The surgeon’s nurse said “you’re cleared” the way you’d say “your car’s ready,” and I almost cried in a parking garage in front of a stranger’s Corolla.
Cleared. Months of waiting and a little velvet bag of dilators and a drawer full of gauze I was sick of looking at, and then a woman with a lanyard says it’s fine, go live your life, and I walked out into the sun holding a folder of discharge papers like it was a diploma.
I texted Dev from the elevator. just three words. i got cleared.
He called instead of texting back. He doesn’t do that. He’s a texter, he texts me from the next room. He said, “Can I come over tonight or is that too much,” and I said, “that is exactly the right amount,” and then I stood there in the garage with my heart going like I’d run up the stairs.
So that’s how I ended up on my own couch at eight o’clock in a robe I’d put on and taken off twice, pretending to watch something. Candle lit. Candle blown out because it felt like a lot. Candle lit again. I was sore, is the thing. The appointment had been a lot of poking and a lot of a very kind doctor saying “little pressure here,” and I felt it all over again every time I shifted on the cushion. A dull tender ache, like a bruise you keep pressing to check it’s still there.
And I was scared. Not of him. He’s the least scary person I’ve ever been naked with. He cried at a dog food commercial in front of me and then blamed allergies. I was scared of me. Of what if it feels like nothing. Of what if it feels like a lot of nothing and I have to say that out loud.
He knocked the way he always knocks, two quick and one slow. I opened the door and he was holding a grocery bag and a single sad grocery-store tulip, upside down, like he’d forgotten he had it.
“I didn’t know what to bring,” he said. “So I brought soup. And a flower. In case you wanted to be romanced or fed.”
“Both,” I said. “Both is good.”
We ate the soup. It was that gross kind in a carton, tomato, and I loved it. He sat on the other end of the couch with his socks on my coffee table and didn’t say anything about it and didn’t not say anything about it, and finally I put my spoon down and said, “You can just ask.”
“Ask what?”
“Dev.”
“Okay.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sore. And I’m so nervous I might throw up this soup. And I want you so bad I can’t see straight.” I laughed and it came out wobbly. “All three. At once.”
He put his bowl down. He crossed the couch on his knees, which is a ridiculous way to cross a couch, and took my face in both hands, and kissed me so softly I felt it in my stomach, in the backs of my knees. His mouth tasted like tomato. I started laughing into it and he started laughing and we sort of fell sideways, and I ended up half under him with my robe gaping and his hand flat on my ribs.
“Slow,” he said into my neck. “We have all night. We have all the nights. Nobody’s timing us.”
“Okay.”
“If it’s weird we stop and watch bad TV.”
“It’s not going to be weird.”
“It might be a little weird.”
“It might be a little weird,” I agreed.
He undressed me like he was unwrapping something that could break. The robe slid off my shoulders and he kissed each one. He kissed down my sternum and I could feel my own pulse in my throat. When he got to my hips he stopped and just looked, and I put my arm over my face, and he moved it gently away.
“Hey. Look at me.”
I looked at him.
“You’re so beautiful it’s honestly annoying,” he said. “I had a whole plan for tonight. Be cool. Be calm. I’ve been hard since the elevator text.”
“Since the elevator text?”
“I was in a meeting. I had to hold a binder in front of me.”
That did it. That broke the nerves right open. I was laughing with my whole chest and he was grinning down at me, and when I reached down and felt him through his jeans, hot and heavy and definitely not calm, my laugh turned into a sound I didn’t plan to make.
He got his shirt off. I got his jeans open. We kissed with our teeth a little. And then he slid down the bed, and settled between my thighs on his stomach, and I felt every muscle in my legs lock up.
“Tell me if it’s too much,” he said. “Just say red, or stop, or ow. I’ll take ow.”
“ow’s good.”
“Ow’s very clear.”
The first touch of his mouth was so light I almost didn’t feel it, and then I did. Oh. His tongue, flat and warm, one slow stripe, and a flash of something went up my spine like a struck match. Not nothing. Not nothing at all. I made this shaky little noise and my hand found his hair.
“There?” he said against me.
“Yeah. Yeah, there, keep, oh my god.”
He kept. He was so slow about it, so patient, working out the shape of me with his lips and the tip of his tongue, circling and then pausing and then circling again, and every time I tensed up from the soreness he eased off and went back to the place that made my toes curl instead. It was a new map and he was reading it out loud with his mouth. I was wet, really wet, which I’d worried about, and the sound of it was so filthy I covered my face with my other arm and he said “good, that’s so good, listen to you,” and I came very close to dying right there.
He pushed one finger in, barely, just the tip, watching my face.
I hissed.
“Too much?”
“No. It’s — tight. It’s sore. Don’t stop, it’s sore in a good way, I think? Is that a thing? Sore in a good way?”
“That’s definitely a thing.” He eased in another half knuckle, crooking it up, and then did something with his tongue at the same time, and I felt this deep clenching slow roll right in the middle of me that I had never felt before in my life. My back left the mattress.
“Oh. Oh. Dev. Do that again.”
He did that again.
“I feel it. I feel that, I can feel that, it’s like, it’s inside, it’s —” I was babbling. I couldn’t help it. “It’s like a whole other room in the house.”
“A whole other room,” he said, muffled, and I could feel him smiling against me. “Keep talking. I like where you’re going with this.”
I’d been so afraid of this moment going quiet and clinical, and instead I was a sweaty wreck with my heels digging into the sheets, begging him to keep his finger exactly there. He added a second one, so slowly, and the stretch burned a little, a hot ache that made my eyes sting. I breathed through it. He held still. His thumb went up and rubbed small slow circles where my clit used to be a different thing and was now this other new thing, and the ache and the want got braided together until I couldn’t tell where one stopped.
“I want you in me,” I said. “Please. Now. Slowly. Please.”
He crawled up my body, wiping his mouth on his wrist, red-faced and shiny and gorgeous, and reached over for the nightstand. I watched him fumble. I watched his hands shake a little.
“You’re nervous too,” I said.
“I’m so nervous.” He laughed, breathless. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to be good at this. I’ve been thinking about it for like four months and I’m going to be so embarrassing.”
“You can’t be embarrassing. I’m the one with a binder-hard boyfriend and a card from the surgeon in my purse.” I pulled him down. “Just go slow. Be slow. I’ll tell you.”
He lined himself up. I felt the head of his cock against me, thick and hot, and I took a breath and held it.
“Breathe,” he whispered.
I breathed. He pushed.
It was a lot. It was so much. A stretch that went deep and wide and left me making this thin high whine, my nails in his shoulders. He stopped when I whined. He stayed there, only an inch in, shaking with how badly he wanted more, his forehead against mine.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Okay. More. Little more.”
A little more. A little more. Every inch he gave me felt enormous and precise, like I was learning a word in a language I’d only ever guessed at. And somewhere around halfway the sore edge softened and something underneath it opened up, a deep, full, warm pull, and when he finally bottomed out, hips against mine, I felt it all the way in my belly.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god, you’re in me.”
“I’m in you.”
“I can feel all of you.”
“You feel so good.” His voice cracked. “You feel so, fuck, you feel unreal.”
We stayed like that, locked together, for a long moment, just breathing. His heart was pounding against my chest. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he made a sound I will remember until I’m very old.
Then he moved.
Slow. Long, deep, barely pulling back before sliding in again, hips rolling, and every thrust pressed on something inside me that sent a bright slow wave all the way up to the back of my skull. I’d stopped talking. I was just going ah, ah, ah into his shoulder like a broken doorbell. He reached between us and found my clit with his thumb, wet and slick, and matched his rhythm to the circles.
“Good?” he said. “Is this good?”
“So good. Faster. A little. Not too — yes, yes, there, like that.”
The bed creaked. The headboard knocked the wall, soft at first, then not soft. The ache was still there, background hum, but the pleasure was winning, climbing, a tight spiral gathering low in me that I recognized with wonder as something that was going to happen. My thighs were trembling. His mouth was open against my cheek.
“I’m close,” I said, like it was a surprise. “Dev, I think I’m close, I think I’m going to —”
“Do it. Come on. I’ve got you. Come for me.”
His thumb pressed in just right and he drove in deep and held, and the spiral snapped. I came with a cry I didn’t recognize as mine, waves of it, a rolling clenching pulse around him over and over, deeper than anything I’d ever had, so long my toes cramped and I saw white at the edges. I said his name. I said some other things, one of which was, I think, “holy shit,” and one of which may have been “mom,” which we will never discuss.
He lasted maybe three more thrusts. I felt him swell and then go, groaning into my hair, pulsing hot inside me, his whole weight collapsing onto mine. We lay there twitching. Neither of us could move. Sweat cooled on my ribs.
After a minute he lifted his head. His hair was stuck up on one side. He looked completely wrecked.
“Did I,” he started.
“You did.”
“I didn’t hurt —”
“You did a little,” I said. “Worth it.”
He kissed me, sloppy, laughing. And then I felt it, an unmistakable, deeply unromantic gurgle from low in my own body, and I clapped a hand to my stomach.
“Was that you?”
“That was me. That was the soup.”
“Oh, no.”
“I think I have to pee,” I said, with great dignity. “Like, urgently. I’m so sorry. I think everything in there got rearranged. Everything is in a new neighborhood.”
He was laughing so hard the bed shook. “Go! Go, I’ll — I’ll hold your robe.”
I limped to the bathroom bow-legged, one hand on the wall, with a trickle of come running down my thigh, and sat on the toilet and burst out laughing alone in the dark. Then I cried a little, quick, happy, over before it began. Then I cleaned up, and caught myself in the mirror: flushed, wild-haired, a bite mark on my collarbone, glowing like a lightbulb.
When I came back he’d stolen the whole duvet and the tulip was on my pillow, right side up now, propped in a water glass.
“I fixed it,” he said, nodding at the flower. “Also I found your dilators in the drawer and I didn’t touch them, I just want you to know I saw them and I respect them.”
“Get out of my drawers.”
“I’m in your bed, I’m adjacent to your drawers.”
I crawled in against him, sore and sticky and ridiculous, and he pulled me into his chest. My stomach growled again. His answered, a deeper rumble, and we lay there listening to our own bodies argue.
“There’s more soup,” I said.
“I’ll heat it up.”
“Dev.”
“Yeah?”
“Do it again in the morning?”
He grinned into my hair. “Slow?”
“Slow,” I said. “We’ve got all the nights.”
