First There Was Forever

by Juliana Romano

  “For what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, just, whatever, listening,” he said. Then he took a step toward the back door. “Let’s go outside.”

  I followed Nate past the pool and down the stairs to the lower deck.

  Big, dark trees surrounded us, concealing the city lights and the traffic below. I liked feeling separate from everything and everyone except Nate. It made me wish we could go away together, somewhere where we could take as much time as we wanted to get to know each other.

  “So,” Nate said. “Hailey called me tonight.”

  I dropped back away from the railing as if I’d been hit in the stomach. It was the last thing I’d expected him to say.

  “Whoa,” Nate said. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “She asked me if I was going to some party she was going to. It’s weird that she doesn’t know about us.”

  I felt dizzy. “I just don’t know what to tell her yet.”

  “Just tell her what’s up,” he said. “She’s your friend, right?”

  “She’s my best friend,” I said defensively.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, shrinking farther away. “It’s just complicated.”

  “It’s not such a big deal, Lima.”

  “If it’s not such a big deal, why do you care so much?”

  Nate was quiet for a moment before answering. “I think because it just doesn’t seem like you. You don’t seem like you’re afraid of what anyone thinks.”

  I knew he was trying to give me a compliment, but I bristled.

  “You don’t get it,” I said. “Hailey isn’t just anyone. She’s my oldest, best friend and she is gonna be really mad at me.”

  “All I’m saying,” he said, “is the Lima I know, the one I like, is an honest person.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t believe this.”

  Nate might have been right, but it didn’t matter. I was risking my entire friendship with Hailey just to be with him, and now he was going to stand there and tell me how I should behave? Angry tears stung my eyes.

  “How can you lecture me about being a good person? You’re the one who started this whole thing,” I said. “You kissed Hailey and then just ignored her. You’re the one who is coming between me and my best friend. Why don’t you just leave me alone? That would fix everything.”

  Nate’s mouth hung open for a moment in surprise, and then he just looked hurt. He stumbled backward.

  “Wait, Nate, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “No, it’s okay. You’re right,” he said, and retreated back up the stairs.

  chapter

  fifty-seven

  With Nate gone, the night air clamped down on me and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My head was spinning. I stepped toward the house, then grasped at a door handle and practically fell into Meredith’s dad’s bedroom. I moved through the dark and collapsed on his bed. I lay there in the silent room, and the bad kind of quiet enveloped me. This was the opposite of how tonight was supposed to go.

  I hated myself for getting upset at the mention of Hailey. The night up until then had been going so well. I could feel how much Nate trusted me. He was opening up to me more than ever. But instead of letting him in, I had lashed out and ruined everything.

  I heard a rustle and opened my eyes. Nate was standing in the doorway.

  “Can we talk?” he asked.

  I nodded and dragged myself into a sitting position, and he came over and sat down next to me on the bed.

  “What you said out there—” he began.

  “I take it back,” I interrupted. “Please believe me.”

  “Let me say this,” he said. “You’re not wrong. That stuff you said, it’s kinda true. I’ve fucked up a lot of shit in the past. Like, with girls. Not just Hailey. But her, too. I don’t trust myself. And I don’t want to do that to you. Not ever.”

  Why would you? I thought. A dark well was widening beneath my feet, threatening to suck me in.

  “But with you, it’s different,” he said. “I’ve never liked someone so much or for so long.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  A smile spread across his lips. He reached into my lap and picked up one of my hands. “Yeah.”

  We stared at each other in the dim room. Even in the dark, I could see his blue eyes were blurry with feeling. There were so many things that had happened between us and suddenly there was this beating inside of me, like something in my heart that needed to come loose.

  I reached up and touched the rough part of his cheek and he pulled me toward him. We started kissing and then we lay down onto the bed clumsily, our legs getting all tangled in the transition. The room got warm and then hot and I felt the edges of our bodies softening, as if we were actually blending together.

  “Lima,” he said, pushing a strand of hair off of my forehead, “you are so important to me.”

  “You’re important to me, too.” I whispered. We kissed again, and this time I could feel a blind, intense longing opening up inside of me. Nate kicked off his shoes, and I sat up to take mine off, too. Then I lay back down and we kept kissing. We rolled over and under each other, his knees pressed my knees apart, and then my hands ran down his body and inside his clothes. Everything seemed to be coming undone. Buttons. The snap on the back of my bra. The zipper of his jeans. This time, I didn’t think about the strangeness of his body or wonder about how I looked as my shirt came off. Something between us was changing and I was certain that Nate felt it, too. Like we were slipping into a dream.

  “Should we stop?” he asked. He was lying on top of me. When he spoke, he shifted his weight the tiniest bit and a new line of sensation lit up inside of me.

  “Do you want to?” I asked.

  He frowned a little in the dark. “I’m not sure. Sex changes things.”

  “I know,” I said, running my finger along the edge of his collarbone.

  “I really don’t want you to do something that you might regret later,” he said.

  I looked up at him and his eyes were burning, drowning.

  “I don’t think I’ll regret it,” I said. “I don’t think I’d regret anything with you.”

  I reached for one of Nate’s hands where it was resting on the pillow beside my head and wound my fingers into his. His palm was sweaty and for a moment I thought maybe he was shaking.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said plainly.

  “Me too.”

  I watched the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed slowly in and out.

  “I just,” he said, and for the first time, I really saw him straining for the right words. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen Nate not know what to say.

  “I know,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Do you have something?”

  “Yeah, I have a condom,” he said, rolling off of me. He reached for his pants in the dark, and I could hear him shuffling through our clothes. When he found it, he lay on top of me again, this time supporting his upper body with his elbows so that he hovered a little bit away.

  I reached up and touched a strand of his hair. We kissed again. I could feel the heat radiating off of him. He rolled onto his back, fumbled with the condom, and after a minute, came back to me.

  And then it was happening. I could feel Nate breathing and I could practically feel the blood pumping in his veins, too. I ran my hands down his arms and over his back. My toes, my fingers, my lips, everything was buzzing with Nate. And all those parts of Nate that I’d always wanted to touch, like his elbows and his shoulders, even his knees, I felt as if I were touching them all at once.

  “Was that okay?” Nate asked when it was over.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  We kissed and then he pulled me tigh
ter to him and buried his face in my hair.

  Now that we’d had sex, kissing Nate felt like the most natural thing in the world, like something I had been doing my whole life.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Beyond okay,” I whispered.

  We lay naked, our bodies mashed into a single puddle of heat and dampness. Slowly, our heartbeats began to steady. A night breeze blew in through the open doors and I looked outside. Funny, I thought, how the whole world outside of this room was totally unchanged. Exactly as it had been when we came in here. But everything in this room, and everything between the two of us, and even all those things inside of us that we couldn’t see or name, was different.

  chapter

  fifty-eight

  When Nate and I awkwardly re-entered the screening room, the movie was still going. I sat down on the couch and tried to act nonchalant. I had splashed my face with water and combed my hair with my fingers, but I felt disheveled and undone in a way that I couldn’t conceal.

  I could feel Meredith’s eyes on me, so I turned and met her gaze. She didn’t smile. Her eyes were dark. She looked at me for a long, slow minute then flicked her gaze back to the movie screen without saying anything.

  Did she know what I had done? I could hardly believe it myself. I shifted uncomfortably on the couch, my insides still feeling warm and loose, like they might spill out of me if I wasn’t careful. My whole body had been kneaded, softened by having sex with Nate.

  • • •

  After the movie I walked Nate and Ryan to the front door. Nate and I couldn’t stop looking at each other and smiling and blushing. There was a renewed shyness about both of us now.

  “That was a fantastic movie,” Nate said to me over his shoulder as he and Ryan walked out onto the porch.

  We both laughed.

  “Such a good movie!” I added.

  Ryan rolled his eyes. “You guys are idiots. You saw five minutes of it.”

  Ryan knew Nate and I had snuck off together, but I didn’t care. And Nate didn’t seem to care. The only thing that mattered to me right then was us. I watched Nate climb into the car, glimpsed his hands, his bony ankle peering out from beneath the hem of his jeans. The memory of sex was slippery, hard to hold on to. It was already impossible to imagine how close we had been to each other an hour before.

  • • •

  I showered before I got in bed with Meredith. I stripped down in her bathroom and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Having sex was a weird mix of familiar and unfamiliar sensations. My body was doing a foreign thing, but it was still just my body doing it. It felt different and uncomfortable, but not scary. Nate was still Nate. I was still me. It was disorienting to look at my body in this artificial light now and realize that it was capable of all that.

  Meredith’s shower was hard and hot, and I scrubbed my skin with her loofah. A sadness was starting to creep into the edges of my mind. Maybe it was just the inevitable come- down from an experience so intense. I wished Nate was still here. I wanted to climb into bed beside him. If I were with him right now, I wouldn’t feel lonely.

  I turned and faced the showerhead and let the water beat down on my face. If I had lost my virginity to anyone other than Nate, I would have called Hailey right then. Even though our friendship wasn’t perfect anymore, she would still be amazing to talk to about this. She would have helped me sort through all the things I was feeling. I tried to remember what she had said when she told me about losing her virginity last summer. There was something obscure about her that day that I hadn’t understood at the time, but now I felt like maybe I could. Suddenly, I genuinely missed her. I hadn’t truly missed her like that in months, and the intensity shocked me. But the feeling was quickly followed by the suffocating fear that choked me every time I imagined telling her about Nate.

  Emotions and vague disappointments spun around inside me, as elusive as fish in a pond. I wanted to catch them and understand them, but they kept squirming out of my grasp.

  chapter

  fifty-nine

  On Saturday night, I watched TV on the bed with Mom and Dad. I wore a pair of flannel pajamas with puppies on them that Aunt Caroline had given me. I lay in between Mom and Dad, nestling my head on Mom’s chest. Now that I wasn’t a virgin, I wanted nothing more than to feel like a little kid again. I knew it was an itch I’d probably never be able to scratch. There was no going back.

  The landline phone rang in the middle of a show. Mom answered.

  “Hi, Hailey,” Mom said. And then, “Me too, sweetie.”

  I could hear Hailey talking, but I couldn’t make out her words.

  “Of course we can,” Mom said. “Okay, here’s Lima.”

  Mom covered the receiver with her hand before she passed it to me.

  “I told Hailey we’d take her with us to the farmers’ market tomorrow,” she whispered. “She knows we always go on Sundays.”

  “Hi,” I said into the phone. “I’m in the middle of a show—can I call you back?”

  Mom frowned at me.

  “Yeah, yeah, of course,” Hailey said. “I’m gonna see you tomorrow. Bye, Li. Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” I said.

  After I hung up, I could feel Mom’s eyes boring into me for just an extra second longer than normal before they drifted back to the TV.

  chapter

  sixty

  I usually loved the Palisades farmers’ market on Sundays. Salty air from the beach blew into the street and made the smells of food extra potent. Local farmers always gave out samples of their freshest fruit and vegetables.

  “Mmm,” Mom said, closing her eyes with pleasure as she bit into a grape. “Try this.”

  She handed Hailey and me each a grape with a toothpick stuck in it.

  I took a bite. It tasted perfect. I wished I could share it with Nate.

  “That’s good,” Hailey said. “I’m gonna get another. You want, Li?”

  I shook my head. Friday night felt like a lifetime ago. Gaps of time between seeing Nate were feeling longer and longer and more and more intolerable.

  “Watch the cart,” Mom said, and disappeared to go pick out vegetables.

  “Are you wearing makeup or something? You look different.” Hailey said, once we were alone.

  I flushed.

  “No,” I said. “No makeup.”

  She rolled her eyes. “God, you’re so annoying. Can you just stop being so pretty for, like, five minutes so I can think about something else?”

  I tried to smile.

  “So,” Hailey said, “I have to tell you. I had a fight with Skyler on Friday.”

  Of course there was a reason why Hailey wanted to hang out with me.

  “Hmm,” I said absently, biting a nail.

  “She thinks I should just get over Nate. She said she’s sick of hearing about him and that basically it’s just, like, never gonna happen.”

  I ripped off a shred of nail with my teeth and spit it out.

  “Li, that’s gross, don’t do that,” Hailey said. “But can you believe that Skyler said that?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, why are you mad at her about it? It sounds like she’s just trying to protect you.”

  Hailey scoffed. “Don’t defend her. She just thinks I’m not hot enough to get him.”

  “Did she say that?” I asked.

  “She didn’t have to,” Hailey said. “I know she thinks she’s the hottest girl in school.”

  I didn’t want to defend Skyler, but the truth was, she was in a million ways a better friend than I was.

  “Do you think I’m hot enough to get Nate?” Hailey asked.

  I hated this game. A bright, cold wind swept through the market, and I took a deep breath.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Thank you!” she said, sounding a little wronge
d. “I’m glad someone believes in me.”

  Mom came back and dropped a bag of spinach into the cart.

  “What did you do this weekend?” Hailey asked me as we followed Mom.

  For an instant, I tried to imagine telling the truth. I could just say, “I had sex with Nate Reed.” Hailey wouldn’t even believe me if I said it. The thought made me giggle.

  “What?” Hailey asked, her eyes narrowing on me.

  “Oh,” I shrugged. “Not much. Went to the twins’ house on Friday.”

  “Hayes-Schmayes,” Hailey said. “I’m ready for that phase of your life to be over.”

  “Meredith is amazing. You just don’t know her,” I replied.

  Hailey frowned. “You know what? Take me with you the next time you go there.”

  I froze. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they’re not so bad. And I’m sick of Skyler anyway.”

  “But I thought you hated the twins,” I said, feeling trapped.

  “Geez, Lima, hate is a strong word,” Hailey teased. “They can’t be so bad if you like them so much. Maybe I’ll like them, too.”

  Hailey would screw up everything if she started coming with me to the twins’ house.

  “Actually, I don’t know if you’ll like them,” I said, trying to sound light. “They might not be your kind of people.”

  Hailey stopped walking.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  I turned and looked at her. She stared at me. The morning sun caught the tiny flecks of brown in her hazel eyes.

  “Do you not want me to come with you or something?” she asked, her voice tiny.

  My stomach clenched. Guilt and anger wrestled inside me, twisting into a million microscopic knots.