Your father taught me to play guitar.
“You know Dire Straits?” he asked. We were in my room. It was summer, and we’d both stayed in the city, a plan we hadn’t made together but were both glad we’d chosen. He’d gotten a job working at a recording studio, I was folding and refolding shirts at a boutique that sold clothing neither one of us could afford. Our relationship had started slow, like a ballad, but then picked up speed the more we got to know each other. Weekly trips to the Postcrypt to listen to music together in March turned into drinks and dessert in April and walks through the city in May, where we talked about our families, our favorite books, our dreams, and our nightmares.
Soon we were hanging out in each other’s dorms, studying for finals sprawled across each other’s beds.
And then it was June, and we saw each other almost every day. One night, we were in his room, the window was open, the fan was on, but we still felt the warmth—sticky on our skin.
He didn’t wait for my response about Dire Straits before he started playing.
But it was a song I knew, about Romeo on the streets serenading Juliet.
“Indigo Girls,” I told him. “They cover this.”
He stopped playing and laughed. “Of course,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
But he was playing again.
I watched his fingers. I heard the chords, felt the notes vibrating inside me. And before long, I was singing with him. Our voices wove into each other. The whole world fell away. The heat and the humidity were gone. It was just me and him and the music. I was awash in it. We finished the song staring into the blacks of each other’s eyes.
“Wow,” he said.
Soon he was behind me on the bed, his guitar on my lap, his legs on either side of mine, his fingers showing mine how to coax a chord out of the instrument, how to strum.
“You’re a natural.” He kissed my neck as he said it.
And maybe I was. Or maybe it was just that everything with him felt natural.