The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  And he wanted it badly enough to wait for it.

  So rapt was his attention he missed his cue at the end of the pas de deux. David reached over him to slide the levers, bringing the lights down. Erik snapped back to the present, his face burning. “My bad,” he mumbled.

  David gazed at him, smiling, his expression neither reproachful nor teasing. “Love will do that to a guy,” he whispered.

  Erik nodded, not looking away. He felt caught between declaring his love, and apologizing for it. Such a strong urge to say to David, “I’m sorry.” But for what? Not for loving Daisy, he wouldn’t back down.

  David looked away then, still smiling. Chin on his hand, staring at the stage. It was dimmed down to the lowest beams on the boom stands, illuminating the hushed interval between pieces. “Fishy, fishy in the brook,” he said under his breath, “many things, but not a crook.”

  Sax

  A bag of Swedish Fish was no problem, but Friday night, Erik had to go to three different convenience stores and a gas station before he could find a bouquet of daisies. He separated two from the bunch and taped them to the candy, leaned paper and pen against the wall backstage and wrote a note:

  The library had a Swedish-English dictionary.

  Sax = scissors.

  He almost wrote “good luck,” then remembered it was bad luck to say it in the theater.

  He stopped Aisha Johnson, one of the contemporary girls. “You wouldn’t say ‘break a leg’ to a dancer,” he said. “How do you wish good luck before a show?”

  Aisha raised her eyebrows and held out an expectant palm.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, reaching for his wallet and the dollar he now owed.

  “I’m teasing,” she laughed. “No, no, I don’t want your money. You say ‘merde.’”

  “Merde.”

  She spelled it for him. “It’s French for shit.”

  He went to sign his name, then decided not to. He took the note and his gifts to the row of little wooden cubbies, which served as mailboxes for the performers and stagehands, and slid the offering into the one marked Bianco. Checking his own cubby, he found a short note of appreciation from Leo, and a longer one from Allison Pierce, heavy with exclamation points and smiley faces. He put it politely in his pocket, then nervously checked his offering to Daisy hadn’t inexplicably fallen out of her box in the last sixty seconds.

  The dancers performed to a full house. Daisy danced beautifully. Even though she behaved in the Prelude and did a double pirouette at the end of her solo, the audience still gave her a small, spontaneous ovation. Erik didn’t miss any cues, but he watched the ballet program filled with distracted anticipation. He wondered if Daisy had found the gift in her mailbox, worried she wouldn’t know it was from him, then both wondered and worried how he could see her after the concert when he had the whole second act to run and she could just leave.

  She did leave. After the curtain came down, and Erik and David had closed up shop, he searched backstage, but she was gone. He stood in the wings a few confused moments, not knowing what to do. He needed a cue here.

  He saw Will crossing the stage, his arm wrapped around Lucky Dare’s curvy body. Erik had never worked with a wingman but maybe now was the time. He started walking over, passing by the wooden cubbies, and a flicker of yellow in his own slot made him stop short. He reached in and retrieved the now-empty wrapper from the Swedish Fish. His face filled with swift heat, then it went numb, as if he had been slapped. He didn’t understand. He turned the wrapper over and over, not understanding. Then he looked and saw his own note to Daisy folded inside the plastic bag.

  She had eaten the candy, but given the rest back.

  She didn’t want him.

  With shaking fingers he drew out the paper and unfolded it, re-reading what he had written. Where had he gone wrong? Ten simple, almost stupid words, and she had changed her mind?

  He turned the paper over.

  A pile of penciled lines on the back of his note. Words jumped out at him. Heart. Happiness. Want. Hands. Whisper. Shaking, Erik pulled back into the privacy of the curtains to read.

  I don’t know what to do since I met you. I don’t know how to be since you showed me your necklace and told me about your father. You let me touch some of the sadness you carry in your heart and now your happiness is something I need. I’m looking for you all the time. I want to talk to you about everything.

  Who are you? I feel like I already know. Like I always knew. I want to be near you. I was born to be near you. I want to know you in the dark. I want you to look at me with your hands. To talk to me with your body. To show me without words. To trust me with your most secret self while I trust you with mine. I want to feel your smile against my mouth when I tell you things and hear you whisper, “I know. Me too.”

  I didn’t know love would be like this. I didn’t know I would love like this. And I want to see you seeing me love you. Like this.

  I’m in my room.

  If you don’t feel the same, please be kind.

  But if you are thinking right now, “Me too,” then please come here, come talk to me.

  I need to talk to you.

  Right now.

  God, I can’t breathe…

  Erik lifted up his head and let go the breath he had been holding.

  But if you are thinking right now, “Me too,” then please come...

  He left the wings, leaped off the apron and ran up the aisle to the booth. Seizing his jacket, he bolted out the lobby doors, out of Mallory and into the icy November night. He ran. Ran for his life. Ran to start his life. Across campus to the south quad, to Daisy’s dorm.

  Heart pounding in his heaving chest, he knocked on her door.

  It opened.

  Daisy stood before him. Sweats and her Lancaster hoodie, her hair down, the makeup scrubbed off her face. Her hand reached out to touch him. Her brimming eyes glowed blue-green.

  “Me too,” he said.

  Daisy drew him in, closing the door behind.

  The room was dark except for a reading lamp clipped onto one of the beds, and a string of Christmas lights around the window. She slid her arms around his neck. Her head settled on his chest. He put his hand on her head, the other arm across her back, pressed her to him. He exhaled. Thank you, he thought, rubbing his cheek against her hair.

  For a long time they held each other.

  “I can feel your heart,” she whispered.

  “I can feel everything,” he said. A thudding pulse in his ears, the hum and roar of his own blood coursing through his body. Daisy unzipped his jacket and peeled it down his back and off his arms. She put it down on the bed and switched off the reading lamp. They stood together, her hands lightly touching his chest. His fingers traced her eyebrows, pushed her hair behind her ear. He felt himself expanding, swollen with emotion, unfolding for her like a map.

  “Have you ever felt this way,” she whispered, beautiful in the Christmas lights.

  “Never,” he said, his voice squeezed tight through his throat. He thought about maps, roads taken and untaken. The twists and turns of life, choices and their consequences sending a person in a certain direction. He could have chosen a different school. He could have come to this school but not gone with the tech theater minor. Anything could have thrown him off course. He could have missed her. He might have gone his whole life not knowing who or where she was.

  “I don’t think I can explain,” she said slowly, “what this week has been like for me.”

  “Dais, I—”

  “No, wait,” she said, a finger at his mouth. “Just listen. Let me say this. You have to understand something. I’m such a practical person. To a fault. A lot of people think I’m cold but it’s just… I don’t like drama. I don’t like ooey-gooey sentimental shit. I don’t coo over babies or cry at movies. And I never believed in love at first sight. I don’t write love notes, either. I mean, I don’t bleed my feelings on paper. Especially for someone I just met. But I swear, Erik, I wrote t
o you tonight and I… I just breathed it. Breathed myself onto the paper. It was so easy and it was like seeing myself for the first time. Who I really am. I should be thinking ‘This isn’t me. This isn’t what I’m about.’ But it is. This is me. I just didn’t know it until I met you.”

  Running his hands over her face and hair, Erik could not speak. He had made her become herself. What else could love be? How could he have imagined love was anything but a force which made you your most authentic being?

  “God, I love looking at you,” she said, putting her palm on his face. Her thumb ran along his bottom lip and desire smacked him hard in the chest. He closed his eyes, leaned out over the edge of the abyss behind his lids. He opened them, kept them open as he brought his mouth to hers.

  “Keep looking at me,” he whispered.

  They kissed, staring at each other, breathing each other’s air. Each touch of their mouths was longer, and in between her fingertips grazed his lips. He’d never kissed with his eyes open like this. Never known a girl who made her fingers part of a kiss. He would never want it any other way now. Already he was changed.

  Long, magic, elastic stretches of time, holding each other, kissing. He gave her a little of his tongue and her throat let loose a tiny sigh. Then her tongue against his, their kisses blooming like flowers. He took it all in, how she opened her mouth for him, her arms twining up around his neck, her body pressing against his, fitting into his hands.

  I want to be inside you, he thought, following the aching, physical concept into another dimension of need. His soul cried out for her. He wanted to be conjoined. His atoms and cells combined with hers. Their perceptions melded so he could see the world through her eyes. How different this was from being fifteen and consumed with desperate, hormonal curiosity. Willing to take it from anyone, just for the sake of getting it. His brain swirled in a mature and masculine revelation as his mouth found her neck, sweet with her sugar-soap scent. He tilted her head back, set his tongue in the hollow of her throat and tasted what was there. Carefully. Selectively. He didn’t want just any experience. He wanted hers.

  “Kiss me,” she whispered. The bite of her fingernails was in his skin as he worked his mouth up her neck, over her chin, and then onto and into her mouth again. Finally their eyes closed and they fell into each other, kissing deep, kissing like lovers, sighing, clinging, drowning in each other.

  “I want you so much,” he said against her mouth.

  “You know I’ve never—”

  “I know,” he said. “You said you were waiting for the one.”

  “I think I was waiting for you.”

  He slid all ten fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. “What is happening,” he whispered. “I only met you a week ago.”

  “Do you feel it’s going too fast?”

  “I’m feeling a lot of things. But doubt isn’t one of them.”

  “I’m feeling so much. I don’t even have names for what I feel.”

  “I know.” He wrapped his arms around her slender body. She fit him. Fit him perfectly.

  “I’ve never wanted something so bad, Erik.”

  “I’ll wait. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll wait, I don’t care how long.”

  She put her hands on his face, her eyes wide and shining, a cluster of Christmas tree twinkles pooled in each iris. “I’m so happy,” she whispered.

  He stared down at her, transfixed and transformed. “I love seeing you happy.”

  She was all up in him again, her mouth wonderful. She kissed like a dream, kissed him like she was born to. Born to, he mused, lost in her. I would move in her like I was born to.

  He pulled her tight against him. Let her feel him hard for her. Let her feel his want while his hands stayed soft and patient on the bare skin of her back. Let her know he couldn’t wait. And yet he would gladly wait. It was all there for the taking. Time was plentiful, a spilling basket of golden minutes and hours. Time was a gift from this girl who had waited for him to find her.

  Your Clothes Against My Skin

  “Do you have good memories of your father?” Daisy asked. She was lying on Erik’s chest, playing with the little gold fish on his necklace. His hand moved slowly up and down her back underneath her shirt. His, rather: she had taken to buttoning herself into his clothes at night, wearing one of his flannel shirts and her underwear and nothing else.

  It was a sweet look.

  “All my memories of him are good,” he said. “That’s what made it so bad when he left.”

  “What did he do, what was his job?”

  “He owned a construction company, did some carpentry on the side. He built my and Pete’s bedroom. It’s a good memory.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He knocked down the wall between our rooms, made one big space for us. Then he built these beds—mine was a loft, and he cut tree shapes out of plywood, screwed them onto the front, so it looked like a forest. I had a swing, an actual rope swing hanging down from the bed. Pete was young so his bed was down low, but it had the trees all around it, and a little hammock for him.”

  “Sounds like something you’d see in a magazine,” she said. She was making the boat charm sail in and out of the hollow of his throat.

  “He built it all one summer. I remember watching for hours. Watching him work.”

  “So he was a set designer.”

  “Huh.” Erik smiled. “Didn’t occur to me. You’re right.”

  “Do you remember his voice?”

  “Sort of. He said Prosit when I sneezed. Skål for a toast. Those were the only Swedish words he used. I can hear them in my head. In his voice.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Relaxed and warm, Erik thought about how to answer. He loved lying in bed with Daisy, in the gold haze of the Christmas tree lights, talking. She asked him the funniest things. Unexpected questions often startling him into thoughtfulness. He found himself opening up in a way he never had before, telling her everything, answering anything she asked.

  “Like me,” he finally said, laughing a little. “I don’t know how else to describe him. He looked like me. But with blue eyes. Dark blue.”

  “Was he tall?”

  “I was a kid. Everyone was tall.” He gathered her hair up in his hands, then slowly let it fall. “If you come to my house someday I’ll show you his picture. I have a few I kept.”

  “I’d like that.” She dropped the charms and pulled herself up and onto him. “And I like you.”

  “I can’t keep my hands off you…”

  It was their honeymoon.

  With the rigors of the fall dance concert behind them, and no other stage productions on the docket, life had downshifted into a more relaxed pace. Only classes and homework demanded their attention, and a heady surplus of free time was available to be together and evolve into a couple.

  They went out often with Will and Lucky. The four of them laughed and carried on, all around Philadelphia, ambling through museums and galleries, going out to dinner or the movies. Sometimes David came along, sometimes with a date. But usually it was the four of them on the town, young, crazy, high on life and each other.

  The nights passed in slower, quieter hours. Being alone. Falling in love.

  And fooling around.

  Spoiled by Lucky’s regular sleepovers at Will’s place, Erik and Daisy had the room to themselves, and together they were constructing a sexual fortress. She was still a virgin, spoon-feeding Erik her body. He ate what she offered, relishing it. He knew the pace wasn’t set out of mistrust or teasing, but from her own desire not to throw any of the journey away.

  “It’s not that I’m totally inexperienced,” she said, the first time he spent the night with her.

  He tucked her hair behind her ears. “I’m stunned you’re not with someone. And I’d be more stunned if there never had been anyone.”

  “I’ve had boyfriends,” she said, gazing off over his shoulder. “But this is the first time everything I feel about a boy and ever
ything I want from a boy, I want to feel inside me.” She looked at him. “David’s such an ass. I have no delusions about sex and marriage. I just wanted to wait until I knew. And I figured I would know when my mind stopped debating and my body said ‘Him. All of him. Inside me.’”

  It wasn’t the first time Erik had heard a girl say she wanted to wait, but he had never heard a girl articulate why so clearly. She was so self-aware and fearlessly true to herself and it made his heart peel open to its most tender core. She was beautiful in his arms, a mermaid in jeans and a silvery-grey bra, her long hair spilling down her back. He made to gather her to him but she hung back, touching his face.

  “You’ve done it,” she said.

  “I have,” he said, hestitating to admit the particulars of who and when. Not because he was considering lying, but because his gallery of sexual encounters, so thrillingly delicious at the time, were now revealed as being so void of emotional connection he regarded them not sadly, but the same way a parent would indulge a child’s mediocre artwork—oh yes, lovely, dear—and then secretly chuck it.

  Daisy touched his face, bringing him back. “What were you going to say?”

  “I’ve done it. But what I’m doing with you is totally different.”

  He had more experience yet he was following her in this dance of slow, intense exploration. Daisy wasn’t meek or passive. Not prudish or shy. She knew her body, knew what turned her on and what got her off and she trusted Erik with the knowledge. He didn’t take it lightly. He was on his own journey—learning what it meant to be a lover. A good one. To take pleasure in pleasing her. To make love instead of assuming its perpetual existence.

  In her bed they devoured the nights. More often than not when he slept over, they woke up naked, tangled in each other’s arms. She was ardently curious about his body and what she could do to it. Not a square inch of him went untouched. She wanted to know him down to the electrons. And for a young man naturally averse to being scrutinized, Erik was becoming addicted to her attention. The more he let her look and let her in, the more open and responsive she became to him. And the more she gave, the more he wanted.