Page 20 of Exit Lane
In one motion, Teddy stands with my legs still wrapped around his waist and carries me to my bedroom. The sight of him, arms flexed and chest flushed, is the in-the-flesh manifestation of every night I’ve imagined him while touching myself, the moments I’ve squeezed my eyes shut and writhed with enough fervor to conjure him in front of me. The real thing, it turns out, is even more compelling. “This is me,” he says, his lips dragging across my neck, “asking if I can take off your pants. And your underwear.” I can barely whimper a “yes.” My head falls back against a mountain of sheets, and my heart starts racing as I watch him undress me. My hands reach for his waist, pulling myself into him, my need for him against his need for me. “The jeans have to go,” I say, and I laugh as he undoes his belt and fights off his stiff denim with one hand, pulling my pants down with the other. This is the part I normally rush. With Teddy, I want everything to stay in slow motion.
He presses my shoulders against the bed, and I bask in the feeling of being fully naked in front of him. Almost on instinct, I move my hand between my legs, verifying that Iam as swollen and as wet as I feel. Teddy watches me, then gently grabs my wrist and brings my fingers to his mouth, sucking the taste of me off of them. “This is what I want,” he mutters. “I’ve wanted this for so long, Mar. More than anything, I’ve wanted this.” He moves my hand back to the pillow, pinning it above my head, and runs his tongue along the side of my neck. Then he’s at my breasts, my rib cage, my hip, my thigh, leaving wet kisses and whispering my name with every exhale. By the time his tongue is dragging along my clit, his hands holding my legs open with authority, I am on the edge of release, my entire body electrified.
How many times in life is the real thing better than the hundreds of ways I imagined it beforehand? And why did I want so badly not to want this?
Steadying my hips, he looks up to see how needy I’ve become, and his attention on my face intensifies my desperation. “What do you want?”
“Teddy, I want you to fuck me,” I manage between waves of almost orgasms. In this dim light, I can barely make out a smile before he plants his hands on either side of me and pulls himself up so our faces are an inch from each other. I pull his boxers down, and he kicks them off the rest of the way, landing them somewhere between my vintage armoire and stack of unread novels.
Our bodies together feel mesmerizing. I don’t know how to get as close to him as I want to be—if that is even possible to achieve. As if he can hear my thoughts, he presses his chest into mine. I can feel his heart beating, and for thefirst time, I feel the thunderbolt of fear. This will be over. We’ll have to put together the pieces of what’s unfolding and make sense of what’s next. With anyone else, this is when I start to make my exit plan, retreat into the recesses of my head to build up walls before anything can take root.
But before I can fall into old habits, Teddy loops an arm underneath me and rolls us over, flipping me on top of him. His palm is splayed against my lower back, and he pulls me into him. “Stay with me, baby,” he says, reading my mind. Teddy’s a flashlight on all my darkest parts.
So I do. I stay with him as he unrolls a condom I pull from my nightstand drawer. I stay with him as he pauses at my entrance, tormenting me as he takes his time teasing himself into me. I stay with him as he sinks into me fully, a groan escaping his lips, his eyes staying locked on mine. Having him inside of me feels like an untying of the knot that’s tethered me to everything I’ve been afraid of. My eyes go wet, and I tilt my head back and rest my gaze on the ceiling. It’s as though my whole understanding of my life and what I want from it rearranges itself around this moment in my bedroom.
“Tell me how it feels, Mar,” he prods, bringing me back to the moment again, rocking into me and pressing the heel of his hand against my clit.
“Not like anything I’ve ever felt before,” I respond, gasping, reaching for his head and holding it into my neck. No past, no future, no story. Just here. The naked honesty of my answer and the shifting angle of our bodies sends me overthe edge, and I can feel my walls convulsing and clenching around him. His release follows mine, one domino falling after the other.
I slip out of bed almost immediately after for the bathroom, and my rosy cheeks and knotted hair in the mirror strike me as a sharp contrast to my usual composure—more revealing than my actual nudity. I wait for a jolt of panic, but it doesn’t come. “See what happens,” I tell myself out loud as the water runs. I crawl back into bed, interlace my legs with his, and watch the silent snowfall out the window. As he kisses my neck and sighs into my chest, it’s obvious neither of us wants to speak first. To start trying to make sense of what just happened.I fucked Teddy McCarrel, I think, leading with the facts.And it was the best sex of my life.This feels like the beginning of something monumental, terrifyingly so.
I decide to offer an out.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I say. “This can just be something that happened when you randomly decided to visit me in Copenhagen if you want it to be.”
Teddy’s face drops, a flash of anger turning sweet, somewhere closer to conviction. “Mar, I’m sick of pretending like this isn’t what it is. That it isn’t exactly what I want it to be. I’ve never had sex like that before. I’ve never wanted to have sex with someone the way I’ve wanted to be with you all these years. But it’s not about the sex—I mean, not that I’m anywhere close to processing that, but...” He reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ear, pulling his face to my neck.“We’re going to talk about this—ad nauseam. With breaks for more sex and more cardamom rolls.”
A wave of relief. That my eject button was denied. “Whatever you say,” I whisper, kissing him on the cheek and curling toward him.
“If that’s you trying to ask to cuddle, permission granted.”
Our exhales start to sync, and I struggle to keep my eyes open. “Can we do it all over again tomorrow?” His voice is small, tentative. All this time, I’ve been concerned with following a series of rules architected for control, too busy tryingnot to feelto give Teddy a chance. Too focused on racing off into all the tomorrows.
“I loved today.” I kiss his jaw and smooth his coppery hair.
I let my eyelids fall, and as I do, I think about my dad, like I do most nights, and wonder what he would say. He and my mom were married at twenty-one with a reception in a church basement and pies baked by aunts on either side. “Love can be as complicated as you want it to be,” he told me after he was diagnosed, the week I was waiting to be asked to homecoming by a now very happily out man who, at the time, I thought understood me like no one else.
“I didn’t say anything about love, Dad, relax. I just want Dylan to want to be with me.”
He laughed, leaning back against the front porch where we spent most nights after dinner. “Fine.Youcan make anything as complicated as you want it to be. The trickis knowing what to let be uncomplicated.” He died a few months later.
Teddy turns to his side, spooning me and snoring in my ear. I smile, wipe away a tear, and resolve to let this be uncomplicated.
XVI
Teddy
The disbelief of waking up with Marin Voss’s body next to mine jolts me. Last night replays in vignettes. Somehow it was everything I hoped and more than I expected at the same time. But that’s her.
Amid the bliss, there’s a tight pang of guilt. I know I have to deal with life, to return the voicemails from my doctor.Do they leave you two messages if it’s good news?I wonder and pull the covers tighter. Right now, all I want is to stay in this hard-earned happiness forever.
“Hi,” she whispers, rolling over toward me, the weight of her body bringing me back to earth. And back to wanting to forget it all to be with her. Her nipple peeks out from the sheet, and I cover it with my mouth.
We have the kind of sleepy sex I’ve always fantasized about—eyes closed, long kisses, sighing into each other’s shoulders.
“I took the rest of the week off,” she says, back from the kitchen with two cups of ginger tea. “And I promise I won’t make us visit any more museums.”
Instead, we spend the morning in bed, reading a pileofNew Yorkers she saved for an indeterminate future date and drinking cappuccinos. My phone dies on a counter in another room, and its existence barely crosses my mind. There are too many conversations to catch up on. We both try to read a book across from each other on the sofa but just end up making out. “You’re very distracting,” she laughs, tracing a finger along my jaw.
