With Andres leaving and the rest of the campfire descending into another drunken stupor, there’s no longer any good reason to avoid my tent.
Itisimpossible to know. This is a fact, indisputable. True down to my cells.
Even if I know it might end, don’t I still want to try? The question comes out of nowhere, catching my blindside. Maybe the pain of an ending is worth the euphoria of a beginning.Maybe I need to see for myself. Maybe what I want is stronger than what I fear.
I walk slowly to our tent, each step a careful choice. A gust of chilly wind hits and I start shivering. The tent is only a few feet away now. I could grab another layer before I get ready for bed. Pretend that nothing is different. My hand drifts out to the zipper, and the shadow of another hand, on the other side of the nylon, mirrors it, reaching for the same zipper.
Is Eitan leaving? My first thought:he’s looking for you.There’s an ocean between us, and at the same time, nothing but a thin flap of fabric.
I want to swim toward him. I want to howl together, to be spun beneath the bright lights of a dance floor, to sit on the floor together, talking about love. I am made ofwanting. Of dreams. Of thunder.
My hand pulls down the tent’s zipper, a slow undoing.
The tent is filled with him. His presence, his scent, his light. He shuffles back to lean on a palm, but it’s too late. My body wants to be close to his. Fir aftershave lingers on him, his natural musk more potent after three days in the woods. It smells like belonging.
“Finally ask out Andres?” Eitan asks. His jaw is tense, his words terse. The lamp casts his features in a warm yellow glow. He looks like a home I could enter and never leave.
“I’m not interested in Andres.” I sink down to sit on my knees. On his sleeping bag.
He swallows, the motion heavy. Leaden. The air is thick with words I’ve left unsaid for too long. “Did you mean what you said?” I ask. “About building something?”
Eitan shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear his thoughts enough to parse out an answer. “I always mean what I say.”
His face looks so soft in the lamplight, I want to touch it. I need to touch it. My first instinct was right: Eitan is the firstsight of search and rescue after getting lost in the wilderness. Water in the desert. A flash of lightning in an ink-black storm.
We reach for each other at the same time. My hands hold his face and his wrap around my waist, our foreheads kissing.
“I do want more,” Eitan says, with a voice made of gravel. “Of course I do. I’m sorry it took me a little time to get you an answer.”
“I want more too,” I say, breathless.I want everything.Even though we’re saying the same things, wanting the same things, my stomach is full of static. “It’s—I—” I remember Lucy and the cocoon. The hardest state to understand, to see which way is up and which is down, is when you are in the middle of the transformation. When you are being reformed, cell by cell, into a completely new creature.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, as some feeble explanation for why this moment feels like a Gravitron, tilting and careening, and so desperately out of my control. “It feels like I’m becoming a new person. There’s the old me, and there’s this new version I will be. But I’m in the middle of the transition, so I’m not that new person yet, and I’m not my old self.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “And it’s—painful.”
Our lips are only centimeters apart. But even from this close, Eitan’s eyes shine. Desperate and hungry.
“I don’t care what version of you I get. I just want you.” Eitan pulls back, but his arms wrap tighter around me. “The way you make me feel—” He shakes his head. “I think it’s what I’ve been scouring the world for.”
My breath catches. Cancer treatment was like walking through fire. Feeling your life burn down around you, each step you take. But with a moment like this waiting on the other end of it, the walk feels worth it.
I can’t condense this realization into coherent words, but at the same time, it’s exactly what Eitan just said.
“Me too,” I whisper.
We lean in at the same time, and our lips collide.
chapter
twenty-six
It’sa piston sparking at midnight on a rural road. A light, bright and beautiful, in a dark so bottomless it feels empty.
Eitan kisses like he’s going to find the secrets of the Universe on my lips. It’s tender and vibrant and so deliciously needy. And I’m needy too. Since treatment and the breakup, it’s been a string of one bad date after another, and any kisses have been stilted and half unwanted and cursory. I see now that he was holding back after the open mic. But whatever he was scared of then, he’s not scared of anymore. Maybe it was the enormity ofwe. Of feelings so expansive there’s no way for them to be confined to one moment. Maybe he thought I wasn’t ready to be kissed like this until now. And I wasn’t. Eitan has turned me inside out.
“You’re so beautiful,” Eitan breaks the kiss to tell me, breathing heavily. “Like a flower that blooms at night.” He dots my cheeks with kisses, his hands holding me like I’m precious. Like I’m— “Breathtaking,” he whispers against my lips.
The moment is overwhelming. Everything I’ve dreamed of, and at the same time, more than I could have imagined. I’m the Grinch on Christmas morning, my heart growing three sizes inmy chest. I need to see more of Eitan. I need our limbs to be inextricably tangled. I needeverything.
I run my hands over his shoulders, up his neck, and into that thick head of hair I’ve fantasized about for months now. Eitan’s hands chart their own path, from my jaw into my hair, down my spine. We’re mapping each other, surveying every curve and dip, in a language only we know. It’s novel, and familiar, like two bodies finding their way back to each other. From across continents, or lifetimes.
