Not my first pick.
“I was thinking more like…Palu—but I’ll go anywhere with you. Can we even go to Cuba?”
“Someday we’ll be able to. We can go to Palu too.”
I turned away from him, keeping with the syncopated Cuban beat, practically begging for more of him to touch more of me. “When are you going to teach me to dance?” I asked.
“You already know how to dance,” he said in a sexy, deep voice and I felt him press hard into me.
“I mean real dancing, not just moving to music. I want to ballroom dance, with you.”
“We will. I will teach you everything. There’s a Tuesday night swing club we can go to for practice.” He spun me around. “Do you want to learn the tango?” He asked.
“Well that’s an easy answer,” I said, “yes.”
He held our arms in the signature tango pose, “How about…” then swept me into a tango lunge with one leg reaching way back. “I’ll teach you the tango on our next date. Tonight is Cuban night.”
A jealous thought of all the women who’d gotten to dance with him flashed in my mind. His dancing partner, women in classes he taught, private lessons, surely they had been swooned by him when he put them into the tango position. Then I reminded myself, he’s with me, not them, he’s about to make love to me, not them.
He unbuttoned my jeans, then followed them to the floor guiding me out. His lips navigated the length of my body from my ankles all the way back up to my wanting eyes. He grasped my shoulders and turned me away from him, “Lay down,” he said, “on your stomach.”
I could have died, every moment agony and ecstasy in equal measure, and nothing had even happened yet. He pulled back the down comforter and instructed me where to lie. The sateen sheets were cool against my skin, making his warm hands even more titillating. He stood over me with sensual vanilla jasmine massage oil in his palms. My hips moved to the Cuban beat, unrestrained, uninhibited, a show he enjoyed.
“Baby, you’re so hot,” he said it like he was about to devour me whole. His slippery hands made long strokes from my shoulders to my waist, his fingertips fanned out and covered the entire wingspan of my back. Each time, he slipped a little further into my panties, and with each sensual stroke, I sighed in ecstasy.
“Thank you for the massage, you’re so wonderful,” I muttered.
“You don’t have to thank me, I love touching you.”
I sighed again, even more aroused from his words than his touch. He teased me until I nearly begged him to take my panties off, then finally he slid them down to my ankles letting them fall to the floor. Then he teased me more.
It was an unbearable agony he forced me to endure, long pauses of him stepping away to watch me thrash and suffer after naughty strokes over my most sensitive areas.
“I will get you back,” I declared.
“I can’t wait,” he said, flipping me over. His ice blue eyes stared at me and his voice was drowning in testosterone, “I’ve waited so long for this…for you, all of you.”
The mood changed from deliberate mischievous teasing, to unrestrained primal desire. He radiated through me, filling my every cell with a fantastic and wild love. Pinned underneath him, with my arms pressing against the wall, he took his rightful place of over me, guarding me, making love to me.
He set his lips on my ear, “I love you so much, I can’t believe it’s really you.”
We lay side by side under the thin sheets, exhausted and exhilarated—our oily bodies touching in as many places as possible. Shadows flickered on the wall and The Buena Vista Social Club was still playing on repeat. He searched through the sheets for my hand then interlaced his fingers in mine.
“I knew it would be good, but I didn’t think it would be that good,” I said and we laughed.
“Me neither, we fit so well together,” he said. “Stay here.” Then he shimmied off the bed, turned off the music, and left the room.
When he came back, he was wearing clean boxers and his guitar. He sat at the edge of the bed, one leg dangling down, closed his eyes and started to strum. I pushed up onto my elbows, laid draped under his cool sheets and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I recognized the song, I loved the song, I’d suggested he learn this song. He did, he learned it for me.
“Time After Time.”
I closed my eyes and swayed along to his masculine voice singing those romantic words. I felt his love for me.
Then we sang every song we could think of, sometimes just him, sometimes just me, and sometimes we sang together. I fumbled through lyrics singing only a chorus or often only a single line, but I still sang, something I hadn’t done with anyone in a long time. I sang until I couldn’t sing any more.
It became our after sex tradition for him to sing late into the night, any song I requested “Wicked Game,” “Cry To Me,” and “She Will Be Loved.” were among my favorites. If he didn’t know my request he would slip his guitar pick between his teeth, pick up his phone, Google the lyrics and cords and play it anyway; any song, any genre, any hour of the night. Even if he sang it completely wrong, if I requested it, he tried to sing it.
It was there at the edge of his bed with his guitar and our nearly naked bodies where we fell madly and unequivocally in love.
The next morning I woke up paralyzed.
Chapter 33
“A WOMAN KNOWS THE FACE OF THE MAN SHE LOVES
AS A SAILOR KNOWS THE OPEN SEA.”
—HONORE DE BALZAC
Daylight peeked through the crack of the blinds, and his overwhelmingly male body was still pressed against mine. He lay contented and untroubled as I lay hopeless and incurable. I reached my arms above my head and clamped on to the corner of the mattress. I tried to pull my limp body closer to the edge so I could roll off then crawl to the bathroom.
His voice was sincere, I sobbed the instant he spoke. “Baby, what’s wrong?” He hovered over me radiating concern. “What can I do? What is it? Is it your back?”
“Yes,” I wept.
“Honey, what do you need, how can I help?” He sat up, ready to act.
“I don’t know…” I turned my face away as tears pooled on the pillow beneath me. “I just need some time; it’ll get better as the day goes on. It’s always the worst in the mornings. There’s a bottle of ibuprofen in my bag, will you get me 800mg?”
“Of course,” he mobilized immediately.
“Do you have an ice pack too?” I asked.
“No, but I can get one.” He slid on yesterday’s jeans and buttoned them around his trim waist. “Here you go,” Grant held out his hand, offering me four small rusty colored pills and a glass of water. “Take these, I’ll be right back with an ice pack, ten minutes. Can I get you anything else?” I shook my head embarrassed by my helpless condition. He kissed my wet cheek. “Baby, I’m so sorry; tell me how to help you.”
“You’re doing it.” I said through a forced smile.
When I heard the garage door close, I rolled onto the floor then inched my way into the bathroom to get my overnight bag. Crawling brought sensation back into my legs but made the stabbing pains in my lower back worse. Every move contracted a muscle that pulled on a bone that caused more crunching and grinding. I took another little white pill—not because I wanted to—because I had to.
Grant came back with a five pound bag of ice, the kind you get from an aluminum cooler outside of a gas station. He stuffed a plastic grocery bag full, laid blankets on the couch, propped up pillows, and helped me into position.
We were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, each with a generous mug of coffee when he asked, “Honey, what’s going on, why does your back hurt? Was it the flight?”
“No. It’s been like this for a while, I don’t know exactly how it happened. I just know it’s getting worse.”
“Why didn’t you tell me how bad it is? I want to know these things.” He set down his coffee and kneaded the muscles in my legs and feet with both hands—his strained expression revealed a
deep, honest concern. “What do you think it is, baby?”
I looked down into my coffee, searching for an answer I didn’t have. How can I not know what’s wrong with me and why can’t anybody help me?
“Honestly I don’t know what it is—I could speculate but I can’t be sure. I’ve been to a dozen different specialists and gotten a dozen conflicting opinions.” I shifted, uncomfortable in any one position for too long. “No one seems to know exactly where the pain is coming from, but everyone seems to have plenty of expensive and useless advice. I’ve just been trying to deal with it Learn how to live with it.”
“There has to be help for you. Where have you gone?”
I told him everything, everywhere I’d been, traditional and non-traditional, and everything I’d taken. “I was told I wasn’t a candidate for surgery, that people with lower back pain without nerve pain don’t have good results.”
“Did you get a second opinion?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to Minneapolis? Or to the Mayo Clinic?”
“No.”
“Then that’s where we need to go.”
An ill feeling crept over me, he’d expect me to keep looking for a solution, expect me to get better, and I’d keep letting him down.
“Don’t worry about the money,” he said, preempting my complaint.
But I did worry about the money. Rather a lack of the money I would need to go to Mayo, and I wasn’t going to ask him or anyone else for money. I was twenty nine, made a moderate income, I needed to take care of myself.
“You need to find real help. Medical help, don’t go anywhere else. You need to go to someone at the top. I know an orthopedic surgeon in Colorado; I’ll call him and ask where we should go. Do you have x-rays or medical records from past doctor visits?”
“Of course.”
“We will find a solution okay?”
But he didn’t understand, “I did see an orthopedic surgeon,” I said, “he said I wasn’t a candidate for surgery. He gave me Vicodin and Oxy and sent me home. I take it when I need to, more than I want to.”
“If you need pain killers take them. We will find you help. I will help you,” Grant said.
“There is one thing that takes the pain away,” I said raising an eyebrow.
“What’s that?”
“Sex.”
***
Our journal was wrapped in a light green silky fabric scattered with sparkling silver flecks. We kept it under his bed and said that we’d write down the things we didn’t want to forget. We made a pact that we wouldn’t read the other persons entry until a year from the date they were written.
It was so hard not to read the things he wrote—I kept my promise for at least a month before I read his first entry. This is what it said.
After trivia night with the guys, I expediently made my way back home in great anticipation to see my honey :)
We, as always, had great conversation as we sat on the short bus together, while drinking five day old wine that seemed to give us both a headache. C.J. brilliantly suggested that sex may be the perfect remedy for our malady. Thankfully, she did not pull the all too common “I have a headache, therefore, no sex!” Heh-heh!
We retreated to my bedroom with her favorite massage oil, and I proceeded to strip away any stresses that may have contributed to C.J.’s headache. In a very passionate love making episode, we telegraphed everything that was unsaid, and everything that was about to happen…ah!
We woke up this morning to our busy, busy lives once again, but what better way to start the day, than to wake up next to the girl of your dreams!
-Grant
Chapter 34
“IN DREAMS AND IN LOVE… THERE ARE NO IMPOSSIBILITIES.”
—JANOS ARNAY
“The summer of 2009—the summer we fall in love.” Those words, his words, as they slipped past his lips, became tattooed on my heart. It was a summer of adrenaline and uncertainty, new love and letting go.
Sneaking around became the one thing we shared exclusively—a blood secret. We wore disguises; baseball caps, sunglasses and oversized flannel jackets to the movie theater. I snuck into his cabin and he snuck into my apartment.
At the lake, I went for long morning walks and met him at our secret spot where he would pick me up in a borrowed green minivan, we’d drive somewhere off the grid, sip coffee, talk about everything important and nothing at all.
In the glaring midday sun, when everyone was cooling off in the water, he whistled for me from behind the trunk of a huge maple tree. He trapped me between his arms and kissed me feverishly while the clamor of laughter and conversation were just feet away.
We found ways to be together, away from spying eyes. We hid in the grotto, I loved the grotto. Our secret place where a small stream of fresh water wide enough only for a paddle boat flowed lazily between the lakes. Surrounded by eight foot tall reeds, we floated for hours, drifting among the swamp life and gazing up at the vast ocean of blue sky. In was in the grotto where calm water turned into bubbles before a big brown beaver poked his head out and took a curious look at us. We never saw our buck-tooth friend again, but we never forgot him.
No one knew our secret and we’d have to keep it that way, at least for a while. Like family and friends do, they were already liberal with unwelcome advice, wait a year to start dating again, a relationship too soon after divorce will never work, they would say. Probably sound counsel, part of me was scared they were right, but it just wasn’t an option to wait. They didn’t know that what Grant and I had existed in a realm that transcended their conventional advice.
We spent evenings around the bonfire with friends and family, singing songs and stealing glances. Then disappeared strategically twenty minutes apart to avoid speculation. I walked along the twinkling shoreline underneath the light of a million stars, then as soon as I saw headlights on the road I ran through the yards and after his car until the brake lights lit up.
He drove to our secret spot, plowing down a swath of five-foot tall marsh grass that rebounded behind us and concealed our crime. There, behind an old storage garage, next to the sounds of a midnight swamp, we made love in the passenger seat of his car. A tricky feat, we maneuvered in ways that only a contortionist could appreciate. On several occasions our secret spot rendezvous didn’t end in the intended way, but always ended with rolling laughter.
Under the cover of a starry midnight sky we would scurry through the yards and out to the end of a vacant dock where we spread out a thick quilted blanket and pillows. Over the water and underneath the North Star, we drifted into a blissful sleep. Sometimes we made love, other times we contemplated whether or not to freeze our brains when we die. Every time, he encircled me in his arms and we shared our thoughts on how lucky we were to have found such an extraordinary love.
On a Tuesday, for no particular reason, he left me another card.
To the love of my life,
I am soooo lucky to have you, if you weren’t in my life it would feel so empty.
We will have many more years together, that is certain, let’s live every day as if we were spending the last day of our lives together. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone lived that way—the way that you and I do.
Here’s to you, honey, and here’s to us making the most of every remaining day of our lives.
I love you, baby!
Love, Me!
One rainy July weekend we hid-out at Grant’s place instead of going to the lake. We made love and sushi and I gave him his first Thai massage.
“Will I be able to do it?” He asked.
“Weren’t you listening?” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s lazy man’s yoga. It’s perfect for you. Now, get down there.”
“Isn’t Thai Massage a euphemism for some type of kinky sex?” He asked as he slithered into the center of my plush, chocolate-colored Thai mat.
“It’s not kinky sex, we can do that anytime.”
I walked to the win
dow and closed the blinds, leaving them open a sliver, letting the dim glow of the sunset flicker through the narrow slots.
“I’m so inflexible,” he groaned from the floor.
“All the more reason you should be doing this. Now just shut-up and relax.”
The unmistakable sound of ocean whales whirled around us, emanating from the dust covered CD player that sat on the floor of his vacant spare bedroom.
“When I taught Karate I was really flexible,” he whined again.
“I don’t care. Just relax.”
As insignificant as it was, being flexible was the only thing I was better at than him. The pressure of being good enough next to someone so perfect was something I had never anticipated. Everyone I knew and total strangers too, didn’t talk about me the way they talked about Grant. Next to someone so talented and likable, I often felt inadequate and small.
He lifted his head, “Honey, don’t hurt your back. Maybe you shouldn’t do this.”
“Lie back down and don’t worry, tonight is about you, and if you try to help me move your limbs, it will only make it harder. So just lay there like a flaccid penis,” I said with a Botox expression, which instantly turned into gut-busting laughter.
I began at his feet, kneading and squeezing and pressing reflex points. Then I circled his ankles, cracked his toes and manipulated his entire body through a traditional Thai Massage. I plucked, pinched, and stretched every limb, metatarsal, and phalange. I acknowledged every minuscule muscle fiber and joint.
I alternated walking on my heels and toes across his hamstrings and back, massaged his scalp, squeezed his head, tugged his earlobes and pulled his hair. I sat on him, stepped on him, and stopped the flow of blood in several major arteries until he fell into a nirvana he never knew existed.
The muscles in his arms were a chiseled landscape as they cradled his head. I stood over him, done with the Thai sequence but not done with him. I slipped off everything but my bra and panties, then slid his silky black Adidas sweats to his ankles and off. I finished with a specialty service not available on the menu elsewhere—a service that didn’t end with a simple palms-together “namaste.” I acted as if it was standard protocol, just part of the sequence. Then proceeded without permission to touch everything that had not yet been touched.
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