Dear Little Jo,
Regen. I keep waiting for it to finally snow so there won’t be any more roofing until spring. But instead there was light rain all day and then it came pounding down after school. You were standing there at the bus stop when I drove by. I wasn’t sure if it was even you at first. I mean I’ve been doing that a lot lately, thinking it’s you and then it’s not you. Your hair was slicked flat and your shoulders hunched in trying to protect your backpack wrapped in your arms. Not standing with the other kids inside the shelter.
My foot was already on the brake and I was already pulling the car to the curb before I even considered how it might look, me picking you up in my car. I mean we haven’t talked about it, Jo. We’ve just assumed we’re not telling anybody, not even Bron and Shayna, let alone the general public at school.
It was my body making decisions for me faster than my brain. My foot on the brake, my hands turning the wheel. The sight of you shot something strong and bright through my veins. I swear my mouth started to water. It must be how a dog feels when its master comes home. Joy coursing through its whole body.
I guess it must have spooked me a bit, how strong it was. How it got even stronger when you climbed in and slammed the passenger door with the water puddling on the floor mat. Shaking drops off your hair and saying, “Oh, man, you are a lifesaver,” and the whole car filled with the smell of wet Jonathan Hopkirk.
Your scent, Jo. It’s like wool and bread and something else. I don’t know. A scent like if laughter had a scent, or daybreak. You filled the whole car with a yellow light like daybreak. I swear it felt like light pouring into my veins.
I was sort of absorbed in this I guess, and you were talking about normal things. How all this rain reminds you of Prince’s Super Bowl show—“Have you ever watched it?” you asked. “It’s earthbreaking.” That was your word, earthbreaking.
How Ms. Deane, the art teacher, wants Bron to apply to art college instead of journalism school. How Shayna cut class and disappeared this afternoon.
Normal things, you talked about. Everyday things.
And suddenly it all seemed really uneven to me. Unbalanced. Which is why I pulled into that grocery-store parking lot.
“Are we doing errands?” you said. You were shivering a bit, so I left the car on and turned up the heat.
It took me about five minutes to spit it out. And still it was completely faltering and awkward. “Do you think you like me as much as I like you?” I asked.
Total silence. You looked sort of shocked. You said, “Kurl, I think… I think it’s basically a miracle you like me at all.”
I tried to explain what I meant. I said, “It’s just that I can’t really remember what my head was like, before. What was in my head.”
“Before what?”
“Before you,” I said. “I mean I think about you all the time. From the second I wake up, all day long. At school I see something going on in the hall, a crowd gathered, and I think, Oh, Jo would say that’s the crux of the dilemma. Or I will read something in class and I think, I have to remember this for Jo; Jo would love this phrase, or whatever.”
You were smiling. “Jo would love this phrase?” you said. “Really?”
“Or in the caf, they have those vitamin C cough drops you like, and I’ll want to buy them for you.”
You said, “Can I have one now, actually? My throat is sort of—”
“I didn’t buy them,” I said. “I just wanted to.” You were missing the point. I said, “I don’t know what was in my head before I met you. What did I even think about? Because whatever it was, it’s not in there anymore. It’s gone. I am completely, one hundred percent all the time filled up with you.”
You were quiet.
“It doesn’t feel entirely normal,” I said.
You frowned.
“I mean I’m not complaining,” I said.
“You’re sort of complaining though,” you said.
The heater was making an irritating clicking sound. I shut off the engine. “That’s not how I meant it, I guess.” It sounded wrong even to me. It was joy I’d felt, seeing you at the bus stop. What was my problem? Why did I have to switch joy into something else?
“Maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way,” you said. “Maybe it’s a beautiful thing to be filled up with someone else.”
I said, “Sure. So long as it’s two ways. So long as you’re not deluding yourself.”
You turned to face me then. Nudged right up to me. Hooked your knee over my thighs and wrapped your damp arm across my ribs until your mouth was next to my ear. The scent of wet Jonathan. And now the feel of you.
I jerked back and looked around to make sure no other cars were pulling into the spot next to us. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see much.
“You’re delusional, all right,” you said, “if you think it’s not two ways. You think I don’t like you? Do you need me to tell you how I want you?”
Of course I could feel that you did want me. But I wanted you to tell me too. Your lips were cold on my ear but your breath was hot.
You started to say filthy things, Jo. X-rated things. Unrepeatable things. “I want you on your knees, Kurl,” you said, and “I want you flat on your belly.”
You took me through it step-by-step: what you’d make me do to you, what you would do to me, what we would do together.
It was just talk. I mean you were pushed up against me, and we must have been moving. We were moving a bit and you did kiss me at one point, now that I’m thinking back. Toward the end of your speech you were kissing me. My head was tipped back against the headrest. I was breathing your breath and not even hearing the words you were saying anymore but just the command behind the words and the kisses. The command was Surrender.
“You think you’re filled up with me now?” you said. “You’re going to be so full of me that you won’t even know where you end and I begin. You’re going to be so full of me that you’ll think you’re going to die with the pleasure of it.”
And of course I was dying with the pleasure of it right then, exactly like you were ordering me to. Surrender, I heard in your words. Surrender. And I did.
And then without another word you lifted yourself off me and plunged back into your seat and I was torn from you and from myself too, it felt like. Hovering there, shaky and sticky and embarrassed. You cracked open your window to let the steam out.
I crossed my arms on the steering wheel and rested my forehead on them.
“Are you okay?” you asked.
I waited until my voice was back in my throat. Then I waited until my brain found the words. It seemed to take a long time, a couple of minutes at least.
“Those things you’re describing,” I said. “Have you done all those things?”
“No,” you said. “I told you what I’ve done. Just groping, basically. Clumsy stuff.”
“Then how can you say it? How can you even think the words and get them out of your mouth?”
You laughed. “Are you shocked? I just wanted to turn you on, Kurl. Words are sex too,” you said. “There’s no difference between describing it and doing it.”
I turned my head to peer at you past my arm.
Another laugh. “Well, okay, there is a difference, of course, but maybe it’s a spectrum. Maybe describing it is part of doing it.”
“Would you want to actually do it though?” I asked.
“Which part?” you said.
“Any of it. All of it.”
“With you? Yes,” you said.
That was all, just “Yes.” I lifted my head all the way off my arms and looked at you. You were doodling in the fog on your window. Your ear was bright red, and noticing that made me suddenly a bit less embarrassed.
“Me too,” I said.
Why am I repeating all of this? Why did I just sit here in my bed with my babcia’s ugly orange quilt wrapped around my shoulders against the chill, staying up late, trying to remember how the words went, who said what, how we moved against each other, how it felt?
Well, I know why. Because remembering it brings some of it back, sensation-wise. But also because I have this idea that it needs to be written down. For the record, for some kind of record. No one knows about us, Jo. There’s an entire universe that we’ve created from scratch, just you and me. And I mean I would like to live here full-time. But the outside world doesn’t match up to the inside one, so I keep feeling like you and I are a dream.
No. It’s the opposite. I feel like I walk around all day in a dream and then, when I see you, I wake up.
Kurl, you wrote in the steam on the car window.
So I wrote on my window too. I wrote, I am large, I contain multitudes.
You squinted, trying to read it. “I didn’t know you could write backward.”
“It’s Walt,” I said.
“But why backward?” you said.
“So it makes sense from the outside,” I said.
Sincerely,
AK