After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  It makes you bold. It makes you confident. It makes you feel as if you could do anything in the world.

  I leaned over the table and kissed him. I kissed him in the middle of a burger place, the arm of my sweatshirt accidentally falling into the container of ketchup. It wasn’t perfectly timed, by any means. I didn’t hit his mouth straight on. It was sort of to the side a bit. And it was clear I had taken him by surprise, because he froze for a moment before he relaxed into it. He tasted like salt.

  When I pulled away from him, it really hit me. What I had just done. I’d never kissed someone before. I had always been kissed. I’d always kissed back.

  He looked at me, confused. “I thought I was supposed to do that,” he said.

  I was now horribly, terribly mortified. This was the sort of thing I’d read about in the “embarrassing moments” section of YM magazine as a girl. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so . . . I don’t know why I—”

  “Sorry?” he said, shocked. “No, don’t be sorry. That was perhaps the single greatest moment of my life.”

  I looked up at him, smiling despite myself.

  “All girls should kiss like that,” he said. “All girls should be exactly like you.”

  When we walked home, he kept pulling me into doorways and alcoves to kiss me. The closer we got to my dorm, the longer the kisses became. Until just outside the front door to my building, we kissed for what felt like hours. It was cold outside by this point; the sun had set hours ago. My bare legs were freezing. But I couldn’t feel anything except his hands on me, his lips on mine. I could think of nothing but what we were doing, the way my hands felt on his neck, the way he smelled like fresh laundry and musk.

  When it became time to progress or say good-bye, I pulled away from him, leaving my hand still in his. I could see in his eyes that he wanted me to ask him to come back to my room. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you come by and take me to breakfast?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good night,” I said, kissing his cheek.

  I pulled my hand out of his and turned to leave. I almost stopped right there and asked him to come up with me. I didn’t want the date to end. I didn’t want to stop touching him, hearing his voice, finding out what he would say next. But I didn’t turn around. I kept walking.

  I knew then that I was sunk. I was smitten. I knew that I would give myself to him, that I would bare my soul to him, that I would let him break my heart if that’s what it came to.

  So there wasn’t any rush, I told myself, as I got into the elevator alone.

  When I got to my room, I called Rachel. I had to tell her everything. I had to tell her how cute he was, how sweet he was. I had to tell her the things he said, the way he looked at me. I had to relive it with someone who would understand just how exciting it all was.

  And Rachel did understand; she understood completely.

  “So when are you going to sleep with him? That’s my question,” she said. “Because it sounds like things got pretty steamy out there on the sidewalk. Maybe you should put a date on it, you know? Like, don’t sleep with him until you’ve been dating this many weeks or days or months.” She started laughing. “Or years, if that’s the way you want to play it.”

  I told her I was just going to see what happened naturally.

  “That is a terrible idea,” she told me. “You need a plan. What if you sleep with him too soon or too late?”

  But I really didn’t think there was a too soon or too late. I was so confident about Ryan, so confident in myself, that something about it seemed foolproof. As if I could already tell that we were so good together we couldn’t mess it up if we tried.

  And that brought me both an intense thrill and a deep calm.

  • • •

  When it did happen, Ryan and I were in his room. His roommate was out of town for the weekend. We hadn’t told each other that we loved each other yet, but it was obvious that we did.

  I marveled at how well he understood my body. I didn’t need to tell him what I wanted. He knew. He knew how to kiss me. He knew where to put his hands, what to touch, how to touch it.

  I had never understood the concept of making love before. It seemed cheesy and dramatic. But I got it then. It isn’t just about the movement. It’s about the way your heart swells when he gets close. The way his breath feels like a warm fire. It’s about the fact that your brain shuts down and your heart takes over.

  I cared about nothing but the feel of him, the smell of him, the taste of him. I wanted more of him.

  Afterward, we lay next to each other, naked and vulnerable but not feeling as if we were either. He grabbed my hand.

  He said, “I have something I’m ready to say, but I don’t want you to think it’s because of what we just did.”

  I knew what it was. We both knew what it was. “So say it later, then,” I said.

  He looked disappointed by my answer, so I made myself clear.

  “When you say it,” I told him, “I’ll say it back.”

  He smiled, and then he was quiet for a minute. I actually thought he might have fallen asleep. But then he said, “This is good, isn’t it?”

  I turned toward him. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  “No,” he said to me. “This is, like, perfect, what we have. We could get married someday.”

  I thought of my grandparents, the only married couple I knew. I thought of the way my grandmother cut up my grandfather’s food sometimes when he was feeling too weak to do it himself.

  “Someday,” I said. “Yeah.”

  We were nineteen.

  ELEVEN YEARS AGO

  Over summer break, Ryan went home to Kansas. We talked to each other every day. We would send e-mails back and forth in rapid fire, waiting impatiently for the other to respond. I would sit on my bed, waiting for him to get home from his internship and call me. I visited him early in the summer, meeting his parents and sister for the first time. We all got along. They seemed to like me. I stayed for a week, the two of us hanging on each other’s every word, Ryan sneaking into the guest room to see me every night. When he drove me to the airport and walked me up to the security gate, I thought someone was ripping my heart out of my chest. How could I leave him? How could I get on the plane and fly so many miles away from the other half of my soul?

  I tried to explain all of this to Rachel, also home for the summer after her freshman year at USC. I complained to her about how much I missed him. I brought him up in conversation more often than he was really relevant. I had a one-track mind. Rachel mostly responded to these overdramatic testaments of my love by saying, “Oh, that’s great. I’m really happy for you,” and then pretending to vomit.

  My brother, Charlie, meanwhile, had just turned fourteen and was about to enter high school, so he wanted nothing to do with Rachel or me. He didn’t even pretend to listen to anything I had to say that summer. The minute I started talking, he would put on his headphones or turn on the TV.

  A few weeks after I got home from visiting him, Ryan insisted that he visit me. It didn’t matter that the tickets were expensive or that he wasn’t making any money. He said it was worth it. He had to see me.

  When he arrived at LAX, I watched him come down the escalator with the other passengers. I saw him scan the crowd until he saw my face. I saw it register. I saw in that moment how much I was loved, how relieved he was to have me in his eyesight. And I could recognize all of those emotions because I felt the same way about him.

  He ran to me, dropping his bag and picking me up in one fell swoop. He spun me around, holding me tighter than I had ever been held. As devastated as I’d been to leave him weeks ago, I was that thrilled to be with him again.

  He put me down and grabbed my face in his hands, kissing me. I opened my e
yes finally to see an older woman with kids watching us. I caught her eye by accident, and she smiled at me, shyly looking away. The look on her face made it clear that she had been me before.

  My family caught up to us then, finally done parking the car. They had all insisted on coming, in part, I think, because it was so clear that I did not want them to come.

  Ryan dried his sweaty hand on the back of his jeans and offered a handshake to my mother.

  “Ms. Spencer,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.” They had met once before, only briefly, when Mom came to move me out of the dorms.

  “Ryan, I told you to call me Leslie,” my mom said, laughing at him.

  Ryan nodded and gestured to Rachel and Charlie. “Rachel, Charlie, nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot of good things.”

  “Actually,” Charlie said, “we prefer to be called Miss and Mr. Spencer.”

  Ryan chose to take him seriously. “Excuse me, Mr. Spencer, my mistake. Miss Spencer,” he said, tipping his imaginary hat and bowing to Rachel. Then he extended his hand in a firm handshake to Charlie.

  And maybe because someone was taking him seriously, Charlie chose to lighten up.

  “OK, fine,” Charlie said. “You can call me Charles.”

  “You can call him Charlie,” Rachel interjected.

  We all headed to baggage claim. And as much of a spoilsport as Charlie wanted to be, I couldn’t help but notice that he talked Ryan’s ear off the entire way home.

  NINE AND HALF YEARS AGO

  Spring break of our senior year, Ryan and I both decided to stay in Los Angeles. But at the last minute, my mom found a deal on flights to Cabo San Lucas and decided to splurge. That’s how the five of us—my mom, Rachel, Charlie, Ryan, and I—found ourselves on a flight to Mexico.

  Oddly enough, Charlie was perhaps the most excited about this idea. As we took our seats on the plane—Mom, Ryan, and I on one side of the aisle, Rachel, Charlie, and a strange bald man on the other—Charlie kept reminding my mom that the drinking age was eighteen.

  “That’s nice, sweetheart,” she said to him. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re still sixteen.”

  “But it would less illegal,” he said, as he clipped in his seat belt and the flight attendants walked up and down the aisles. “It’s less illegal for me to get drunk in Mexico than here.”

  “I’m not sure there are degrees of illegal,” Rachel said, scrunching herself tightly in the middle seat so as not to touch the bald man. He had already fallen asleep.

  “Although I think prostitution is legal in Mexico,” I said. “Right? Is it?”

  “Well, not for minors,” Ryan said. “Sorry, Charlie.”

  Charlie shrugged. “I don’t look sixteen.”

  “Is weed legal in Mexico?” Rachel asked.

  “Excuse me!” my mom said, exasperated. “This is a family vacation. I didn’t bring you all to Mexico to get high and hire hookers.”

  And of course, all of us laughed at her. Because we had all been joking. At least, I thought we had all been joking.

  “You’re too gullible, Mom!” Rachel said.

  “We were kidding,” I added.

  “Speak for yourself! ” Charlie said. “I was serious. They might actually serve me alcohol at this place.”

  Ryan laughed.

  It really struck me then just how different Charlie was from Rachel and me. It wasn’t just in the superficial stuff, either, like the difference between brothers and sisters, high-schoolers versus college students. He was markedly different from the two of us.

  Rachel and I were a little more than a year apart. We experienced things together, through a similar lens. When our dad left, I was almost four and a half years old, and Rachel had just turned three. Mom was still pregnant with Charlie. Rachel and I may not really remember our dad, but we had time with him. We knew his voice. Charlie entered this world with only my mother to hold him.

  I sometimes wondered if Rachel and I were so close, if we meant so much to each other, that it prevented us from really letting Charlie in. By the time he was born, we had our own language, our own world. But the truth was, Charlie simply wasn’t that interested in us. As a little kid, he did his own thing, played his own games. He didn’t want to do the kind of stuff Rachel and I were doing. He didn’t want to talk about what Rachel and I talked about. He was always forging his own path, rejecting the one we had laid out for him.

  But as much as we had our differences, it was staggering how the three of us had grown up to look exactly alike. Charlie may not have been similar to Rachel and me in temperament or personality, but he couldn’t distance himself from us genetically.

  We all shared the same high cheekbones. All three of us got our dark hair and blue eyes from our mother. Charlie was taller and lankier, Rachel was petite and daintier, and I was broader, curvier. But we belonged together, that much was clear.

  The plane took flight, and we started talking about other things. When the seat-belt sign went off, my mom got up and went to the bathroom. That’s when I saw Ryan lean over the aisle to whisper something to Charlie. Charlie smiled and nodded.

  “What did you just say to him?” I asked. Ryan smiled wide and refused to tell me. “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “It’s between Charlie and me,” Ryan said.

  “Yeah,” Charlie piped in. “It’s between us.”

  “You can’t buy him alcohol at this place,” I said. “Is that what you were talking about? Because you can’t.” I sounded like a narc.

  “Who said anything about anyone buying anyone alcohol?” Ryan said, perhaps a bit too innocently.

  “Well, then, why can’t I know what you’re talking about?”

  “Some things don’t involve you, Lauren,” Charlie said, teasing me.

  My jaw dropped. Mom was on her way toward us, back from the bathroom.

  “You are!” I said, somehow yelling and whispering. “You are going to get my sixteen-year-old brother drunk!”

  Rachel, finally having enough of all this, said, “Oh, Lauren, cut it out. Ryan leaned over and said, ‘Let’s see if I can get your sister to freak out over nothing.’”

  I looked at him for confirmation, and he started laughing. So did Charlie.

  “I swear,” Rachel said. “You’re as gullible as Mom.”

  A LITTLE MORE THAN NINE YEARS AGO

  I graduated magna cum laude. I missed summa cum laude by a fraction, but Ryan kept telling me not to worry myself over it. “I’m just graduating,” he said. “Not a single Latin word after it, and I’m going to be fine. So you’re going to be better than fine.”

  I couldn’t argue about my prospects. I already had a job. I had accepted a position in the alumni department of UCLA. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my psychology degree, but I figured it would come to me in due time. The alumni department seemed like an easy, reliable place to start out.

  On graduation day, Ryan and I were at opposite ends of the auditorium, so we only spoke in the morning and then made faces at each other during the ceremony. I spotted my mom in the audience with her huge camera, Rachel and Charlie next to her. Rachel was waving at me, giving me a thumbs-up. A few rows back, I saw Ryan’s parents and his sister.

  As I sat there, waiting for the moment when they called my name, it occurred to me that this was the end of so many things, and more to the point, it was the beginning of my adult life.

  Ryan and I had rented a studio apartment in Hollywood. We were moving in the next week, on the first of the month. It was an ugly little thing, cramped and dark. But it would be ours.

  The night before, Ryan and I had fought about what furniture to buy. He thought all we needed was a mattress on the floor. I figured that since we were adults, we should have a bed frame. Ryan thought all we needed were a few cardboard boxes for our clothes; I was insistent that we
have dressers. It got heated. I said he was being cheap, that he didn’t understand how to be an adult. He said I was acting like a spoiled brat, expecting money to grow on trees. It got bad enough that I started crying; he got upset enough that his face turned red.

  And then, before we knew it, we were at the part where we both admitted we were wrong and begged each other’s forgiveness with a passion unlike anything since the last time we’d fought. That was always the way it was with us. The I love yous and I’m sorrys, the I’ll never do that agains and the I don’t know what I’d do without yous always eclipsed the thing we were fighting about in the first place.

  We woke up that morning with smiles on our faces, holding each other tight. We ate breakfast together. We got dressed together. We helped each other put on our caps and gowns.

  Our life was starting. We were growing up.

  I stood up with my row and followed the path up to the podium.

  “Lauren Spencer.”

  I walked up, shook the chancellor’s hand, and took my diploma. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ryan. He was holding a sign so small only I could see it. “I Love You,” it said. And at that moment, I just knew adulthood was going to be great.

  SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS AGO

  For the fourth anniversary of when we met, Ryan and I went camping in Yosemite.

  We had been out of school for a year and a half. I was making a decent salary in the alumni department. Ryan was doing OK himself. We were just starting to get ahead of our bills a bit, starting to save, when we decided that a trip to Yosemite wouldn’t put us back too much. We had borrowed camping equipment from my mom and packed food from home.

  We got there late Friday afternoon and pitched our tent. By the time it was properly set up, the sun was setting and it was getting cold, so we went to bed. The next morning, we woke up and decided that we should hike up Vernal Fall. The visitor’s guide said that Vernal Fall was a hard hike but that the view from the top was like nothing you could imagine. At that, Ryan said, “I’m in the mood to see something I could never imagine.” So we put on hiking boots and got into the car.