“No, you are perfect just the way you are,” he says.
I want to roll over to face him, kiss him, but I have not brushed my teeth, and I am worried about my breath. No, I am worried abouteverything.
“What do you see?” I ask the pillow.
“Everything you do not.”
“Stop being so philosophical.”
“Stop hating yourself,” Leo says, voice firm. “Don’t diminish yourself. Don’t diminish me.”
For a moment, there is silence, that buzzing sort of silence that grows louder the longer you are quiet, more deafening the longer you remain in your head.
Is he mad now?
Why didn’t I just keep my mouth shut?
I almost ruined our first date, and now I’ve made good on my promise. Why am I so intent on harming happiness?
Leo’s hands and arms are wrapped around my body. I should feel safer than I have my whole life, and yet this feels like a ruse.
I don’t feel as if I deserve this.
“Sid,” Leo whispers. “Sid. It’s okay.”
The roar in my head diminishes to white noise.
Is this the way my name should be uttered? One single simple syllable suddenly so rich with nuance, emotion, passion that it becomes not just a name but a living, breathing entity.
I think of the very few times I had sex with Rebecca.
I never uttered her name with a quivering shudder.
And she never said my name. Ever. Sex was a job meant to have an outcome: children. Three preferably. To please our parents.
Sex wasn’t even quid pro quo for us: You do this for me, I do this for you, and—at the very least—some pleasure is derived. No, sex was perfunctory, pleasure-free, a checklist like the duty chart Ron puts up every week in Zsa Zsa. You are thrilled when it is over, not while you are doing it.
I never yearned for sex with Rebecca, and she never yearned for me. Neither of us was ever present during our most intimate moments.
We eventually turned our fantasies into pathetic, fleeting affairs, finding our pleasure elsewhere, alone with faces and bodies we pretended were lovers. My anonymous encounters were inhotel rooms during the middle of the day, parked cars, restaurant bathrooms. The guilt and panic set in—as they are doing right now for me decades later—when the rush of pleasure was over and I looked into the faces of my anonymous partners and saw—and felt—nothing at all.
“Sid?” Leo asks.
“I’m still here,” I whisper.
“Good,” he says.
I am still here. Somehow. Just before the hourglass has run out of sand.
I can feel the sun lift higher above the mountain. It shines on me, warms my bare arm, which is wrapped in Leo’s.
Leo’s closeness makes me uncomfortable. I am not used to it.
He is asking for me to see myself? But what do I see?
I stare at our intertwined arms.
The striations of gold on his tan skin, or the dark spots on mine?
