have anything to do but talk that day and walk up and down the shoreline, our feet splashing in the salty tide. And it was incredibly freeing. In those hours, I didn’t have to think about the gaping hole in my life. Michael was filling it in with his interest in me.
It didn’t escape Lucy’s notice, either. “You’re in love with being loved,” she said two weeks later, when I’d disentangled myself from Michael long enough to join her in Cath’s pool. She was hanging on to the side, kicking her feet out behind her in lazy swipes, and her wet hair was slicked back from her face.
I swam away from her, stung. Michael was flipping through a magazine on a lounge chair just a dozen feet away, his eyes shaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses and his chest pink with sun.
“That’s…well, mean. And not true,” I said, paddling over to the concrete lip and tossing back my own soaked hair.
“Really?” She shook her head, shrugging. She was squinting in the fierce afternoon sun, her nose wrinkled in disapproval, each freckle standing out like a polka dot. “What is it you like about him other than how he’s completely obsessed with you?”
“You’re out of line, Lucy.” I managed to keep my voice steady as I said it, but my heart had squeezed into a tight fist. I didn’t want to fight, but I wasn’t going to listen to her accuse me of something she understood nothing about.
I was flattered by Michael’s interest, and I knew it even then, but I was also pleased by it because I’d fallen so hard for him. There were plenty of things I liked about him, not that I was about to spout off a list for Lucy’s benefit. He was smarter than any boy I’d ever dated, for one thing, and he was gentle and funny and kind, but there were a million little quirks that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone who wasn’t in love with him. The way his fingers were shaped. The way his left eyebrow was slightly crooked. The way he ate Oreos, around and around the edges until he swallowed the middle in one gulp. The fact that he was an awful swimmer but could run for miles without losing his breath. The short stories he’d written and collected in a plain spiral-bound notebook. The way he always carried a book with him wherever he went.
That he liked me was only one reason among the dozens I mused over as I lay in bed at night, and the idea that he’d given me something to do other than brood all summer didn’t occur to me at all until Lucy mentioned it.
It was rude and blunt of her to say it, but there are moments now when I wonder if she was wrong.
That summer was gorgeous from the beginning, just hot enough, lush and sweet scented. The old trees that lined the streets were thick with leaves, gardens had bloomed early, and every few blocks you could smell the chemical tang of chlorine from a backyard pool. Michael had been anticipating boredom his first summer away from Manhattan, where a kid with two doctors for parents could do pretty much whatever he liked, but we kept busy in the way only teenagers seem to do, wandering the streets hand in hand, drifting lazily in friends’ pools, talking for hours on my front porch, counting fireflies at dusk and listening for the tinny jingle of the ice-cream truck.
And kissing, of course. There was a lot of kissing.
I’d kissed boys before, if not extensively. I was usually too wrapped up improving my port de bras or learning a new variation for performance, and most of the boys in my ballet classes weren’t particularly interested in girls. But I had made out with Tommy Giuditta during the second installment of Friday the 13th, and I’d fooled around with Brendan Hastings at Billy Caruso’s party over Christmas break.
Michael tasted different, felt different from other boys. I couldn’t get enough of touching him. The wiry hair on his chest was fascinating. The smooth, firm muscles in his upper arms responded beneath my fingers. And his mouth was hot and faintly sweet, like nothing I’d ever tasted.
When he touched me…well, that was different, too. I was so familiar with my own body, the strength of my legs, the jutting definition of my ribs and hipbones, the painful bunions and scabbed blisters on my feet, that I was convinced it couldn’t hold any surprises. But when Michael and I were kissing, tangled together in his bed or on the sofa in my deserted living room long after everyone had gone to sleep, I never failed to be awed. My body understood a whole host of things I didn’t, apparently, and Michael had been the one to introduce me to them. There was heat, a slow softening that blurred every edge when Michael touched me, but there was also an electric buzz, a new, urgent energy. Need, I know now.
I was consumed with it those first weeks we were together, restless and irritable when he wasn’t within arm’s reach. To satisfy my parents—who had explained that although not dancing certainly wasn’t my choice, I would have to spend at least some of my vacation productively—I’d found a part-time job at the cinema downtown. Michael wasn’t working, since his mother felt that the loss of his father, moving out of his first and only home and preparing to leave for college were quite enough for him to deal with.
I’d been heartbroken to learn that he had graduated already—he was only a few months older than I was, but he’d started kindergarten early or something like that. I was too shattered to listen to the explanation, and anyway, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was come September, he’d be leaving for Boston and Harvard.
One afternoon when I didn’t have to work and Michael’s mother had taken his sister, Jane, into the city for the day to visit friends, we were sprawled upstairs on his bed, drinking iced tea and feeding each other potato chips. We’d been talking about Michael’s favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village and had drifted into a strange conversation about reading The Scarlet Letter for school, and then about what classes Michael would take at Harvard, where he was going to major in literature.
I could feel him pulling back, the muscles in his shoulders stiff and his eyebrows drawn together over those huge, dark eyes. He would make noises about putting off school for a year, finding a job in town and waiting for me to graduate. He’d done it before, and although I’d stopped him each time, I was learning that he had a stubborn streak as wide as the sky.
I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay, either—not with me as the cause. What if he stayed and hated me for it? What if he stayed and realized he didn’t really love me, even though he’d said it a million times already, like a prayer between kisses, whispered in my ear at the movies, written on scraps of paper he left in my shorts pockets or my bag. It was then that I’d realized that being the object of love gave you power. And I was desperate not to use it the wrong way.
I pushed up on my elbows without warning, nudging the nearly empty chip bag to the floor. Michael looked up; he’d been lying beside me on the bed, his dark brown hair gleaming amber in the sun and one cheek flushed with heat.
I sat up completely and peeled off my T-shirt and bra, then swung my legs over the side of the bed to shimmy out of my shorts and panties. Michael sat up, too, eyes wide, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak.
I held out my hand as I lay back on the pillows, and he straddled me, his jeans rough against my naked thighs, his T-shirt warm and soft against my breasts. “Tess?” he said.
I didn’t answer, but he let me tug off his shirt, and groaned as I ran my hands over his chest.
“This was more romantic in my head,” he said as I fumbled with his zipper. “There were going to be, like, candles and stuff.”
I smiled as he shrugged off his jeans. My blood was racing, but it felt good. We’d been giving ourselves to each other for weeks, fitting the smaller pieces into the bigger ones, revealing colors and shadings, creating a puzzle that was very definitely an “us” instead of the separate entities “me”
