She was the first person I saw that night, standing across the room, and the shock of recognition fired through my system. I hadn’t wanted to go, had pushed and bullied and jostled myself off my sofa and away from the joint I could have rolled. I never liked industry parties, full of people desperate to be seen. Performers do better in groups of normal people, I feel.
The music was bad, like anything that tries to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum, desperate not to exclude or offend anyone—lukewarm and stale, like the beer served at the bar. There were some other people I knew; nobody I wanted to talk to. But the flash of her profile haunted me, more than I was ready to face.
I found her again, once I had my drink, saw her standing in a group, laughing, gesticulating with those fingers I used to admire—long and strong for a woman, agile in their expression. Her hair was different, and she wore more expensive clothes, but she looked just the same as she did a few years ago. She still didn’t use any makeup I could see, still wore flats on a party floor littered with clicking heels.
I remembered the wave of curiosity that had washed me to her shores when I first saw her. We were younger then; I was still in my twenties and I think she was just nineteen. She was stocky and tall, heavyset, with limbs and torso as big as mine, and maybe stronger. She moved her body with every word she spoke, hands and shoulders and face expressing her thoughts louder than any voice could. There was a strange grace to her, a curious attraction.
I’d wanted to fuck her even before I knew her name, wanted to feel those strong hands around my cock, wanted to find out what it would be like to eschew all standards I’d grown to accept, in which the first thing a girl had to be was smaller than. Smaller than me, smaller than her friend next to her.
I was drawn to this girl, this woman, who occupied space so confidently.
She was a songwriter, I found out by listening in. She ordered red wine, not a beer or a cocktail, and when her group dispersed I made my move. We talked until our feet were aching, until we found a table in the thinning venue. We talked all night, talked about music and poetry and about the stars. We talked about the intricate relationship between colors and sounds, about sex and obsessions. We compared tattoos and tried to express in words the way something so painful could feel so good. After her fourth glass of wine, she told me she liked to be fucked the way she wrote her songs: raw and hard and honest. No icing, no hollow words and no sugar-bow on top.
I remembered my cock was straining against my jeans. I wanted to pull her out into the night, wanted to fuck her up against the wall and on the taxi ride home. I drifted in and out of focus, then, the way you do when you want to do two things at once: listen and try to find a smooth way to interest her in spending the night.
And then she started talking about her boyfriend. We were both drunk by then, and she was resting her chin on her hands, looking soft and strong in the most perplexing contradiction. He studied law, thought her passions were a waste of time, didn’t like it when she wore bright colors.
I didn’t know what to say, wanted to find him and punch him and take her home, as a victor’s spoils. Instead I got angry like the dick I was. She had wasted my evening. All this time I spent talking to her, I could have found someone to fuck and now the party was over, only some sad losers left. Losers like me, maybe, who bet on the wrong game.
I left her there, didn’t even ask how she would get home.
I never realized how strongly she stuck in my mind all the same. Maybe I never understood the real reason I got so angry, maybe even stupid younger me got on some level that in the hours of drinking and talking, I’d started writing songs in my head for this girl I had only just met.
And here she was again, more beautiful than before, settled into herself in a way she hadn’t been at nineteen, thrown back into the same room by the inevitability of working in the same field in the same town.
She saw me before I had really decided what to do. Her face slackened in mid-sentence and our eyes met. Even then I could still feel the gentle vibration of her voice when she’d told, in a tiny, drunk whisper, that she liked to choke on it. My cock hardened in sympathetic memory.
She nodded a greeting, bit her lip and didn’t smile. She tried to find her way back into the conversation, but I think she knew I couldn’t stop watching her. Her motions, now, felt hesitant and suddenly exposed, and eventually, she made some excuse to leave.
Maybe I shouldn’t have followed, but it felt like an invitation. At least, it was all the invitation I needed. I saw her heading out the back door, past the bathrooms and onto a dingy back street. An unsavory smell wafted from the trash cans, a dizzying contrast to the glittering facade on the other side.
“You got a cigarette?” she asked. She wasn’t looking at me; she was leaning against the brick wall, looking up at the night sky. People always talk about light pollution in the big cities, but there were a ton of stars, like freckles in a summer face.
“You smoke?”
“No.” She held out her hand anyway. I jumped off the step into the back street and then patted down my coat until I unearthed an old and crumpled pack.
“I didn’t think you would remember me.” She fished for a smoke and then rolled it between her fingers, stared at the filter and the stuffed tobacco on the other side. Her voice was deeper than I remembered, just a little lower in volume.
“Gemma,” I said, trying to grasp for proof. But all I could think of in that moment was her job and the way she liked to be fucked. I didn’t say either out loud, but her name at least made her look over. There was a ghost of a smile on her face, but maybe it came from the stars.
“I guess you don’t remember me too fondly.” I don’t know why I said it. A shadow crossed her face, and I wondered just how badly I’d behaved that night. My memory got a bit woozy after a third glass of wine.
“What do you want, Logan?”
Straight and to the point. Raw. No sugar on top. I licked my lips, handed her my lighter. She stuck the cigarette between her fingers, popped a light, then watched it fade. Then she did it again. I watched her hands, those beautiful hands.
“Let’s go somewhere.”
I almost wanted to laugh at the speed at which she turned to me, the expression on her face. She snorted, rubbed her face and finally lit her cigarette. She blew on the flame, though, just watched the smoke escape, a strange smile on her face.
“That’s funny.”
I didn’t know what to say. That was funny, too. I was supposed to be eloquent; I’m known for it in interviews. My few loyal fans love it in my songs. But she brought me up short.
“Shouldn’t you ask me if I have a partner before you waste any time out here?”
I cringed. Visibly, I think, because she seemed to stand a little taller in response. I wondered how many years she had held on to those words. A few minutes earlier, I would have scoffed, I think, at the idea that I hurt her back then. It was just one night. I never even saw her naked. But I saw it in her face then.
I leaned against the wall next to her and lit a cigarette of my own. Unlike Gemma, I brought it to my mouth though, and sucked the stinging smoke into my lungs. It felt good. I stared at the one in her hand, the glowing point, the elegant fingers, turning and turning it to keep the flame alive.
“Come on. Let’s go somewhere.” I scratched my head, felt my head swimming a little, and kicked a stone across the back street. “Please?”
She threw me this weird, contemptuous, almost pitying gaze, but then, just when I was ready to give up, she shrugged and nodded. She was the one who walked ahead, wound her way gracefully between trash cans and soaked cardboard boxes. I trotted behind, watched her broad shoulders, the oddly angular curves that had driven me to such curiosity all those years ago. I hadn’t changed. I still wanted to see her naked. But she had liked me, back then, and her eyes had shone with curiosity and interest. They didn’t now. There was something else, something I had no access to.
“So where do you want to go?”
I nodded away from the clubs, all with bright and flashing neon signs. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know where to start. Hell, I hardly knew why I wanted to be alone with her in the first place, or where we were going—just that it was imperative for me to try. I had a vague idea of taking her down to the river, but then she stopped me a few minutes on.
“Here,” she said. It was the entry to a tiny park, a playground and some trees, and she sat on one of the swings. Her shoes crunched on the dirty sand.
She was the one who found words first. I guess that made her braver than me, or smarter, and definitely more beautiful with her skin almost translucent in the moonlight.
“It was stupid. You hurt me. I mean, I get that it’s stupid. I was just some girl you wanted to pick up, nothing happened. The end. But it hurt.”
I pulled out a fresh cigarette. I don’t know why I offered her one, too, but she seemed to enjoy watching them burn, and she fished one out as well. The light struck bright against the darkness around us.
“It’s not stupid.”
She shrugged, managed a pitying smile.
“I kept seeing your face everywhere. Your name. It’s like they played your songs on a loop on the radio then. For years I didn’t get it. It should have been nothing.”
“Yeah. Should have been. Wasn’t.”
She shook her head in agreement. It wasn’t nothing. I sat down on the other swing and tried to make sense of the ache in my chest.
“I think…I think I wanted you to save me so badly.” I looked up, tried to see her face in the shadows. Her voice was raspy and frail. “I was so, so unhappy. I didn’t know it, really, but I was. And then you came, and you were bright and strange and I wanted to crawl inside of you and live a fuller life. I wanted you to save me.”
I rubbed my face. It was a shock when I felt moisture in the corner of my eye and I looked away, sucked smoke deep into my lungs.
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah.” She turned toward me, smiled in the dark. “I know. Neither did I. It was good. That you didn’t know, I mean. It meant I had to save myself. Took me a while, but you gotta learn sometime, right?”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I had a right to. I grasped the chain of her swing and pulled her closer; our feet bumped against each other and she leaned her cheek against my knuckles. I don’t know how she did it, the brutal honesty, stripping down walls like clothes. I remembered how she’d done the same all those years ago, and how powerful it was then, too. I couldn’t do that.
I wanted to say that I was sorry. That the only reason I acted the way I did was because something about her had gotten inside of me so deep that it left a gouging hole when I realized she couldn’t be mine. And I felt betrayed, like she’d wormed herself inside just to go away again, that glimmer of something that could be more than fucking, more than searching, more than flitting from girl to girl. And I wanted to say that I hadn’t known any of that two minutes ago.
I couldn’t say it, though. I blamed being a man, or my upbringing, but the truth was that I was never as brave as Gemma.
“Strange isn’t it?” she said after a long, oddly comfortable silence, broken only by the squeaking of the swings. “It’s been so long. And…I kind of hated you for most of the time. But it feels like…I still know you. The way it felt back then. Like…”
“Like we’re picking up where we left off.”
“Yeah.” She was almost all voice now, just a shadow in the dark, a warm cheek against my hand. “Something like that.”
“I wouldn’t care this time.”
I felt her cheekbone move over my knuckles, the brush of her nose.
“About what?” she asked.
“Whether you’re with someone.” I looked down at my dark feet in the sand. My hand around the chain of her swing tightened once, then I lifted a finger off it, touched my knuckle to her face. It was softer than I thought it would be. Warmer, too, cheeks like a flower petal furnace. “I don’t know if that’s even more douchey, and it’s a fucked-up way to say I’m sorry, but I just don’t care. This time, I would save you.”
There are things you only understand by saying them out loud, truths that have to be verbalized to become truths. This one hurt, it hurt like a tattoo. It hurt like frozen flesh thawing.
Her lips touched the back of my hand. I heard the quiet plop and smack of a kiss, felt the heat of her breath. She sniffed, and then blindly we were on our feet, and her lips found mine. Her cheeks were wet and so were mine, but it didn’t matter in the dark. Like secrets whispered in vacuum. Like a tree that falls in the woods.
She was my height. Her lips lay on mine, no stretching or stooping, no tension at all. They were wet with tears and shivered, hummed, vibrated against mine. They tasted like salt. Mine or hers, I didn’t know.
I was a different person in the dark.
“Maybe I’m going to save you this time,” she whispered and her fingers traced my face; they rubbed against the stubble on my jaw, and down my neck. When she held on to my shirt, I touched her arm. I felt hard muscle under her dress, hard muscle under soft skin.
I remembered her eyes, that bright aquamarine. I could see them, a memory that reached out across the years. She said it was the color of the sea, the color of A minor. I should have corrected her; I should have told her that everything about her was a major chord.
“Come on,” she said, and took my hand, squeezed it tight. She knew where to go now, and I knew it, too.
Her apartment was just like her: spacious and intriguing. No frills or clutter. Guitars lined the exposed brick wall to her bedroom. I held on to her hand, pulled her back to me and kissed her against that wall between two Fenders.
She was stronger than me, I think. But she yielded so easily. She cupped my face while I pulled her dress up over her hip. I traced the elastic of her panties through her tights. Her ass was firm and soft, all at once, like everything about her.
She was dizzyingly surreal, and finally in my arms.
“You have to go slow,” she whispered, pushing her thumb over my lips before I could say anything. Her eyes glowed blue in the hallway light that glittered on the polished guitars. “You have to mean it.”
A strand of her hair stuck to the exposed brick. She bit her lip, then pushed her thumb past mine. Our eyes locked, and I swirled my tongue around her intrusion. She tasted like salt and smoke.
“You’re dangerous, you know?”
I don’t know how she did that, how she could look smaller with just a sentence, just a flick of her eyelids. My grip on her ass hardened and I felt my knuckles bruise against the brick behind her.
“I don’t know anyone who can hurt me like you could. That’s why I want you so bad. That’s why…” She shook her head, pulled her thumb from my mouth and looked at the gloss of my saliva. “Nobody makes me feel weak like you do.”
I kissed the palm of her hand, her cheek, her nose.
“I know…” I knew from stinging eyes and a dumbstruck tongue. I knew from the moisture on my cheeks, from an outburst of pointless, vicious anger five years ago. I knew. And then I knew where the pain came from, the biting gnawing feeling in my chest that had followed us around all night.
It was five lost years. Five years in which I could have been happy. Five years unraveling and catching up. I kissed her again, and time spun around us, speeding up and slowing down like a crazy carousel ride.
Her bed was a vast sprawl of blankets. I laid her down, dressed like she was, and she smiled up at me. She hadn’t turned on the lights but a streetlamp shed an orange glow that made her eyes look almost green.
I pulled off my jacket; the leather squeaked in the silence. Maybe for the first time in my life, I had an inkling that I could wait, that I could kick off my shoes, climb in bed with her and hold her until we fell asleep. I saw myself making breakfast in the morning. I’d pick a guitar from the wall, and we’d write something together the way she talked about five years ago. And I would sleep with her only once she knew that I meant it this time. That, no matter my reputation, no matter what I did that night we met, no matter all of it: I meant it this time.
I liked myself in that vision. But I think she already knew, somehow.
She brushed her shoes off with her toes, and then lifted her foot into my hands. Her heel rested against my stomach. I touched her calf, and her arches. I counted her toes under the dark tights. I liked her legs, liked the sheer length, the stability. She could have sent me sprawling on the floor with just one good push, but she didn’t. Her leg was soft and pliable under my hands. The contrast made my cock ache.
She wriggled her toes under my shirt. There they rested, hot against my stomach.
“Take it off?” It was a sweet sound, half question, half command. I felt light as air, smiled down at her and my shirt joined my jacket on a chair. I saw her chest expand as her eyes roamed my torso, saw her tongue flicker over her bottom lip.
It’s a powerful drug, being wanted. I knew that too well, maybe; I was an addict by all accounts. But my usual hits didn’t compare to being wanted by Gemma.
I stepped between her legs, rested my knee on the side of the bed. She lifted her ass for me so that I could pull her tights and panties out from beneath her dress. I painted a line of kisses down her leg as I exposed her skin. Slowly.
It was the sweet smell of her cunt, I think, that made me drop to the floor next to her tights, hollow and still warm like the abandoned skin of a snake. My eyes sought hers for approval, maybe, or just connection; something in me jumped at her surprise, at the shock of vulnerability. I smiled against her thigh. Kissed that pale strip of skin.
Her legs closed behind my neck even before I reached her cunt. It was nestled so prettily in the dark, but I pried her legs apart, grinning up at her. I wanted to see, I wanted to peel her open, taste every part of her. I liked her surprise, too. And I savored it like the first taste of her clit, like her moan when I bit her labia, when I pushed two fingers inside her and held her down so I could keep sucking her clit with any amount of traction.
It was dark between her legs, and warm. It was salty and alive with her wriggling, writhing body. She was still half dressed when she came the first time, and so was I. Her cunt clenched around my fingers hard and fast, like her hands around my hair.
She held on to me long after she cried out my name. I rested my cheek against her thigh, breathed her in, smiled at the way her fingers mirrored the rhythm of her cunt.
That, too, was a new sensation: the desire to be held on to. To be kept and not let go.
I kissed her slit, carefully. She squirmed, whimpered again, and I lifted her legs onto the bed. She looked flushed and happy. She plucked open my jeans, but left me to get rid of them before I joined her in bed.
“You taste like me,” she whispered, brushing her fingers along my lips. “Make me taste like you, too?”
I looked up surprised, maybe where I shouldn’t have been. That old conversation shot back into my head. She liked to be fucked raw and hard and honest.
I peeled her out of her dress, pulled her to the side of her bed, where I could feed her my cock. She lay on her back, suckled it upside down like a lifeline, like a woman, like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Still glowing from her orgasm, every movement was slow, soft, like a kitten after her nap. From time to time, her hip bucked up in unconscious imitation of her lips around my cock. I squeezed her nipples, hard. And each time her moan sent the shock of vibration through her mouth, I had to close my eyes to stop me from drowning in her vertigo.
I started fucking her mouth when her moans became louder, needier, when she started to seem distracted. Her toes curled inward each time I pushed against her throat, each time she drew a ragged breath. Her hand clenched around my thigh as she choked, but she didn’t push me away. That’s when I knew. Long before her other hand moved between her legs, before I came on her face and she beamed at me upside down. That’s when I knew we understood each other. That no time had passed in five long years, and we were just beginning.
I wanted to write a lifetime of songs about that smile alone.