by Julia Kent
I felt like a thousand bobbleheads were all bouncing inside of me. For eternity.
I told her.
I told her and she kissed me.
What fresh hell was this? Or was it heaven?
And now this chick—my chick?—was playing piano like she’d been doing it for three lifetimes. As the chords to “Say Something” filled the room I listened. Really listened. Was she telling me something, or just picking a popular song?
She cut it short, though, as I pulled Lena’s guitar off my back and started strumming with her.
“I don’t know the words,” Maggie said with a smile, her face filled with all the questions my inner bobbleheads nodded to.
“You know the words to this?” I played the opening notes to “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer”.
She replied by playing the matching chords. Perfectly. With a jaunty, intense tone that made the song fresh and vibrant. Holy shit.
And then, by God, we played. Neither of us had a rock-star’s voice like Trevor or Liam, but we had a throaty grace between the two of us, her alto matching my gravelly tones. We complemented each other with a melodic blend that I felt, rather than heard, as my fingers took us through the song.
Oh, I wasted
my only answered prayer
on a woman
who didn’t believe in God....
Chills. Tiny warm spiders ran through my veins like they’d replaced my blood.
Maggie didn’t look at me as we sang. Not once. Her eyes were closed and her shoulders rose and fell as her hands played magic on my spine.
At one she walked away
At two she said no
At three she said please
At four she said more
Our voices combined, like two wisps of smoke reaching high, and soon the sound that came out of us was like twin strands of DNA, reaching toward God.
The song ended and I couldn’t breathe.
Just couldn’t. If I moved, I worried this would end. My eyes felt like pieces of the sun. All I could see was Maggie, sitting on the bench at the piano, looking right back at me with eyes that looked like stars.
Holy shit!
Before I could think, I played the opening chord to “Random Acts of Crazy".
And I began:
Your Mama told you to watch out for me
Your God told you to walk away
Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone
And you weren’t sure what to say
The night you found me, wandering and lost
Naked by the side of the road
My guitar shattered, my body bereft
You fought everything you were told
Maggie joined with unselfconscious joy, her body playing and finding its way without sheet music. I could have played these parts in my sleep, though the bass part wasn’t the same as guitar. Somehow the music was just in me.
In her.
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
You have to stop and pause
You can turn away and never look back
But it will yank you back, because
Random acts of crazy draw you in
Random acts of kindness draw you in
Random acts of love draw you in
We finished, her fingers playing a little ditty at the end that sounded like bells floating on the hush of a misty morning dew. The silence echoed like a question.
Like a prayer.
A burst of applause from one person filled the air like a lightning strike. It cracked, splitting the air in two.
“That was amazing!” Rosita called out, her voice almost a scream.
Maggie turned a deep shade of red that made me want her so much. So bad. The push of blood to her cheeks drove me crazy. My body itched, my fingers skittering along the strings. A pulse of blood in my body, like a giant bomb inside me, made me need to move. To kiss. To touch.
“Are you professional musicians?” Rosita asked, calling out over her own clapping.
Maggie thumbed toward me. “He is,” she said, dipping her head. She looked at me through her eyelashes and I nearly grabbed her and kissed her right then and there.
Instead, though, I just stared.
“You both should be!” Rosita shivered. “Your voices! You sound like you’re in love!” A bell rang in the distance. “Damn! Gotta go. One of the other campers.” She scurried out, her wide backside banging into the loose screen door and making it clap one final smack as she departed.
You sound like you’re in love.
Maggie
My hands hummed. They didn’t tremble. No shivering. Not a tremor or a shake. They hummed like the energy from a thousand high tension wires were buzzing through and I was a conduit.
That same energy flowed between me and Tyler as our eyes met.
“How did you—?” He crossed the room with steps that ate the floor, Lena’s guitar in his hands, the empty case still on his back. Those songs. Those two songs. I got so lost in them, like finding out every part of me was a little bit of every part of everything. Of the sky, the air, the piano...and of Tyler.
“I’ve played around at home with Random Acts’ songs. Nothing fancy, I just love the songs and I’ve never—”
The kiss hit me before he even touched me. His lips said everything we didn’t say in the song or in the car. His hands spoke thousands of words with their slow claiming of me, his embrace a place to relax and stand tall, a sanctuary for contradictions and discovery.
And then, without a single word, he reached for my humming hand and walked me with great deliberation back to the little cabin. I snagged two sleeping bags in the corner as we left.
We weren’t even in the little cabin fully before he set down Lena’s guitar, whipped off the case, and was kissing me again, the rasp of his stubble just jarring enough to make me feel everything without experiencing it fully. As the kiss deepened, though, it altered, changing me with it. Fingers in my hand, a flat palm against my back, the wet heat of our clothes and skin pressing against each other, the wild taste of Tyler in my mouth.
I broke away and breathed hard, Tyler’s mouth open, his eyes dark and inviting.
“Let’s get you out of these wet clothes,” he said.
“I know,” I said with a small, breathy laugh. “I’m going to catch a cold.”
“No, Maggie. I mean,” he said, pulling me closer to him, warm heat pouring from his body to mine, “—let’s get you out of these clothes.”
The last time I had a man break through the physical wall between two bodies and enter into me was a night filled with pain, horror, brutality and the weeping knowledge that all three of my attackers enjoyed every second of what they did to helpless me.
Before the gang rape I had dated a few guys. More than a few, actually. I had slept with two. And after, it took a while—but I kissed a couple.
There’s this moment when you cross a bridge between yourself and another human being. And there’s an implied agreement, a consent that evolves from nuance and risk. There’s this moment when it’s like stepping through a dimension. Like realizing that your reality is not the only one that’s true.
I’d felt that before, so when Tyler kissed me it wasn’t unfamiliar. But this time it was as if the truth called out its secret name across all the dimensions, echoing into hidden places neither of us even knew existed.
The flutter of his fingers on my arm as his palms slid up and wrapped around my back. The light touch of his lips against mine, as he kissed once, then twice, and then I kissed him back. The push of my fingers against the hard ridge of muscle at the base of his ribs. The feel of being in the space of someone else, and yet doing it knowingly. On my terms. With all my rules.
I was sure Tyler had rules, too. I was as sure of that as I was of the knowledge that he was kissing me because he wanted to, that his fingers were lightly brushing against the base of my back because he knew I wanted that, too. In this moment, his rules were as im
portant as mine.
Finally, I had met someone who understood how important the rules are, and he was telling me that right now, with his tongue, with his touch. The promise of respecting what he knew was packed into the force of my response.
It wasn’t that sex was even a need any more. No longer a craving, or something to use as a palate cleanser, it was a way of fulfilling a promise to my former self. Making love with Tyler would be like reaching my hand back in time to the Maggie who lay broken and bruised, battered and beaten, torn and terrified, and saying, “Come here, let me comfort you. The world is not always like this.”
And until I met him, I didn’t even have that hand to give, not in my own dimension and not in any other.
But I did now.
I pulled back and took in a deep breath, the sound like marbles rolling around in a tin can.
He pressed his forehead against mine and made a sound remarkably similar. “I didn’t know people like you were out there, Maggie.”
I took the opportunity to slide my palms flat against the base of his back, to feel the rich topography of his bones against sinew and skin and muscle. His breath shuddered from a different impulse than my own, and I felt him thicken against me, felt his arms tighten. He dipped his head down and gave me a kiss that from any other man would have been a question. But from Tyler, it was permission.
“You’re in charge,” he said, the words redundant. His lips had just told me so.
I took him at his word and pulled back, smiling. “I need a shower,” I said with a laugh, the chuckle a little too self-conscious. I wanted to be confident, to stand bold and open. I wanted to show him the old Maggie, the one without scars. The one who had never been broken in the first place.
But as he stood before me and searched my eyes with a look that was so raw and authentic that a thousand versions of myself all coalesced into one, I realized that she’d been there all along. He took my hand in his, playing with each of the five fingers, rolling them against his calloused fingertips, touching the knuckles, playful and unhurried. Then he entwined his fingers in mine. Each of the five fingers matched perfectly with the others, and he walked me slowly to the bathroom.
I let go of his hand at the door and made a motion to go in, when I realized his heat was right behind me. I turned around, and my nose bumped into his chin.
He laughed, then leaned down, his hot breath in my ear as he said, “How about we shower together and take it from there?”
My first reaction, deep inside, was a resounding no. And yet, split seconds later, I had the presence of mind to question the first reaction. Why not? What was wrong with a shower? I was hyper aware of everything already, as if I had to get this perfect at the same time that I had to etch every single breath into my memory forever.
I’d learned a long time ago that you could hold two completely contradictory truths in your head at the same time. Unfortunately I’d had to learn that on the ground, being abused with hands attached to faces I didn’t know, trying to take away one of those truths. I appealed to my better nature, the part of me inside that knew that the knee-jerk judgment was often nothing more than the wrong truth getting there first as if it were a race, and the one who won always got its way.
I said nothing—this was my turn to have words fail me—and instead I answered him with action, reaching in for the shower knob and turning it on Hot.
The sudden feel of his hand against the nape of my neck as I pulled back from turning on the shower, the casual intimacy of his touch, the way he moved in and out of the space between us, as if we’d been lovers forever, made me feel as if something had shifted inside both of us. The idea that our other selves had morphed into something combined, like we had been Tyler and Maggie separately, and now we were forging a new identity.
On the car trip so far, everything had been about defining ourselves. Staking out our claim. This is who I am. This is who I am. Don’t like it? Well, fuck you. You do like it? Well, Oh shit!—I don’t know what to do with that.
The way Tyler’s warm hands pushed against my ribs, pressing in and toward and into me, was a negotiation, one of the body, and one that had hardly been settled yet.
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said. They were the right words at exactly the right time. He didn’t have to say them. And yet, the fact that he knew to say them meant more than the words themselves.
“I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case, Tyler,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes. He couldn’t stop looking at me. Our hands were an afterthought, but they seemed to know what to do. His fingers unbuttoned my jeans with a kind of tenderness that made me gasp as he slid down the zipper and slipped his fingers between the thin cloth of my panties and curled them around my hips, down the slope of my buttocks, pulling the pants down into a pool at my ankles.
The cold chill of the air wasn’t the only shock I experienced. My skin went pebbly with gooseflesh. And as he reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled up, my arms willingly raised, my hands clasped together then apart, as if I were praying to a lesser god, as if I were thanking a minor deity.
“Hold on,” I said, turning away, pulling out one, then both of my contact lenses. They were disposables, so I tossed them in the small trash can and turned back to look at him.
Shock registered on his face. “Your blue eyes!”
“They’re fake.” I gave him an appraising look. “C’mon. You knew that.”
His eyes narrowed. Softened. “I like your brown eyes better. They’re more you.”
“They are me.”
“And that’s why I like them.”
He unhooked my bra in seconds and I stood before him, completely bare, stripped down to nothing. “Your turn,” I said as his eyes traveled down the length of my body, then rested on my hands.
“No, Maggie,” he said with a half smile, “It’s your turn.”
My hands didn’t quite shake as I reached for his waist and found the button of his jeans. My breath didn’t quite tremor as I unzipped him and then unfurled him, his body revealed to me inch by inch as the denim dropped. My mind didn’t quite resonate with the sound of a thousand gongs ringing at once as I pulled his shirt up, his arms unbelievably strong, the muscles rolling in and out of vision with a kind of military precision, and then a natural aptitude that made me appreciate him even more.
By the time I was done, it was my heart that shook. The rest of me remained preternaturally still.
We were completely revealed to each other, in all our flesh and in all our colors, and together we were a work of art.
I closed my eyes and could feel his energy vibrating inches from me, from all of me, from everything I had to offer him. When you strip yourself down to the essence of who and what you are, you come to realize that that has to be enough for yourself, that you, naked and vulnerable, weeping and happy, joyful and in sorrow, are always, as is, enough.
I opened my eyes because I realized I had to see him that way. I had to look at the whole of him, naked and raw, vulnerable and open, and come to see that he, as is, before me now, those picturesque arms reaching around me, those legs pressed against mine, was enough. More than enough.
That he was everything, and that together we could be infinity.
The steam filled the room with a kind of ethereal glow, even in this dingy cabin in the middle of the desert. Water was at a premium, and as that thought floated through my mind, Tyler took one step, pulling me into the shower, the water breaking through my trance as his chest moulded against my breasts and his abs pressed into my belly.
What had been intellectual and psychological, some sort of analysis in my mind about the meaning of myself, turned into a simple rush of emotion and of instinct that I couldn’t name, but that could only be felt. The water gave us permission to stand so close, like it was urging his arms around me, his fingers in my wet hair, his palms against my jaw, his lips kissing and exploring mine. My hands stayed in safe zones on his bo
dy, so unaccustomed to the feel of flesh so different from mine. Aside from a few furtive kisses and that one encounter with him two months ago, I hadn’t touched a man—I hadn’t given myself permission.
The ripe promise of being touched by someone as if we had all the time in the world made my heart slow to a natural beat, even as the water tapped out its own lyrics on our skin, the push of our hands against each other’s bodies growing more urgent, more eager. We were wet and wild, filled with a sort of abandon that comes from too much time spent living in our heads, living in separate bodies. This combining was less a give and take and more a claiming of each other.
He kissed me hard, then pulled away, looking into my soul. I looked right back. His eyes were filled with a kind of pleading lust that made me laugh. I only laughed because I knew that my own eyes must look the same.
“What is this?” he asked, reaching down before I could answer and kissing me, biting my lower lip and pulling it between his teeth, then smiling. There he was. That was the Tyler I knew was there all along, the one he showed small slivers of in all-too-infrequent grins.
“Whatever it is,” I said, breathless, “I don’t want it to end.”
“Me neither,” he said, then reached down and cupped my ass, pulling me close to him, making me light inside with a fire that even the shower couldn’t extinguish. I was warmth personified, and he was hard against my hip. My hands stayed in those safe zones on him, not because I didn’t want to touch the parts that felt so intimate, but because the eroticism of breaking through to that step felt like it would rush us through all of the pieces that I wanted to enjoy just as much.
This discovery had a sequence. It had a purpose. It held a logic of its own. And even the flashpoint of lust that threatened to take over my entire being and devour everything that stood in its path couldn’t rob me of what was rightfully mine, and couldn’t take away from Tyler what he knew just as much as I did.