“Is that why she’s mad at you?”
Finn leans back in the old wooden chair and it creaks. “No. It’s more than that.”
“So tell me more.”
But he dives back into his food again, taking a huge bite of his lobster roll.
“Finn—”
“Can we change the subject? I think that’s enough complicated conversation from me for the day.”
I close my mouth. “Okay.” I’m uneasy letting this go. “You can tell me anything, Finn. Anything,” I repeat.
Finn stares at the messy tabletop. “I’ll tell you. I promise. Just . . . later.” He brightens a little. Reaches up and flicks my bathing suit ties, which are sticking out of my T-shirt at the back of my neck. “When you’re done eating, let’s go for a swim. We need to cross that off your list of normal, though it looks like you might have crossed it off on your own.”
I laugh. “That’s highly possible.”
“How do you feel about crossing it off once more? Just to make sure you got it?”
“I think that’s a great idea. We’re on borrowed time with this beautiful day anyway. It’s just warm enough to still go in the water. We should take advantage while we can.”
“I agree.” Finn gets up from the table and tosses his nearly empty paper plates in the trash can.
When I’m done, I clear mine, too, and after the two of us clean everything else from the table, Finn disappears into his room. When he comes out he’s wearing black swim trunks and a blue T-shirt. He reaches into a closet in the hallway and comes out with two beach towels. One of them has turtles on it and the other has little smiling snakes. “Don’t judge,” he says, when he sees me eyeing them. “There was a point, right around when I was nine, when I was sure I’d be a veterinarian, so that was the theme of my childhood. Animals, all sorts of animals, especially of the reptile variety.” He laughs, but the pain behind his eyes makes me wonder if the memory makes him miss his mother.
“Interesting new Finn tidbit” is all I say, letting the topic rest there. I take the towel with the turtles on it and drape it around my neck. We head out his front door and down the street toward the beach. “What other interesting new Finn tidbits are available for release today?”
We are so close to the water that we walk there barefoot, picking our way carefully over the hot road.
Finn sidesteps a big rock. “Let’s see. That you should be glad that I no longer keep a pet tarantula?”
“Ew, a tarantula? Really?”
“Yup, really.”
A rickety brown fence, tall thin slats of wood held together by chicken wire, marks the entrance to the beach. We climb up and over the dune. “You’re right, I think I am grateful for that.”
When we reach the high tide line we drop our towels. Finn pulls off his shirt and sets it on top of his towel. I try not to look at his skin, his bare chest. Try to act like it isn’t a big deal that I am essentially disrobing in front of the boy I can’t stop thinking about. “Any other Finn tidbits you want to share?” I croak as I pull off my top and slide my skirt down my thighs and off.
Finn’s eyes flicker over me from head to toe. Then he grins. “Wait, sorry, were you saying something I was supposed to answer? I got distracted by the sight of Marlena the Saint in a string bikini. You don’t look so saintly right now.”
I cover my eyes with my hands. “Shut up. You’re going to make me blush.”
He moves my hands away and plants a kiss on my lips. “I think I already did.”
“You were going to tell me about yourself,” I remind him. “Maybe something more recent?”
His eyes linger another moment on my neck, my stomach, then along my legs. “Right. Recent.” We walk toward the water. “How about the fact that I finally have a girlfriend?”
“I’m your girlfriend?” I yelp when my toes touch the water. It’s colder than it was this morning.
Finn bends down to kiss me again. “Yes.” We wade farther in. The water is up to my chest and Finn’s waist. Both of us duck under.
I know it will warm up the longer we stay in. I am up to my neck, then over my head, treading water. The ocean is nearly flat. Finn swims to where I am bobbing up and down. My hand brushes across his skin under the water. He pulls me close.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You’re smiling.”
I smile harder. Finn wraps his arms around me and I wrap my legs around his waist. I try not to think too much about what I’m doing. I lean in and kiss him. Then I unwrap my legs from his body and dart away, closer to the shallows.
“Hey, where are you going?”
I dive under, my hands reaching for the ocean floor. I plant them there and kick my feet up until they feel air, before I right myself again. “I’ve always wanted to try and do a handstand.”
Finn laughs. “Another thing on your list?”
“No. But I’m adding it now.”
We stay in the water until my teeth are chattering. Finn still has to drag me back to shore, because I could stay in the water all evening. He wraps me up in the towel with the turtles. We grab our clothes and walk back to his house, our bathing suits soaked and dripping. When we get there Finn points to the bathroom so I can change, but of course, it didn’t occur to me to bring a spare set of clothes. I dry off as best I can, leaving on my bathing suit bottom and pulling my skirt over it, but taking off my bathing suit top so it doesn’t leave two damp marks on my shirt. I decide this would be worse than going without a bra. I drape my bikini top on the towel rack and head into the hall. Finn’s door is open and I see him standing there, shirt off, searching for another one. I knock, then push and walk up to him, running my hand across all that bare skin.
“Well, come on in, Marlena.” He laughs, but there is also a catch in his voice.
I’m too busy studying the heart on Finn’s arm to answer, brushing my fingers across it. When I look up into his eyes, his mouth is suddenly on mine and we are kissing. These kisses are hungry and wild and dizzying, our bodies pressed up against each other. Before I’m aware of what I am doing, I’m pushing Finn backward toward the bed and climbing onto him, my legs around his waist like when we were in the water. I’m wearing more clothes this time, but somehow it feels like I’m wearing less. My skirt rides up to the tops of my thighs. Our breaths come quickly as we kiss. I press harder and harder against him, as if I want to move through him. Even though we are as close as we possibly can get I want to be closer. I grab the hem of my shirt, ready to pull it off.
“Marlena? What are you doing?” Finn’s hand shoots out, stopping me. There is a dazed expression on his face.
“Getting undressed?”
His hand is firm, preventing me from moving my top any higher. “Wait a minute.”
“Why?” I demand. “Why wait another second?”
“Well, let’s see.” Finn lifts me up and sets me to the side on the bed. Then he lies down facing me. “Oh, let me count the ways.”
“I want to do this,” I tell him.
“Do what exactly?”
I tap my hand on the bed between us. “This?”
Finn gives me a look. “If you can’t say it out loud, then we’re not doing it.”
“Sex, sex, sex,” I burst out, staring straight into Finn’s face.
And he laughs. “You certainly said it, there.”
I stare down at my hands.
Finn leans down and kisses each one of my fingers. “Marlena, please don’t think that I don’t want to be with you.”
I look up again. “See. You can’t say it either.”
Finn is smiling. “Do I want to have sex with you? Yesssssss.” He draws out the word with such agony that it brings a smile back to my face. “Of course I do. But we can take things slow. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
I groan and flop onto my back. “Everyone keeps telling me that!”
Finn laughs. “Maybe because it’s true?”
“All or nothing. All or nothing! W
hy can’t it be all? What’s so wrong with all? Why is everyone always warning me against it? Are extremes really that bad?” I let my eyes slide back to Finn, down his face and over his chest, so much beautiful skin. “All looks pretty good to me right now.”
This makes Finn laugh again.
“I’m serious. I’m eighteen. I’m ready. Haven’t most girls my age already done this?”
“Plenty, sure, but not everyone. And none of them have the history you do, since there’s that part about being a healer your entire life.”
I glare. “A few minutes ago, you were loving the saint girl in a bikini.”
It’s Finn’s turn to groan and flop back onto the bed. “Oh no. I haven’t forgotten a single bit of that image.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one, not technically,” Finn says. “But there are lots of things we can do other than kissing, Marlena. And there are many kinds of sex.” Gently, Finn reaches out to grasp the hem of my top and raises it a little. His hand sears a trail across my skin, a trail that would be a dark-pink riot of peonies if I could paint it. I close my eyes, the light touch of his fingertips along my ribs ticklish.
“What’s so funny?” he asks. When I open my eyes he is grinning.
I bite my lip. “I don’t know. I guess maybe I’m a little nervous.”
“Good. I am, too.”
“But you know what you’re doing. You’re the one who’s talking about all the things we can do and all the different kinds of sex. You’ve done all of this before.”
“Not with someone like you.”
I sigh. “I know, I know, sheltered miracle-healer-saint.”
Finn’s face loses the grin, his eyes growing serious. “Not with someone I love.” He kisses my stomach, just above the waistband of my skirt. His breath falls across me in soft bursts, petals falling from a tree.
My breathing has stopped. “I’m someone you love?”
Finn lifts his head to look me in the eyes. “Yes, you are,” he says. Then, “I love you, Marlena. I knew it from the first moment I saw you.”
I hold his stare, like a beautiful but fleeting treasure. “I love you, too, Finn.”
Then, in the fading light of the day, Finn gets up on his knees and leans over me. I sit up so he can slip my top the rest of the way up and over my head. “Look how beautiful you are,” he says, eyes on my body.
The body, my body, as a source of miracles, has also been a source of shame. I remember when I turned thirteen and my breasts began to poke through my long white sheaths, two points I could no longer hide, how my mother looked at me, horrified, how she mourned the changes of my body. She immediately went to the store and came back with these tight, stretchy half shirts. They were bras that pressed my breasts so hard against me they nearly disappeared, which was the point. Any curves on my silhouette have always been regarded as embarrassing, shameful, something to make disappear. Evidence of the profane on this sacred body of mine. This sense of needing to hide myself has even carried over into moments when I’m changing clothes, or getting out of the shower. A girl like me is not only never to be touched, but never to be naked, at least not for long. A big part of that girl knows she should feel shame right now, being so exposed in front of a boy. But the thing is, I don’t.
“You have a dreamy look on your face,” Finn says.
“I’m happy,” I tell him.
Finn lies down next to me on his side, propping his head with his hand. “Good. Because I am too. And I’m so many other things I won’t say out loud.”
A thought occurs to me. “Hey, how does, um, this affect your photographic memory? Do you remember, ah, pretty much everything?”
He grins. “Oh yes, I do, Marlena. This is one of the moments when my photographic memory is truly useful. In the best of ways.” He presses a kiss against my mouth, his tongue searching, parting my lips until it slides against my own. When I pull him closer, pull him on top of me, he shakes his head and pulls back. “Mm-mm. We have all the time in the world, remember?” His stare slides down my neck and over my chest and stomach. Starting at my collarbone, his fingertips move across my skin, down the curve of my left breast, then over the right one. There is a tightening in my belly, between my thighs, a tingling along the skin of my chest. When I close my eyes and a sigh escapes, Finn whispers in my ear. “I think it’s time someone else is in charge of healing all the lost and lonely parts of you, Marlena. I want it to be me.”
As his fingertips continue their journey over my body, I open my eyes long enough to say, “I want it to be you, too.”
The warm feeling between my thighs keeps building while Finn’s hands explore every inch of my torso. He leans over me for another kiss, and when I open my eyes there is a lustful but tender expression on Finn’s face, Finn, whose entire being is forever a contradiction. Young but intelligent beyond his years. Serious but fun. Skeptical but full of faith. Fierce but tender. Full of restraint yet willing to abandon himself completely. To me, at least.
“What are you smiling about?” I manage to ask.
“I feel like an explorer,” he says, “discovering all of Marlena’s hidden secrets.”
“I didn’t know I had any hidden,” I tell him.
“Let’s see what else I can find out.” His hand makes its way down my stomach, sliding softly over the skin of my belly until it slips past the band of my skirt and dips underneath the edge of my bathing suit. He stops a moment, and looks at me.
I nod, unable to speak, and the tips of his fingers reach the place between my legs, gliding slowly over this part of my body that I’ve never touched, not like this, that I’m never supposed to allow anyone else to touch. Certainly not like this. It isn’t long before a feeling so intense, so unlike anything I’ve ever known yet somehow similar to that sheer, blinding ecstasy that accompanies a vision, grows up my back and down my thighs and over my stomach to my breasts and my neck until it is all that I am, one great streak of fire and burning that cannot contain my breath.
If pleasure was a vision, it would start out deep and dark and blue, the color of the ocean, cold and sharp. It would become an arrow of stars, streaming through the body on a crash course with the heart. If pleasure was a song composed by a mystic, it would begin with a chorus of soft voices that rise to a startling tangle of bells. If it had a taste, it would be of the sharp salty sea and the bright tang of ripe berries. I had no idea that love, human love, could permeate every one of the bodily senses, that it could take shape in so many different forms. I cannot believe I’ve lived a life that would have me deprived of this until my death in the name of God, of a so-called gift, with a mother who colluded to do just this. If loving Finn has profaned me, then I wish with all my heart that every ounce of sacredness in me is washed away forever.
But somewhere inside me, too, I know for the first time in my life that I am finally discovering what is truly sacred in this world. No God can ever take that from me. This is Finn’s gift to me, a boy so real I can feel his hands on my body and his breath on my lips, which is so unlike the gift that has hidden in my healing hands for so long and kept me from so much of what is truly good and beautiful.
“Marlena,” Finn whispers in my ear, as my lungs slow their effort to gulp the air. “Are you okay?”
“Hm-hmm,” I murmur back, eyes fluttering open.
I look up at Finn, his face hovering over mine, his beauty a wonder, a vision. I trace the curve of his cheek.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
I hook one of my legs over his and pull him closer. “That all my life I’ve been taught to feel ashamed of this, but now that we are here, I don’t feel ashamed at all.”
“Oh Marlena, shame is the last thing you should feel.” He buries a kiss in my hair. “You are beautiful and I love you and there is no shame in this. Not a bit.”
THIRTY-ONE
There are days when you wake up and the whole world feels good. Like everything you see is beautiful and in
its place. The way the sun filters through a break in the clouds, a single ray of light raining down to the ocean below. The strawberries piled in a basket on the kitchen table, plump and red. A stack of books waiting for you to read them. Even the sound of the coffee percolating on the stove gives you a sense of peace and harmony. Sometimes there are entire weeks like this. And when they happen, they seem like a miracle.
Before, I didn’t know that being in the world could feel so good. But now, as the days slide into weeks, I live like I have never lived. Like I’ve always wanted to. I let myself change, I let my life change, I let my relationships change. Most of all, I let myself love and be loved by Finn. We walk the beach, even when it rains. We go through the things on my list, one by one, and things that weren’t on my list, too. Finn takes me to his university campus, where there aren’t any lockers but there are people everywhere, sitting on the grassy quad, carrying their books, heading to classes, and I imagine myself here one day. I think about what I might study. I go to the mall and eat in the food court. Helen and I have sleepovers, and we talk into the woozy hours of morning. I stay out all night, more than once. I learn to ride a bicycle. I get better and better at driving. Then one day, Finn and I go on a road trip.
Before we leave, Helen takes me shopping in the city. We go from store to store on a pretty street with clothes that seem ridiculously expensive, but today I don’t care.
“I need to find the perfect outfit,” I tell her. “For . . .”
Helen and I have just emerged from a dress boutique with price tags the same as her monthly rent. She gives me an exaggerated surprise-face. “For whaaaaat, Marlena?”
“You know what,” I tell her.
Finn has devoted himself to proving exactly how much there is to do other than kissing, and I am enjoying this proving. Before, I’d thought that pleasure just happened. I didn’t know that girls were different from boys, that their boyfriends or girlfriends would have to spend time learning their bodies. Finn has made himself into an excellent student of the body that is mine, and I’ve done my best to do this in return for him. But while there may be many kinds of sex, there is still one kind Finn and I have refrained from having. And I’m glad that we’ve waited.
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