After a few weeks back at the keys, I felt comfortable there again. Your father would start something on the guitar, I’d pick it up, and we’d speak through our music, telling each other how we felt, what we wanted.
“Everything just disappeared,” I told him one day, after we’d been playing for hours. “Everything but you.”
“I always feel that way,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, “when I play with you.”
The pressure of his fingers was all I could think about. I moved closer to him. He floated his finger down to my wrist, and then bent to put his guitar on the carpet.
“We don’t need instruments to make music,” he said. And we didn’t. Every day with him felt like a new song, a new melody.
He touched my cheek and looked into my eyes. The rhythm of our playing filled me. I leaned toward him. Our lips touched, and the music inside me crescendoed. We kissed and kissed.
We lay together on his bed, like we had been for the last months, touching each other, exploring each other’s bodies with our fingers and lips.
Then he pulled off my tank top, I tugged down his jeans. We both slid off our shoes. And the world was gone again. It was just me and him and the harmony of our breathing. It was skin against skin and breath against breath.
I felt his fingers and his tongue, and then he was back kissing my mouth and he whispered, “Do you want to?”
We hadn’t yet. I wanted to be sure of him, sure of us. He’d given me the time I needed to be certain, understanding that this wasn’t a choice I could take back or undo. And now I was. So I answered with a kiss of my own and a soft “yes.”
He reached over and fumbled in the pocket of his guitar case for a condom. I felt lost without him against me. And then he was kissing me and I was wrapping myself around him, pulling him closer. We rocked into the heat and the warmth and the music.
“Are you really sure?” he asked.
“Never surer,” I said.
I felt the fan blowing warm air across my skin.
And then I felt him, inside me.
And I was part of someone else for the first time.