He does not touch me again that evening. In the morning, he has an eight a.m. meeting an hour’s drive away. I get up just to look at him, even that is new and fresh. I stand beside the pink sofa in the living room watching him rush about the cottage – he sprints up the steps because he has forgotten his laptop; he has no time to make himself a smoothie, so he turns on the tap, gulps water from the cup of his hand. Only when he’s at the door do I speak. I say his name because I don’t know how to say,Don’t goorTouch me.He crosses the room, presses his thumb against my lip. ‘Later,’ he says. The promise, all the possibilities it holds, sends a thrill through me.
I watch him reverse out of the woods and then I sink into my usual chair at the desk. I don’t open my schoolwork. I do what he did to myself. I toy with the sleeve he pushed back, I circle my wrist bone, press my thumb to my mouth. My arm, my lips are things transformed, why did he choose those parts, why that touch? I want to know what he’s seen, what he’s felt, every singlethought he has about me. It’s good he is away this morning. It gives me time to luxuriate in those touches over and over again.
But I am also aware that time is slipping away, I should prepare for what is to come. I am going to be kissed. I think of Olivia, one of the cool girls at St Matthews, she made a chart of first kisses, she asked everyone in the class. When she came to me, I didn’t answer, unwilling to be entertainment. ‘Why are you always so difficult?’ she said, ‘It’s a simple “Yes” or “No.”’ I shook my head. She rolled her eyes, put a cross by my name. ‘As if there could be more than one answer.’ I take out a tube of lip balm, twist the pink stick all the way up and smooth it across my lips. I kiss the glass, cold and wonderful beneath me.Ask me later, Olivia. Ask me later.
I’m on the porch when he returns. I have taken a bath, my hair still smells of my apple shampoo, my skin is wrinkled and soft but I am wearing what I wore last night, the same long-sleeve T-shirt and shorts; if he kissed me in those, why would I ever change out? He slows when he sees me under the shadows of the eaves. He sets down the mesh cage, drops his bag, comes to a complete halt. He looks at me for what seems like an age. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he says, and suddenly, I am.
The cottage is cool – the stone floor underfoot, the kitchen counter I trail my fingers over, the polished wood of the banister winding upstairs. He holds open his bedroom door. Yesterday, after he kissed my arm, he dragged his duvet onto the study floor for me and I fell asleep to the sight of him working, the smell of ethyl acetate no longer repellent but a scent to be savoured, the smarting in my throat another form of his touch. But now, in his bedroom, there are no butterflies or jars or laptops and I think I’ve arrived. I am in the moment I’ve been waiting for.
He pulls the curtains shut, turns. ‘This will be strange for you,’ he says.
I shrug. I want it to be strange.
‘You haven’t done this before?’
I shake my head.
‘Are you afraid?’
‘A little.’
‘Of what?’
I glance at the bed. I have only been here when the curtains are pulled back and I can see the leaves of the oaks, I have only come to mess it up and spy. Child’s play. Now, everything is different. In the setting sun filtering through the weave of the curtains, the bed seems enormous, the plumped-up pillows, the folded throw are things from a hotel. So adult. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what to do.’
He steps towards me. ‘That evening, in the museum, do you remember what you did?’
He is teaching me, he is returning me to the familiar, except this subject matter isn’t butterflies or botany, it is the private science of him and me. The bed vanishes, overtaken by the memory of the carved pillars outside Lepidoptery, the vertebrae of the diplodocus in Hintze Hall below. I lift my fingers and lay them on his throat.
This time, there is no intolerable silence. This time, he makes a sound like nothing I’ve heard before, a purr, alive and trembling under my fingers. ‘You see?’ he whispers, ‘You know what to do. Everything you do is right.’
A switch flips, all doubt, gone. I brush my fingers over his neck, let them rest at the base of his throat. He shudders. I loosen the line of pearlescent buttons I’ve stared at every Saturday formonths. The openness of his shirt reveals the shock of his body, the definition of his abdomen, the curve of his biceps, the dark line of hair from chest to navel. I ease his shirt off. His shoulders are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
My hands drift to the clasp of his belt. It’s unbelievably masculine. The thickness of the leather. The black stitching.
He catches my hand, then stiffens, steps back. ‘Wait, wait, perhaps we should stop.’
I look up, confused.
‘Before it’s too late.’
Isn’t it already too late?
‘Nothing’s happened.’
I don’t understand. I’ve touched him, surely that’s happened?
He shakes his head. ‘This could be all.’
I stare at my hands, suspended where he has abandoned them, bewildered that the world of his skin can be so quickly withdrawn. I’m frightened. This will be so much worse than when he ignored me for weeks. How will I bear it now, after everything he’s said, everything he’s touched. Is this what men do? Kiss your arms, put their thumbs on your lips and then tell you it’s nothing?
What I do next, I cannot pinpoint a source for. It rises from the shadowy swirl of movies and music videos, the whispers of cool girls, from biology itself, from science, it is as clear as a bell, solid as stone: a girl’s body changes everything. I pull off my shorts and my top, I step out of my knickers. I stand in front of him in the falling light of the afternoon, trying to be brave. ‘I don’t want this to be all.’
He regards me for so long, I start to tremble, from his gaze, from the air on my skin, from the rising tide of my self-doubt – mynose is too large, my hair is too thin, my eyes are swamp water, how could he ever wantmeafterMama? But then, the tempo changes, he crosses the room. His hands are in my hair. He tilts my chin towards him, he says my name into my mouth before he kisses me. He is everywhere, his palms running down my ribcage, across the blades of my hips, his lips are on my neck, he is whispering, ‘You’re the one, do you know that, it was always you,’ he is saying, ‘I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you.’ A shadow flits across my brain, that makes no sense, wasn’t that in our living room, the day he first met Mama? But I push it aside, I can’t think of her now. The backs of my thighs hit the bed. I lie down.
He pulls the sheets over us. I think of cocoons, layers upon layers of silk, the bed the first, the sheets another, his body the closest one. He supports himself on his forearms, his belt buckle stabs against my hip as he slides it off. With that practised efficiency I’ve always loved, he pushes off the rest of his clothes. ‘This might hurt,’ he says, reaching down.
It does at first. He is right about that and many other things – when he said it would be strange, when he implied there’d be no going back. Because while this is a return to the liquid world of his body – the taut muscle of his shoulders, his hair between my fingers, his addictive scent – it is also different. Pain tears through me, I cry out with it, I am dying, I am breaking apart but as he gathers pace, rhythm, I realise I am not dying, not breaking apart, I am being unlocked, surrendered. Towards the end, there is a shot of pleasure, my hips buck up to meet him and all the botany flashes in front of me that I thought I knew but didn’t. Phototropism is every inch of my body arching towards him. Photosynthesis is his sunlight on my body harnessed into pure, sweet sugar.