“Fiskare means fisherman.”
“I thought it meant scissors. The ones with the orange handles.”
He laughed. “I get that all the time.”
She asked if his father wore the necklace. Erik remembered playing with it when he was a little boy. He would sit on his father’s lap and make up stories about Birgitta and her boat, catching the magic fish. He reached behind his neck to fasten the chain again, telling Daisy how his mother had met with his father one last time, to sign divorce papers. And the father had given the gold chain over.
Listening to him, Daisy put her hand out on the table. With no break in his words, Erik put his on it. Curled his fingers around hers and went on telling her things. He was only ten when the divorce was finalized. It was more than five years later when his mother gave the chain to him to keep.
“But I had to be sixteen about it,” he said, now holding her hand in both of his. Under the table their calves and ankles were hugging. “Prove he was no big deal to me.”
He was everything to you, she thought, her palm warm between his. He was running his callused fingertips along the edges of her nails. She looked at him, balancing on his gaze.
“I like you,” he said.
As she did over the lid of the piano yesterday, she reached invisible hands to try him on. And found the warm jacket of his simplest self fit her perfectly. She pulled it close around her shoulders, drew her hair out from beneath its collar.
“I like you,” she whispered, lost in his eyes.
You fit me, she thought.
Thursday was dress rehearsal. She was standing in the wings while the wardrobe tech sewed up the back seam of her dance dress when she saw Erik. She held her hands out to him and he came to her, took her hands in his. They stood still, the hustling current of production parting and passing around them as their eyes held in a silent, staring communion. He reached shy fingers to play with her earring, then trailed them down her jaw, touching her like a lover.
Her mind wrapped arms around the moment and slowly pulled it horizontal, drawing Erik’s longing to lie down with hers. She felt it then—the ache of her negative space needing a positive to fill it. Craving for the first time a closeness that conjoined, male and female. Away floated the last bits of adolescent revulsion toward the notion of a man being inside her body. Her thoughts became fists. They dug their nails into Erik’s presence and held on with a quiet, greedy revelation.
I want him.
Friday was opening night.
The night her life opened.
THE DRESSING ROOMS LINED the space beneath the stage like catacombs. Beneath the low ceiling, the air was warm and dry. A little musty. Layered with the smell of hairspray, makeup, sweaty costumes and illicit cigarettes. (They weren’t supposed to smoke down there but everyone gathered around the one transom window that opened and did anyway.)
Because it was opening night, the strong scent of roses and carnations wafted down the row of dressing tables as the girls exchanged flowers and notes. Personal possessions and good luck charms crowded the Formica. Pictures were tucked into the mirror frames and trinkets were arranged in mystical, superstitious order.
Wrapped in her mother’s black shawl, Daisy sang softly to the music from someone’s boom box while she made up her eyes. Among her cosmetics was a bud vase with two yellow roses—one from Will, one from Manuel. At her elbow was a tissue-wrapped package: Taylor knitted her a hat.
“Hey.”
Lucky’s reflection appeared in her mirror.
“A little Fish was swimming around your mailbox.” Lucky reached over Daisy’s shoulder to set something on the dressing table. “But so was a shark named David.”
Daisy half-turned to look back at her, eyes wide.
“I don’t trust him,” Lucky said, smiling. “So I went with my gut and brought it down.”
“Thank you,” Daisy said. She turned back to the table, heart spinning in circles like an eel. Erik left a bag of Swedish Fish in her mailbox. Two daisies taped to its top and a folded piece of paper beneath. Lucky slipped away as Daisy unfolded it. The note was short, only ten words clustered in the center of the page.
The library had a Swedish-English dictionary.
Sax = scissors.
Merde.
Lucky came back and set a paper cup of water on the counter. With a careful fingernail, she picked the tape off the daisy stems and put them into the cup while Daisy read the note again.
Lucky pulled out the chair at the next table and sat. “You got a nail file?”
Daisy gave her one then tapped her eye pencil on the table, thinking. She waited until Lucky was engrossed in filing to speak.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“No. You can buy me tampons at the drug store and throw my dirty underwear in with your load of laundry, but no, you may not ask me any personal questions.”
Daisy smiled, loving her. “When did you have sex for the first time?”
“Actual intercourse?”
Daisy nodded.
Lucky put her hands down, fidgeting with the emery board. “I was fifteen,” she said. “And I didn’t do it for love. I did it to piss my mother off.”
“Do you regret it?”
Lucky rolled her lips in, nodding. “A little. I got nothing out of it.”
“Who was he?”
“A boyfriend. Sort of. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy. But not the one who should have been my first. And I should’ve gotten pregnant but I didn’t, thank God. And by the way, since we’re having this conversation and you have a funny look in your eye, I keep the condoms in my top drawer. Help yourself.”
“Thank you, I have my own.”
When packing Daisy up for school, her mother had thrown a box of Trojans into the carton of drug store supplies. Right in with tampons and witch hazel. They went into Daisy’s top drawer and hadn’t seen the light of day since.
Lucky’s nose wrinkled. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I like to take care of the people I love.”
“In case you haven’t figured it out, I trust you.”
Lucky smiled at her. “What’s going on, Dais?”
“Everything.” Daisy leaned toward her mirror, lining her eyes. Cloaked in a mild confusion. She wasn’t sure if Lucky gave the wrong answer or if she asked the wrong question.
“You really like this guy.”
“I can’t stop thinking about him. And I’m thinking about him in ways that I… I’ve never felt like this about a boy.”
“Like what?”
She looked at Lucky. Put one foot on the trust, then the other. “Everything I like about him,” she said, “I want to feel inside me.”
Lucky nodded. “You’re smart.”
“Am I?”
“I think too many girls jump into sex before they even know what they’re feeling. Or feeling anything at all, for fuck’s sake.”
“I have no shortage of feeling right now,” Daisy said to her reflection.
“My thought is you don’t have to hoard your virginity until marriage but it’s not a thing to get rid of either. It’s a gift. Not only to him but to yourself.”
Daisy turned, pointing the eye pencil at her friend. “You’re gifting him your history.”
“Exactly. No matter where you go or what you do, that guy is the first and there’s no erasing it. And that’s what I could kick myself for. What’s done is done. I’m not going to die of regret. And I’m not trying to sound like I know everything about sex. But the way it is with Will? I’m telling you, Dais. Don’t do it because you’re in college and everyone else is doing it. Do it because it feels right. When it’s the right person, Jesus, it’s so fucking good.”
Daisy nodded as she touched the two daisies on her table.
“You’ll know when you don’t have any inner monologue going on in your head,” Lucky said.
The cloak of uncertainty fell from Daisy’s shoulders. Nothing was wrong with waiting. And nothing was wr
ong with knowing it was time. Not wanting sex didn’t require an apology. Neither did wanting it.
“Thanks, honey,” she said.
Lucky hugged her. “Good luck. I mean, merde. Will taught me you say merde to a dancer.”
“I’ll teach you a few things to say to him.”
“Which is why I love you.”
AS DAISY WARMED UP at the backstage barres, her thoughts kept returning to the night in the campus center. When Erik unclasped his history from his neck and set it into her palm. Let her hold it. Let her touch some of the keen sadness that came with it. As if he stripped off the armor of adulthood and let her see the little abandoned boy within.
Nothing could be done about it except to hold it in her hands and witness.
I don’t know what else to do, she thought. You let me touch some of the sadness you carry in your heart. Now your happiness is something I need.
Slowly she took her foot off the barre. She was filled with words piling on top of words. She went back to the dressing room, sat down and turned Erik’s note over to the blank side, reached for a pen. She’d never written a love note. It always seemed to her a foolish thing to empty yourself onto a piece of paper that could fall into the wrong hands.
I don’t do this, she thought. I don’t bleed my feelings on paper to someone I barely know.
She looked down at the white expanse behind Erik’s words, hearing its plea to be filled with hers.
I don’t know what to do, she wrote, vulnerable and trembling. But the paper was kind to her thoughts. She saw herself between the words and lines. She trusted the blank space. Trusted the little gift Erik had given her tonight. Trusted the moments they shared so far and what he let her hold in her hands. She wanted more of it. Wanted to hold all of it.
I’m looking for you all the time, she wrote.
She exhaled, breathing herself onto the paper. She dared to tell him he filled her head like a dream. Not just his body but his mind. His heart and his pain.
I want to talk to you about everything.
She ate the candy and wrote until the stage manager called fifteen minutes. She wrote a little more after the Bourée, arranging a circle of red gummy fish around the paper cup. She wrote after the Prelude and the Siciliano, the words rolling through her head to her hand.
I didn’t know love would be like this.
She stopped, pen poised over love. Too soon? What else would you call it? Her fingers traced over the lines she penned. They were in ink. They couldn’t be erased. Either she gave him all of herself or nothing.
No apologies, she thought.
After curtain call she was free to leave. She changed out of her costume, tidied the top of her dressing table. She would go back to her room. Tell him in the note where she was and ask him to find her. If he felt the same. She picked up the pen.
If you don’t feel the same, please be kind. But if you are thinking “Me too” please come find me.
Excitement pressed her, front and back, squeezing her lungs between.
“God, I can’t breathe,” she whispered.
She hesitated before confiding this last secret. In a way, it was the most honest part of what she felt right now. And she told him.
God, I can’t breathe.
She folded the paper, slid it and her heart back into the empty bag of Swedish Fish, which was now an envelope, and placed it in Erik’s mailbox. Gave it one last caress.
Please be kind.
She went to her dorm, showered and put on sweats, called her mother. Acted as if it were a normal night. She turned out the overhead light, leaving her reading lamp and the Christmas lights around the window. Her body was tired. The adrenaline of performance seeped out of her muscles, leaving them limp.
She dozed until a knock at the door woke her.
Slowly she got up.
No apologies.
The cold came off his clothes. He was breathing hard and trying to quiet it. The color was high along his cheekbones. And she knew he ran the whole way. He came running to her.
“Me too,” he whispered.
THE SKIN OF HIS FACE WAS COOL but his mouth was warm. He was shaking all over, as was she.
His kiss was perfect. She touched his mouth, felt his breath catch against her fingers. He tasted like everything she wanted. He was beautiful, golden and tousled and trembling. She stroked the back of his neck, ran her lips over his head where the cold still clung.
“I have so much to tell you,” he said.
“Lie down with me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
Under the covers of her bed, still dressed, still shaking, they kissed and talked, falling asleep mid-sentence. Woke again to pick up where they left off. Kissing and talking until the thin hours of dawn.
“I want to talk forever,” she said.
He pushed up on his elbow and slid his hand into her hair, pulling her face to his. “You know what I want. I don’t have to tell you. But I’ll wait for it. I don’t care how long. Whenever you’re ready for me. I’ll wait.”
As the days gathered speed and collected into weeks, as they explored each other’s hearts and bodies, he said it often.
“I’ll wait, Dais. I’ll wait for you.” He sighed, the circle of his arms tightening around her naked body. All of his skin lay along all of hers and it wasn’t close enough for her. Not anymore.
“It’s the first time I understand how love can have a physical expression,” she said. “Because everything I like about you I want to have inside me. I want to put it with mine and make it us.”
“God,” he said, running his hands down her bare back. “Exactly like that. I want to be inside you. I mean all of you. Inside, looking out…”
He rolled her down, her head tucked in the crook of his elbow and his other hand on her face as he kissed her. His kiss was soft and hard at the same time, deep in her mouth yet hovering. The smell of his skin and the taste of his tongue. His palm sliding to curve around her breast. Gliding down to draw her leg around his hip. She felt him hard against her stomach. Hard for her all the while his mouth and hands were so relaxed and meandering.
“You feel so good,” he whispered. “You make me feel so good and I want inside it. All of it around me.”
“I want it too but I—”
“No buts. Stop.” His finger wormed between their mouths. “Stop kissing me. Listen, this is important.”
Smiling so wide it hurt, she nestled her head into his chest, her hand running down the soft skin of his back.
“Everything we’ve been doing, Dais, it’s not like it doesn’t count. I don’t think of it as a consolation prize or second-best or something to make do with until we start having sex. If we’re making each other come, then it is sex. It’s making love to me. All of it. Even when we’re lying around just talking.”
“Even all my questions?”
“Especially those,” he said against her neck. “You reached the tipping point with me. I mean, nobody has ever known me the way you do. And maybe… Give me a second, I’m kind of figuring something out.”
He rested back on the pillow and ran his hand through his hair, eyebrows furrowed. He was so beautiful then, so endearing and thoughtful she wanted to throw herself into his experience. Melt and meld into his body so she could work it out with him.
“I’m so happy right now,” she said, caressing his face.
He bent his head, rubbing his brow against the heel of her hand. “I’m trying to pay attention to it all,” he said. He put his mouth into her palm a moment. “I’ve never fallen in love before. I want to remember this.” His eyes flicked up to hers. “You know?”
She ran her hand along his cheek. Her thumb glided across his lips, then along his cheekbone. “I know,” she said. “I want to remember the falling.”
“I’ve never been anyone’s first. And from what I hear, the first time isn’t always such a great thing physically for girls. That kind of bothers me. Or worries me. I just want it to be… Not perfect, but…�
� His hand cut a level line through the air over their heads. “I want something underneath it.”
“Build the bed first, before we get into it.”
“Yeah. I want you to trust me. Maybe that’s why I like your questions so much. Answering them lets you know me. Lets you trust I’ll always give you the truth about myself. Shit like that means more to me right now than sex. It’s how I’m a virgin. And I’m as cautious about giving it up as you are giving me your physical experience.”
His smile flashed around a nervous laugh, his eyes grew wide. “Jesus, sometimes I can’t believe the shit that comes out of my mouth when I’m with you. Did any of that make sense?”
Her heart was caught up in her throat, her eyes caught in his. “I love you,” she said.
The smile faded. His fingertips came up to trace her face. They stared, peeled wide open to vulnerable bones.
“I love you,” he said. “And I’ll wait for you.”
“Then I’ll wait for you, too,” she said.
FOR FOUR WEEKS THEY BUILT the bed beneath them. Constructing a bower of intense exploration. Sometimes her questions made him blush or chuckle. Sometimes he hesitated before answering, self-conscious about the truth or struggling to find the right words. But he always answered, making her more and more hungry for the arc of his life.
Running her hands over his body in the dark she purred with curiosity. Feeling him get hard against her body or in her hands, she was hungry for evolution, wanting to know all of Erik’s journey through sexuality. How his body had woken up, started to respond to girls. The ways they would look or things they said and how he would get hard for them. She wanted to know how it came to be—from his experience of thinking about sex in the aching, preteen dark of his room all the way down the road to arrive at this place of being her lover.
“When was your first wet dream?” she asked.
He gave a bark of laughter. “Oh, God. Thirteen? Thirteen or fourteen, sometime in there.”
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