Page 33 of Guy's Girl
Adrian can’t get the wrapper off the condom. He’s naked, and so is Ginny, and he can’t get the goddamn wrapper off the goddamn condom.
“Let me.” Ginny appears at his side. She kisses his shoulder, then takes the condom from his hands and tears it open with her teeth.
Adrian isn’t motivated by sex. Not the way some men are. He enjoys it, obviously, but he doesn’t spend weeks pursuing women for the sole purpose of sleeping with them. He wasn’t even planning to sleep with Ginny today. But now that it’s happening, it feels inevitable, a wave finally reaching shore.
Almost every one of the women with whom Adrian has slept have been one-night stands. Flings he met at a bar or the Delphic. He felt no emotional attachment to those women. Just basic, alcohol-fueled desire.
With Ginny, it’s different.
She positions herself above him, holding him with gentle fingers. He finds as he watches her that what he feels isn’t basic desire. He isn’t thinking about her breasts or her hips or the soft curve of her lips. He’s wondering if she’s cold, if he has the air-conditioning too high. He’s wondering if she’s comfortable, if she likes to have sex this way. He’s thinking about all the moments they’ve shared in the past month. The questions she’s asked. The secrets she’s told him. The way she listens when he talks. The way she makes him feel like he’s finally allowed to be comfortable in his own skin.
Then she lowers onto him, and he sinks into her, forgetting all that entirely.
Ginny’s head dips back, shoulder-length hair floating down her shoulders. She uses the muscled length of her thighs to raise and lower her body. Adrian can hardly think straight, but he knows he doesn’t like the idea that she has to do all the work, so he pushes himself up into a seated position and wraps his arms around her back, holding her tight to his chest. Ginny loops her arms around his neck and lowers her forehead onto his shoulder. Waves of pleasure roll from his pelvis up through his stomach, his chest, in every place that Ginny’s hand touches. Together, they move her body up and down, up and down until they’re both panting, sweat running down their bodies in long rivulets.
“Adrian,” she whispers.
The sound of his name coming from Ginny’s mouth does something to Adrian. His muscles tighten, drawing her closer. A strange tension is building within him—different from the typical one, the escalation before release. It feels warm and dense, like the soft roots of a plant taking hold in the soil. He can’t identify the feeling, and something about it scares him.
He flips Ginny over, maneuvering so that her head lands softly on his pillow. He lays his chest atop hers. The heat from her skin seems to seep all the way through to his stomach. This doesn’t feel like normal sex to Adrian. There are no tricks, no theatrical moans. It’s just him and Ginny and the soft music of their breathing.
The waves of pleasure build and become almost overwhelming. He tries to time things right, to not come before she does, but she feels so good that he isn’t able to hold back for long. When he finishes, it doesn’t feel like the tension within him releases into the air, into nothing. It feels like it seeps from his body into Ginny’s, like she now holds a piece of him.
He rolls off her and onto the tangle of bedsheets. He holds out an arm, and Ginny crawls under it. She lays her head on his chest.Her toes slide down his calf, one leg fitting itself between his thighs.
“That was nice,” Ginny whispers.
“Yeah.” He smiles, tracing circles around her shoulder. “It was.”
They’re quiet after that, bodies adrift on a gentle sea. Adrian shuts his eyes. He’s tired. He’s always tired. But he finds that of all the ways in which he’s fallen asleep since moving to New York—in his bed, on the couch, under his desk, on the subway ride home—he likes this one the most.
After they have sex, Ginny does her best to keep things casual. She doesn’t bring upwhat they are, or speak of the bleak sadness that normally seeps into her body after sleeping with someone. She gives him the light version of Ginny, the same one she gives everyone else.
But she’s fighting a losing battle. She knows it. You see, Ginny gives love too freely. Doles it out like flyers on the side of the road. She will accept anyone, befriend anything. By the time she finishes distributing every ounce of love within her, she has none left for herself.
They see each other more and more, after that weekend.
Adrian’s favorite Hungarian photographer has an exhibition at a gallery in SoHo; Ginny stares so hard at each photograph that he’s surprised they don’t light on fire.
They speed down the paths of Central Park, Adrian on a bicycle, Ginny on her Rollerblades. They weave through bridal parties and moms with strollers. Ginny grabs onto the back of Adrian’s bike seat and he pulls her up the steepest hills.
They go to a coffee shop in Brooklyn where board games and cards are spread out on low-rise tables and refurbished trunks. They drink three cups of coffee each and, by the end, Ginny’s leg fidgets faster than a woodpecker. When she wins at Yahtzee, she yells, “Fuck yeah, motherfucker,” so loudly that half the shop turns around.
Each time Ginny asks him to meet, he almost says no, then changes his mind.
Adrian refuses to think of them as being in a relationship. He went to Harvard because it was the logical decision. He ran for vice president of his final club because it was the logical decision. He took the job at Goldman because it was the logical decision.
He will not fall into a relationship because it is the logical decision. He will wait for love, no matter how long it takes, even if he’s ultimately incapable, even if he’s alone forever.
In the morning, Ginny arrives to work pumped full of zero breakfast and a headful of endorphins left over from an hour spent forcibly wringing sleep from her body on the treadmill in their building’s basement. She heads over to her standing desk, nods at her coworkers, opens her laptop. She answers an email or three and scrolls through her list of tasks for the day.
At eleven o’clock on the dot, her phone dings with a message from Finch.Shake Shack?
This has become their ritual. Every week at noon, they meet in Madison Square Park, where, after quickly scarfing down two burgers and French fries, they pick up their Diet Cokes and do laps around the maze of pavement.
And talk.
And talk.
