s kissing me as his laughter fades, kissing my neck and biting it and sucking bruises, deep and stinging, into my skin, marking me. With his fingers still laced in mine, I wrap my legs around his hips, push his hips with my feet, urging him deeper. He bites at my breasts and my nipples, sucks bruises there, too, on the sensitive underside of my breast, as he pushes deeper and faster inside me, with rising urgency, with rough sounds in his throat.

The orgasm grows slowly inside me and, when it comes, it feels like an explosion somewhere low in my abdomen, or an earthquake, spreading and consuming my entire body. I roll my pelvis, making raw, scraping sounds in my throat. I hear his voice tangling with mine, feel the three sharp thrusts of him coming inside me as we come together, his teeth biting my lips, his fingers gripping painfully into mine and the sounds of our breathing tangling together in the air around us.

Laughter bubbles out of both of us like aftershocks. I kiss his hair and he kisses my breastbone and my legs gradually soften around him and slip down to the tangle of sleeping bag under us, and eventually his penis slips out of me, and still we lie together wordlessly, breathing and listening to each other breathe.

Finally, he shifts off me, lies beside me, and, with a hand on my face and in my hair, he breathes, “Can it be real? Can she love me?”

“She does.”

“Annie, I—” He kisses my eyebrow and looks at me almost sadly. “I’ll need your help.”

I nod and raise my eyebrows a little, waiting.

“I’ll need you to tell me how to do boyfriendy-girlfriendy. What you like. What you want.”

“Okay,” I tell him. “You mean, like, court me?”

“Sure. Flowers and chocolate?”

I shrug and make a face. “I like words a lot. And sex feels romantic to me, most of the time. And . . .” I look up at the ceiling and consider. “Actually, I really like it when you confront the dragon and the mountain. That shit is hot.”

He chuckles. “You’re sure you don’t prefer flowers and chocolate? That would be a lot easier.”

“And—I don’t expect you to say yes, but I’m just putting it out there, since you asked. I’d really like it if you could say it every day.” I look at him.

“Say . . .” He swallows.

“Say you love me. Yeah.”

“Every day.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“I mean,” I say, backtracking, “don’t say it just because I asked, but like, when you feel it. Just say it when you feel it.”

Matter-of-factly, he says, “If I said it when I felt it, I’d never say anything else.”

I stop and stare at him, floored. “That was . . . good. That was, like, mega-boyfriendy.”

“It was never about not feeling it—I’ve felt it since . . .”—he shakes his head, looking dazed—“I don’t know, always, I think. The first moment I saw you, I think part of me must have known even then.”

“Dude, you do not need my help with boyfriendy,” I tell him, and I push him to his back and kiss him for a long, long time before I ask, “So how do I be girlfriendy to you? What feels romantic?”

He thinks about the question as he touches me. He says, “I like this. I like when your body is open to me.” So I open my body more to him. He kisses me and says, “My favorite thing might be when I don’t have to fight, when I can drop all the armor and just . . .”

“Yeah.” I put my hands on his face and kiss the little bruise on his nose. I kiss his right temple.

“I begin to think . . . god, do I dare say it out loud?” he says as I kiss him more places. “I begin to wonder if the strength that has gotten me out of the pit and the swamp and onto this never-ending rage mountain might really be sufficient for me to be your partner.”

I rest my chin on his chest and bite my lips between my teeth, remembering the feeling I had after I swung myself through the crux of the Money Pitch, the strength and confidence, the pride in myself, the sense of connection with Charles below me and the universe around me.

The move isn’t the hard part; the decision is the hard part.

He draws my face to his and says, “I will falter, my harpy, as I move toward you. I only ask that you stand where I can see you. Be still for me, domina, and I’ll find my way.”

“I will.”

He says, “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“And you know I’m on my knees, at your feet—”

“Don’t be on your knees,” I interrupt, “just stand at my side.”

But he doesn’t stop. He rolls me to my stomach, pins me down by my hair, and moves his lips to my neck as he whispers, “—mad for you, desperate, besotted, chained to you. I love you. There is nowhere I’m content, my Annie, but when I’m inside you, holding you, certain that in this moment we belong to each other. Do you belong to me?”

“And I’m yours. Never forget.” He bites my earlobe. “Even when I can’t find my way to the words, my termagant, my shrew, never forget that I’m chained to you.”

“Charles.” My voice is rough, cracked.

“Be really still for me, sweetheart.”

It takes us a long time to leave the tent.

* * *

As we finish packing up our stuff, ready to head out, I inhale deeply and sigh, “Petrichor.”

“Mh?” Charles hoists on his pack.

“Petrichor. You taught me that, that last semester in Indiana. The smell after the rain.”

He takes my hand and kisses me. “The fundamental unreliability of the universe.”

We hike out of the campground, hand in hand, silent, the couple miles to his car.

When he opens the trunk to load our stuff, we hear his phone ringing from the glove compartment.

“That’s a weird coincidence,” I say.

But his face goes dark as he drops his stuff into the car. He retrieves his phone and wanders away from me as he answers it, with “Hi, Mum.”

He stands, listening, with his head down, eyes closed, jaw tight. He stands there, alone in the middle of the gravel parking lot, out here in the middle of nowhere Upstate New York. I watch him grip a fist in his hair, then look up at the sky, listening more than he’s talking. At last, he pulls off his sunglasses and covers his eyes with his hand. He nods and says something, then moves his hand to his forehead as he begins walking back toward me.

His voice sounds totally calm as he says, “Yeah, and listen, I’ll give you a bell tomorrow, okay, and we’ll sort something for this week. Right. Okay. Bye, Mum. Bye.”

Then he looks up at me with a face like death.