We talked, today, she and I. I’ve seen her, noticed her, but, today, we talked. There’s something in the way she presents herself, in her speech patterns, that I like. Something that feels comfortable. I didn’t say as much as she did. I tried to lead her to places that let her talk more. I have the urge to talk with her, again.
I don’t know why I’m writing this.
I talked with her, again. She was in the same place as the other day. I can’t tell if she likes me or is just being polite. I walk right up and start talking to her. There I am, taking up space with my presence, no escaping. A polite person would just go with it, knowing they’ve been trapped into a conversation. She did seem happy to see me, though. That moment of recognition became a shining smile. I do like listening to her.
She doesn’t really know that I’ve been making time to visit. I couldn’t escape this thought: that we’ve only had these few conversations as a result of her politely surrendering to my imposition. I had to get going and was saying goodbye to her. I let her know that things would be busy for me, but I could find time to spend, if she wanted. I told her I would understand if she had other things she needed to do. I gave her an out, I had to. There was no hesitation on her part. “Yes, please. If you can”. When I realized I had been holding my breath, I let it out as quietly as I could, so she wouldn’t notice. “Come back, please,” she said, smiling. I told her I would.
She’s clever and cutely amusing. She is not aware that she is particularly so. It doesn’t glare at her as it does me. Her responses to me pointing it out usually start with, “I’m just…” followed by an explanation of her mundanity. I’ll have to keep at it. A woman should know that she’s enchanting.
She called me silly and when she did, she touched my arm and said my name. I watched her say my name. I like the look of it on her lips. Here I am looking at her lips, feeling the place where she touched me, as if she’s ruffled my pores. As if she were liquid and has just left some of herself on me. I feel stupid and for just a second, somehow untethered. I’m wondering how ridiculous I seem and can hear my own voice, saying, “say my name, again”. She does, looking at me. I have no clue what I’m doing, but I seem to be doing it, anyway.
We’ve been talking for weeks. Not every day, but it’s become more frequent. I like the feeling I get when I’m around her. My stomach does strange things. I feel compelled to talk with her and feel it in my belly. It’s a tightness, like there’s something gripping. Then I see her and it lets go, but I still feel it. It quivers and writhes, but not unpleasantly so. It’s as though there’s a thing that was stressed and is now feeling playfully boisterous. I wonder, when I walk up to her, next time, if I’ll notice the transition. Is there some line I’ll cross, some set distance from her that will let my stomach unwind? Can I stand on one side of the belly barrier, taught, then step into the other side and feel it let go? What would happen if I straddled the border? I’m an idiot.
I am sleepless. We talked, today, and I was asking if she thought celebrities were sexy. She told me she’s got a couple of celebrity crushes, but there are qualities she looks for that usually run deeper than what you can see on a screen. I thought that was a good answer. She mentioned qualities I have. Sexy qualities, according to her. I said so. She said, “well, yeah, you’re sexy”. I laughed it off.
Now, I can’t sleep. How can I sleep when I’m sexy?
She was teasing me when it happened. She says I’ll say something very sweet and be clueless that I’ve done so. She’ll be looking at me, with whatever emotion I’ve just stirred, and I’ll ask her if there’s something on my face or something. She was mocking me and laughing and talking fast. I’m watching her face and hearing her laugh and I had to kiss her. So, I did. She stopped talking. I kissed her, again. When she finally spoke, she said, “are you going to kiss me, again?”. I was and I did. There are lots of things I don’t know, but I know I want to kiss her again.
She is, though it pains me to use such a banal comparison, like addiction. As much as her presence feels like pleasure, her absence feels like need. That makes me question the very nature of pleasure. How much pleasure comes down to a sense of relief? How much pleasure is no more than the final recovery of something you were lacking? Water when you’re thirsty, food when you’re hungry, a lazy rest after a sleepless week, a first kiss.
Tonight, I was inside of her, for the first time.
I took my time, not trying to be particularly sweet or gentle, only wanting that very moment to last. I was eager, but in no hurry. Poised between her legs, seeing her, feeling her arms around me, I curved my hips forward. When I entered, penetrating that wet, welcoming kiss, I let out a quiet moan. A soft cry of relief.
I want to suck her straight into my veins.
I am beset by dichotomies. It’s easy to marvel at them. The way I get that feeling of both thrill and comfort. With her, I have a sense of familiar belonging, all while my heart is furiously strumming beyond the bounds of my chest. It’s like fried ice cream. Like a tender kiss and a desperate thrust.
We are to the point where if we stop, someone will be hurt. We’ve been here for a while, but you don’t notice it until you start to worry about losing it. Suddenly, you’re in the deeper part of the ocean, at the brink of where it becomes open sea. You didn’t plan to be here, you weren’t looking to be here, but here you are.
I don’t know what comes next or how to proceed, only that I am here with hope and trepidation. It makes me hesitant and I know she feels that, I have no doubt.
The air changes when she steps out from her shower; my eyes don’t need to see it to know she is walking out of the mist like Venus reborn. I am pondering through the window and see her reflection as she approaches. She wears a towel around her wet hair and nothing else. Her breasts graze my back as she comes up behind me and puts the side of her face on my upper arm. She calls me her reluctant storm and I want to fuck her until I expire.
She was laughing. She was laughing and I never wanted it to stop, not for anything. Not until I had struck every undignified pose, danced every jutting, awkward dance. She was laughing and I was a god, grand and ridiculous. A god with the power to call forth an eruption of joy in tangible, rippling peels.
She slowed, because I was running out of material, and she said, “I’ll…”, but never finished, because I wriggled my eyebrows, sending her into more giggles. The wind was knocked out of me as it hit me like a physical thing. I had to sit down.
She loves me. She loves me and she’s been waiting for me, just patiently waiting. Of course she wasn’t saying “I’ll…” she was saying “I love you”, but stopped herself. It came crashing down on me at once, the signals I’ve missed in thoughtless ignorance. I can’t breathe. Of course I can’t breath, how can a man be this stupid and still have enough brain power to operate a pair of lungs? She’s been hiding it for fear of my own hesitancy. All her passion and fire, waiting. Patience like a mountain. Only a fool could keep missing this inevitable moment and there is no greater fool than I. I look at her, really look. At her, into her. She loves me. This amazing woman, remarkable from tip to toe. I am overcome, she sees my eyes welling and she isn’t laughing anymore.
“I love you”, I said to her and couldn’t say anything else. She stared at me and I nodded, because it’s all I could do. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry it took so long, that I should have been telling her every day for a long time, but I shrug, because it’s all I can do. She climbs into my lap, facing me and places her body against mine and says “I love you. I love you I love you I love you”, holding me, her hand on the back of my neck, “I love you I love you”, her breath in my ear, “I love you…”. I don’t feel the least bit smart or manly or funny. I feel like a lump. But it’s alright, because she’s saying I love you over and over, and I keep hearing that it’s okay, that she’s got me, that she’s always had me. That it’s okay that I’m a moron, because she loves me and she’s going to keep on doing it. I am a lump with arms and I use them to crush her to me.
I’m going to ask her to move in with me. I think she’ll say yes.
It’s been a while since I wrote in this notebook or even saw it. At least a couple of years. I remember how it was, how I had held myself back for so long it was like a rubber band being stretched back and back and suddenly let go. I was energized. I asked her to move into my place. She said no. Her explanation was horrifyingly slow; a painful display of attempting to avoid hurting my feelings that kept her from getting anywhere near the point. It eventually became clear that while my place was larger and arguably nicer, she preferred the quaint charm of her house and would I “pretty please”, move in with her instead. I restarted my heart and said yes.
We’ll be moving out, soon, into a place we both picked out. It’ll be ours. That’s how I found this notebook, going through clutter, deciding what to pack and what to throw out.
She still likes to tease me about how reticent I used to be. “What were you waiting for?”, she asks. “I don’t know!”, I reply. “How could you not know?”, she asks. “I’m probably not very smart”, I reply. She calls me cute and I tell her I’m too big to be cute. Of course she giggles at me. I let her tease. Having me embarrassed is a rare opportunity, so she takes full advantage. I think she finds it endearing.
The other day she was laughing out of nowhere as she remembered something. She walked over and stood before me, slinging her hip to one side and said, “big strong man was out of his depth, because he wanted meeeeee”, she sang, spinning away… and consequently almost spun into the wall, instead of through the doorway. She laughed at herself and made a quick exit, leaving me with my red face and reluctant smile.
Later, we were lying in bed, facing each other. I was doing what I often do, talking with her and hoping she’ll keep talking. She was laughing, then said, “I was practically begging you to make a move. Any move!”, the pitch of her voice going up with her rising incredulity. I said, “At first, I really thought I was being…”, it took a moment to find the word, “…obtrusive!”, immediately shaking my head at myself. She said, “I wanted you so bad. You made me feel… goofy and tongue-tied just being around you. But I couldn’t stop talking!”. And she’s off…
I am listening to her every word as well as her rhythms.
She’s talking about how she was afraid that her incessant jabbering would scare me away, how the words would come helplessly spilling out of her mouth like a stream of magician’s handkerchiefs. My body relaxes, my eyelashes become lazier.
She’s talking about the first time I kissed her, that I didn’t use my tongue, and how her ears were ringing. I am listening to her lips.
She talks about the first time she spent the night; smiling as I slept, absorbing my scent, listening to me breathe. I hear the lilt of her emotions, the cadence of her little laughs, her hesitations; the climaxes of her sudden realizations. It’s like music. She could talk about anything: relationships, politics, hair, childhood. I’ll never be more at ease than I am in those moments, when she’s telling me a song.
It was my turn to talk. I could tell by her face. Her expression seems more open, her eyes become brighter, somehow. She stretches back, assuming the posture of the listener, waiting for me to reminisce. I ask her if she knows what kept me from blowing it, from ruining the whole thing. She smiles. “Selfishness”, I say to her, “pure and simple. I wish I could say it was something more noble. I was, in fact, painfully aware of how deserving you are of anything I could give you and more. But I’m selfish. I found you”. I brush a piece of hair back from her face and say, “What felt important was that I found you and wanted to talk to you. That I started learning you. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a plan or a clue or even that I might not be good enough for the job. I selfishly clutched you to me because I found you and I wasn’t about to give you up”. I’m stroking her cheek with the backs of my fingers. “I discovered you”, I tell her. “I discovered you and I’ve been discovering you ever since. I have no intention of stopping”.
I watch her pretty eyes begin to fill with tears. She slaps me in the middle of my chest and buries her face right where she hit me, saying “you always say just the right things”. I may never understand how something that makes a woman want to cry and strike a man can be considered “just the right thing”. She takes my face in her hands, looking in my eyes and says, “you are more than good enough”. I kiss her instead of arguing. She would only disagree. I am not, nor will I ever be good enough for her. But no one is. I’m only okay with that because she’s mine. And because I’ll never stop striving to be exactly the kind of man she deserves. She’s worth at least that.
I was thinking of throwing this silly notebook away and now I’m writing in it. I don’t know that I’ll ever write in it again, but I seem to be unable to bear the thought of discarding it. It may be a sentimental decision, but I‘m keeping the journal. Apparently, it says just the right things.
Since this journal is yours now, I guess I can stop referring to you in the third person. Hi there, Little Smile. All of that was so long ago, but it doesn’t seem that way. You know I’m awful with dates (or as I like to say, ”chronologically challenged”) and I’m guessing you’re surprised I would remember an anniversary of when we first talked. You tell me you’re fine with me occasionally forgetting dates, because I remember what’s really important. With some things, it isn’t so much remembering as being unable to forget.
One last sojourn into the memory vault:
It was right before we moved in together, I was in the comfy chair, in pajama bottoms. You weren’t wearing much at all, only my unbuttoned shirt. I pulled you onto my lap and you laid your head against my shoulder. I touched your chin, tilting your head up to me and said, “I’m keeping you”. As you can see, I meant it.
I hope you enjoyed this old notebook, my musings of secret fears, hopes and infatuations. Reading it over, I can see I don’t have the same fears I once did, and my hopes with you have changed, as well. The infatuations, though, have stayed the same. You are a source of endless fascination to me.
I could fill the rest of these pages with ways I love your eyes or your skin. I could talk about how you make this absurd life meaningful. I could rattle off the innumerable ways in which you are unfairly sexy. But I’m leaving the remainder of these pages blank. It’s an open chapter, another horizon for us to explore.
I look forward to the days ahead and look dearly on the days we’ve had together. I still carry you around in my blood. And in my pocket. It still pleases me that when someone catches me with a mysterious smile on my face, it’s you. You are that little smile.
Happy Anniversary, baby.
-Yours, yours, yours, without reserve,
stormborns
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