Page 75 of Alone With You in the Ether

The first time with heris rushed, embarrassingly so, faster than he’d like. The first night is her at his door, saying words he can hardly hear through the effort of straining to recognize reality, to stop his head from saying, Is this a dream? Haven’t we dreamt this?, and reminding himself that no, this was real, this was real because behind him the water will boil soon, the salt will go in and then the pasta, the oven will beep and dinner will come next. His brain is not thinking,Oh, she’s here, I knew it, instead his brain is no use to him at all. It is thinking, What time is this?, and it doesn’t mean six o’clock, it doesn’t mean evening, it doesn’t even mean dinnertime, it just means, Where are wein the cosmos, because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?

The first time, he doesn’t ask any questions that would count as questions; nothing journalistic like when, how, where, what, and most importantly, why? As in, why him, why anyone at all, but most especially,why him? But he doesn’t ask anything informative, he only steps aside, permits her through. She glances around at the simmering water and the pasta and the chicken in the oven; she recognizes she’s entered a room which did not previously have plans to contain her and now has to expand. She opens her mouth to apologize and he, unthinking—thinking only that he doesn’t want her to be sorry, that in fact ‘sorry’ from her tongue should be reserved for only the most capital of offenses, such as disappearing from his life forever—he takes her hand and holds it, urgently. She looks down and closes her mouth, and maybe her heart beats faster. Maybe her breath quickens, maybe it stops. He can’t hear the sounds of her physicalities over the loud rushing in his ears. He is a mathematician, a scientist, and he is precise in his waiting, so she is the one who graciously fumbles for him, towards him, on his behalf. He lifts her onto the kitchen island and they’re both still mostly-clothed when he fills her, right there next to the pasta that will soon be cooked. His forehead presses to hers as her hips lift from the countertop which might be marble, might not, he’s never been an expert in materials but he knows that she feels soft and smooth, like velvet. He knows her tactility now and he can never go back to not knowing. The water boils and he comes, he doesn’t know if she does, he asks her and she laughs. She pulls his mouth to hers, says to his tongue and his teeth and his shortness of breath, I’m hungry, what’s for dinner?

The second time is slower, lazy even. This time they’re both full, wine splashing on his shirt because they’re drunk on each other, unstable. He doesn’t taste the pasta at all, only watches her as she eats it, as she exclaims over it, Did you make this? Yes, yes I made it, Masso says Barilla is unacceptable, Well, good, all the better for me. Her blouse is unbuttoned, he can see her bra and the redness at her breasts where his lips and probably the stubble at his jaw have rudely marred her skin. He thinks, desperately, I should shave. She catches him looking and laughs, leans forward, points to the wine on his shirt and says, You’re a mess. He thinks of the way her legs wrap around his hips. Yes, he is a mess. Put it in the wash before it stains, she says, and while he would happily sacrifice a t-shirt for evidence that any of this took place he says okay, okay fine, removes his shirt and places it in the washing machine (in-unit laundry, the most blessed of blessings) to be washed, only she’s lingering in the hallway, looking at him. He was inside her, she liked his food, she came here for him. It washes over him in a wave, dawning, and it numbs him first before setting him alight; before he illuminates with it, resurrected. She wanders over to him and leans in, inspecting his handiwork, and closes the lid of the washing machine. He steps behind her as she pretends to scrutinize the dials. He rests his hand on her hips and she shivers.

This time, it will all be for her.

He places her hands flat on the washing machine as it starts to vibrate with effort, buzzing beneath her palms. From where he stands, lips on the nape of her neck, the whole thing quakes with waiting. This time, it’s Barolo and her on his palette. This time he takes off her clothes slowly, strips her petals gently, waits until her knuckles go white on the machine and then threads his tongue between her lips, hands curled around her thighs. He will forget the pasta, he’ll forget the color of the label, but he’ll remember the wine. He will think of it every time he sees her bare legs, every time he finds himself at her back. Clean laundry, red wine, and her, from the first time he finds the little discolored freckle on the back of her knee and every time after, marking it like the north star. This time, she finishes with a gasp. It grits through her teeth and she leans back to tell him, raggedly, I knew you would feel like this. I knew I would feel you everywhere, in my whole body, I knew it. She’s rocking against him slowly and whispering I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, in his ear until she sighs again, his hands tight on her hips.

The third time is shaky, full of little aftershocks that climb up his spine and descend again, free-falling towards a collision. They’re on the roof, it’s freezing, he tries to take her back downstairs to his apartment where it’s warm but she says No, no, let’s stay up here, I feel alive like this, like I could die like this. He doesn’t tell her how often he has the same thought but thinks that maybe she can see it, because somehow her palms find his cheeks. She’s wearing his clothes, wrapped under a blanket with him when her hands wander, when they express their disinterest in being empty, when they fill themselves with him. He chokes out, I’m not a teenager anymore, she laughs, Aren’t you?, and yes, she’s right, he’s hard again, god damn it. There are rules about this, somewhere. Rules of physicality, rules of basic human exertion, rules about not fucking on the damn roof but she is adamant and he’s still licking the taste of her from his lips. He has the unlit joint between his teeth, pretending he’s capable of refusing. He isn’t. She can see as much. She lowers her head to call his bluff and the joint falls from his mouth somewhere into the cracks in the concrete below, into the fissures of his constitution. He gives up, twists around, and both of them are shaking with cold and probably adrenaline and this is what he will remember, the way the muscle in his arms and in her legs are shaking while he’s holding himself up; while she consumes him.

Consumption, that’s what this is. He is being willingly eaten alive. He says Goodnight and she smiles, says See you in the morning, she tangles her legs with his. She anchors him, then pulls away and orbits him. He moves, she moves. In sleep, she’s different. Her hair is soft and smooth, and he doesn’t touch it for fear of waking her, but he wants to. In sleep, she looks like she’s floating, like he and she are somewhere underwater, both holding their respective breaths. She wakes around four and seems disoriented—How did we get here, down here in this ocean?—and then finds him and comforts herself aloud with, “Oh, good.” The fourth time he touches her, it’s because of that: “Oh, good.” What was she thinking, saying that? Was she thinking what he hopes—“Oh, good, it’s still you, I didn’t dream it”—or is she thinking something else? “Oh, good, you didn’t leave.” “Oh, good, I still feel the same as I did last night.” “Oh, good, today is Sunday, I’ve woken up and didn’t die in my sleep,” what is it? He asks her silently while he fucks her, begs it with his lips pressed to hers. He hasn’t even begun to think about her kiss, about the way it feels to kiss her, which is normally step one but with her is somewhere beyond intimacy. Being the thing on her tongue means something more to her, he can tell it does. It has required more permission to kiss her lips, to share her breath, than to slide inside her pussy, to occupy her cunt.

“Oh, good,” she said when she woke to the sight of him, and that’s what he thinks while he kisses her.

Oh, good. It’s you.

There is a brief reprieve as she comes with him to church. This time she holds his hand while they enter, doesn’t drop it. They should have showered, probably, but he likes that she’s all over him. Makes him feel holier that way, shrouded in something that contains no doubt. He wears the smell of her draped over his shoulders, where her legs have been. No one else knows the lengths he has gone, the man he has become since touching her. He thinks of all the other versions of himself making love to all the other versions of her and resolves to pluck them out of their alternate realities, out of their alternate spaces and times, to place them in this one. He hopes she has not developed the ability to read his mind, that she isn’t seeing herself bent over the pew or perched, queenly, atop the altar, with his rapturous head between her legs. He is especially worshipful this Sunday. This particular Sunday, he willingly falls to his knees.

The fifth time is all newness and strangeness, unfamiliarity itself. She shows him the studio she’s rented. It’s difficult to get to by public transportation but he prefers to walk, anyway. She shows him her paintings, her drawings of him. All of it is impossible, fuck, she’s impossible. She took a blank page and turned it into something beautiful, how could she do that? She’s a magician, of course she can read his mind, she knows exactly what he was doing to her for an hour in the Lord’s house. She smiles, You’re being awfully quiet, he says, Am I? She shrugs, We should shower. She is slippery, difficult to hold, but still he holds on tightly.

They part for a while, he has to work, though in truth he doesn’t want to overwhelm her. What he wants to do is get on his bike and go somewhere he can scream into empty air, where he can take a breath that is not full of her just to prove it can still mean something, just in case. Just in case. She’s elusive, impulsive, she wanted him yesterday and he was “Oh, good,” today, but will he be something less tomorrow? Will he be “Oh, hm,” and then eventually just, “Oh.” He writes down his thoughts, or tries to. What escapes him are shapes, organized ones, fitted cleanly together. Order, that’s what he needs. His apartment is a mess, it has dirty dishes and the washing machine contains a stained shirt and she is everywhere. She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

The sixth time, he notices paint flecks on her arms, a little on her cheek. He laughs, What were you painting? She says very seriously, You, always you, I can’t help it. Only you these days. Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me.

He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please.

She kisses him back and she does.

The first time they argueshe is sure that she loves him. It’s the first time she really knows it, because even though her thoughts have been telling her so for days and somewhere there is a burning for him that is impossible to extinguish, she doesn’t really believe that love is anything more than science. Hormones, evolution, love, nuclear fusion, quantum theory, it’s all just a theory. It’s all just a sensation they tried to give an explanation to because humans are small, and stupid. Because people want to be romantic about everything, they want to give names to the stars, they want to tell stories. Love is a story, that’s all, until she fights with him for the first time.

The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before. With others, with Marc, it was always Regan, please be reasonable, Regan, I don’t want to do this right now, I’m tired. Regan, are you being difficult because you’re bored? And for her, it was always Fine, fine, I’m sorry. Maybe not the I’m sorry part because she was almost never sorry, but the giving up was always there. The sense of resignation, it was inescapably tied to The Fight. Before Aldo, love was concession. Love was a withering Yes, Dear, and the sensation of Don’t fight, Be careful of the eggshells, You are not at home here and can easily be sent away. She had thought love meant being Reasonable, a proper noun for a proper effort, for the evasive toil of Love and Relationships, and it made her think, from time to time, of her briefest love story. Of the time in Istanbul when she’d been crossing the street, a train blocking her path, a boy standing inside the middle car, beautiful. His eyes found hers somehow (eyes always found hers) and he beckoned to her, Come, come. She shook her head, No, don’t be crazy, he pouted and mouthed, Please. And for a second—for a moment—for a breath—she considered it. Considered boarding the train just to tell him: Is this destiny? She didn’t and he disappeared, gone forever. She doesn’t remember his face anymore but remembers the sensation: Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

Sometimes she hates that she didn’t possess the requisite lunacy to board that train, and the itch to mend it, to do so in some other way, has always stayed with her. It festered into an impulsiveness that will not disappear. She thinks: I hate that I didn’t get on that train, I hate that I watched him go and fade to nothing, and at first she thinks she loves Rinaldo Damiani the same way she loved the boy on the train. As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.

But then they fight and she thinks: Maybe this is different. It’s not a very big fight, but the important thing is that they have it, that it happens. Surprisingly, this isn’t how she knows he loves her. This isn’t about him at all. She already knows his brain is something foreign to her, something that contains little pockets of mysticism that she will never understand, no matter how intently she can dig her greedy tendrils. So when he says, ______, she says, _____, mostly just to challenge him. Later she will forget what the argument is even about, only that it happened, and most importantly that when she said ???, he said !!!, and did not dismiss it. He didn’t say, Regan, do you really want to do this now? Regan, I’m tired, let’s not. Regan, go to bed, it’s late and you’re arguing just to argue. He doesn’t do any of that, instead he !!s when she ??s and when she !!s he ??s, and she should be annoyed, she knows. She should be irritated or tired, the way people always are with her, but she isn’t. Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

She knows better than to confuse apologies with affection. People are always sorry, so when he crawls towards her on the mattress she knows to wait for it, to sigh and say, It’s fine, only instead he surprises her, says: I love your brain. She doesn’t know what to deal with first, the use of ‘love’ or the fact that it isn’t what she was expecting, or the idea that anyone can possibly think fondly of her brain when she has put almost no effort into molding it. Her body, that’s easy to love, and her personality, whichever version it is, is specially crafted for every occasion. She has always been studious of other people, despite what her mother thinks. Her mother believes she rebels just to rebel, just to provoke, but that, Regan thinks, is just another form of study. She understands what people want from her, knows when to give it or not. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the success of a rebellion, knowing what people want, so to vehemently deny what others so desperately desire?

Regan has always been good at that, at making people hate her or love her depending on her mood, but she has never given any thought to her thoughts. Then he says it, I love your brain, and she is so stunned she wants to fight with him all over again. She wants to fling things at him wildly—God is a myth! Time is a trap! Virginity is a construct! Love is a prison!—just to make him say it again, to make him prove it true. Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing? Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent?

Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

She thinks so loudly that she wants to quiet her thoughts with sex, which nearly always works. Oh, she likes sex with Aldo, she craves it, the thought alone makes her entire body sing. The way he fits with her, inside her, she wants it in excess—she wants, as she always wants, to be smothered by it, to drown in it, for it to be so vast and devouring it swallows her whole—but she has felt that way about sex before, about men and boys before. She has already lost herself many times, many ways, so she wants to do it again and thinks it will be familiar. But with him nothing is familiar, and sex is the least of it. It isn’tnothing—she sleeps with her hand wrapped around his cock just to comfort her subconscious with the shape of it—but this, I love your brain, is more. She already knows she is in love with him and now she suspects he is in love with her, too, in a way that makes her inclined to believe it. She yanks him up to her, ready to reward him with the places she can bend, but he laughs, slows her rushing hands. We can take breaks, you know, he says. She scoffs a little in her head—Oh, her brain, that’s what he wants? Okay, then have it, all of it. She pulls his head to hers, bites his lip, says: I’m going to tell you my secrets.

He licks at her mouth. Tell me, then.

She starts small but moderately sinful, not quite convinced he’s ready to hear the big things or worse, the meek. She tells him about how she flirted with a professor, got him to change a grade. She tells him about the neighbor boy, the first person to cup her breast in his hand and say, Nice. She tells him about the chemistry class she nearly failed except for the boy who sat next to her, who did her labs because she batted her eyes, sent a few dirty texts, okay fine, so there are pictures of her tits out there somewhere on someone’s cloud account, probably, so what. Aldo listens with a smile, a smile that says, Mmhmm.

Before she knows it, she’s confessing other things: I’m actually not very good at anything in particular. I’m not really very smart. People don’t know it right away, but eventually they sort it out. Sometimes I think: No wait I’m lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren’t I? So that must mean everyone else is right.

He doesn’t say anything at first, strokes her cheek the way he does when he’s thinking about whatever it is he’s thinking about (she doesn’t expect to understand it, time or anything, nor does she want to; really, she’s fine with mysteries) but then he says again: Why did you do it?

He means, Why did you, a person with plenty of money and talent and by all accounts a promising future, decide to throw that away for a crime?

Her psychiatrist, the doctor, says it’s because she wanted to fail. Because she was self-sabotaging.

Fine, that’s a theory, but he didn’t ask what her psychiatrist thought.

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