Sex

by Francine Pascal

  But no. That was a tad unrealistic, wasn’t it? In reality it seemed that sex wasn’t just about love and passion and “the perfect moment.” No, in keeping with Gaia’s usual misfortune, she’d been introduced to fearlike feelings just in time to discover that sex was also apparently… rather scary.

  “Gaia,” Ed said softly, sliding his fingers down her cheeks and gripping her shoulders with the purest kindness. “You don’t have to say anything, okay? We could just lie here like this for the next fifty, sixty years without talking, without doing anything, and I’d be happy.”

  Speak, Gaia, she implored herself. Make sounds.

  “I don’t even want you to say anything,” Ed insisted. “I only asked you because it just felt like we were headed toward…” He stopped himself midsentence, seeming to reconsider what he wanted to say or at least how he wanted to say it. “I’m not in any kind of hurry,” he said. “I mean, we’re just sort of… starting here, and I wasn’t even thinking about… Well, I mean, yes, I was thinking about it, but… we can wait for… I mean, we can wait as long as you want.”

  Tell him what you want, Gaia.

  “Gaia…?” Ed searched her eyes for signs of life. “I’m going to take your zombielike state to mean no. That you’re not ready.” He smiled at her, leaned his head forward, and touched his warm lips to the spot where her neck met her shoulder. “Though I would like to mention that you are immensely beautiful when you’re pondering.”

  Ed reached over Gaia to take his shirt, which was balled up next to her. His smooth chest grazed over her, which only added to her state. Without even thinking, Gaia grabbed the shirt before Ed could get to it, leaving his body hovering over hers, even closer than he had been before.

  “Wait,” she insisted, feeling the heat of his face on her skin. “I just have… a few questions.”

  Ed looked slightly hesitant. He stopped reaching for his shirt and looked back into Gaia’s eyes. “What kind of questions?” She was finding it difficult to focus with his body pressed against hers like this.

  “Why?” she asked. “I thought I was the one who didn’t like answering questions.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Ed said, “I just…”

  “What?”

  “I just don’t think so well when we’re this close. What if I give the wrong answers?” The beautifully nervous look on Ed’s face made Gaia feel far less settled. It also made him that much more irresistible. She had to force her hands not to latch onto his naked shoulder blades.

  “They’re easy questions,” she said.

  Ed paused for a moment to consider. “Okay, go.”

  “Okay. Question one: Are you aware that I am a deeply flawed human being?”

  “Well aware,” Ed said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. His eyes moved across her face, seeming to savor each individual aspect separately.

  “And do you understand that my life outside of this bed is… completely screwed up? I mean, beyond any kind of—”

  “These are really easy questions,” Ed interrupted. His smile nearly left her speechless, but she managed to gasp out the next question.

  “And do you have a—a—” she stammered. “You know—do you have—protection?”

  Ed looked almost offended by the question. “Of course I do,” he said. “What kind of guy…” His face went blank in the middle of his own sentence. “Wait,” he said, looking like he’d just gotten lost in the middle of some kind of maze. “Are you saying you want…?”

  “And do you trust me?” she interrupted him.

  “Gaia.” He shook his head with a disapproving smile. “I’m supposed to ask you that. Do you trust me? That’s how it works. You have to be sure that you trust me.”

  She didn’t even see the point in that question. To describe how much she trusted Ed would have been redundant. To try and list all the reasons she trusted him would have taken too long. Of course she trusted him. More than she would be able or want to describe. Much like the way she’d realized she loved him and wanted him. Indescribable.

  Gaia had known Ed longer than anyone other than her own parents. What she had with Ed had taken months to build. Months of slowly increasing trust and adoration. Months of conversations and confessions. Months of finding ridiculous and entertaining ways to pass the time together. Inept misunderstandings always followed by desperately needed reconciliation. The thought of separation always leading to a deeper connection. She didn’t know a thing about relationships, but wasn’t that exactly what all those things added up to? A real relationship. The realest kind. Not the thing that hit you like lightning and could slip away just as quickly, but something built much more slowly… with an unbreakable foundation. That’s what Gaia had discovered here with Ed.

  Maybe someone who didn’t understand their relationship would have thought it was too soon, but something about this moment and this night… it just felt like the culmination of all their days together. Gaia felt like they’d broken through to the other side of something, and she didn’t want to go back. She just wanted to keep going forward.

  “Then yes,” she said, looking into his eyes.

  “Yes, you trust me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, yes, I trust you… but I meant yes to the other thing. The first question.”

  “What was the first question?” Ed asked.

  “The one about being ready,” she said.

  Ed scrunched his brow, trying to keep up with Gaia’s stream of consciousness. “The one about being ready…” She could have sworn she suddenly heard Ed let out an audible gulp as he gave her a look that bordered somewhere between awe and shock.

  Ed looked deeper into Gaia’s eyes. “Wait, I’m confused.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she explained. “I’m not confused at all.”

  With that, she finally gave in to her own hands. She allowed them to caress Ed’s chest, running her fingers around the contours of his back and pulling him to her with a deep, unbridled kiss.

  Ed pulled his head back for a moment. But not to say any more. Only to smile at her. The use of words no longer seemed necessary.

  He leaned back down, and he kissed her with a very different kind of kiss—a kiss that seemed to announce that something new had just begun. His hands became less careful and more confident as he pressed her body closer to his, rocketing her back into a state of full-blown shivers.

  Those shivers. It wasn’t until this moment that Gaia truly understood those glorious shivers. Ed had been under the impression that she was cold. Wrong. Gaia had been sure that her shivers were just the physical manifestation of all the joy and happiness coursing through her veins. That was true, but it was still only half the story. Once again she’d avoided the obvious:

  She was shivering because she was afraid. And for the first time since her uncle’s injection, Gaia finally remembered why she had yearned so much for fear in the first place. Yes, she had been happy before. Yes, she had even been ecstatic and overjoyed. But before fear had been introduced into her life, Gaia had never known what it felt like to be thrilled. Thrilled, the way normal, everyday people could be thrilled.

  So much of her life had felt like a chess game up until this point. Even her fights. Always knowing her next move before she made it. Always knowing what their next move would be—always knowing what they planned to do to her next.

  But this was nothing like chess. This was so far from chess. As Ed’s hands slid so slowly down her shivering back and her hands floated along the center of his chest, Gaia finally understood that there was no way of being thrilled without being afraid. The thrill was born of the fear itself. It was the not knowing. Not knowing where her instincts would lead her or even which ones she might give in to. Everything she was about to feel was totally unknowable. That’s what was making her shiver. And that was something she could only describe as… gloriously scary.

  He grasped the top of her thigh as they rolled over together and forgot about anything beyond that bed.r />
  And with each more passionate kiss, Gaia began to understand why those love scenes in romantic movies always faded to black—why the chapter almost always ended just before the act itself. It wasn’t because the reality of sex was too scary or too “dirty.” At least, not when it was right. It was simply that being with Ed like that… was too intimate to describe. Too close for any words or images to do it justice. It was something for only Gaia and Ed to know.

  Ed froze like he’d just been zapped by an alien space ray in a C-grade Japanese sci-fi movie.

  * * *

  deranged wish fulfillment

  * * *

  ONE CRISP, SUN-DRENCHED MORNING, two grande lattes, and Josh Brown. There could be no finer combination. At least, not as far as Heather was concerned.

  * * *

  Murderously Gorgeous

  * * *

  It was what Heather liked to refer to as a “Mary Poppins” morning. One of those mornings where the spirit of Walt Disney had not just taken over Times Square, but all of New York City, even below Fourteenth Street and down to the Astor Place Starbucks. The trees seemed to be politely stepping out of their way for her. All the rumpled, unshaven bohemians seemed to lock arms and dance a two-step down lower Broadway, while cartoon birds seemed to flitter down from the bright blue sky and perch on Heather’s fingers, winking at her and exchanging whistled melodies as she floated into Starbucks.

  Of course none of the above had taken place, but something far more dreamy and miraculous had: Josh’s unheard of and all too daring Morning Follow-up.

  Heather still couldn’t believe it. She and Josh hadn’t finished their previous coffee rendezvous until midnight last night. But at the end of that unbelievable evening, Josh had actually suggested that they meet again the very next morning. Nine hours. Nine hours between coffee dates. That kind of dating proximity was generally reserved for either deep, insatiable love affairs or desperately lonely people. And considering Josh’s inhumanly beautiful appearance, she knew loneliness was simply not a possibility. Not that Heather thought he’d developed a deep insatiable love for her after one spilled coffee encounter and one semi-impromptu Starbucks chat. But nine hours? Even Romeo could wait more than nine hours to see Juliet. Things were looking awfully good.

  And Josh was looking awfully good. His black T-shirt offered no distraction from his perfectly sculpted, angular face and arms and his slightly spiky, still wet from the shower jet black hair.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” he said, ducking his head in disbelief after Heather sat down at their sun-warmed window table.

  “What?” she asked, widening her eyes with concern. Had she done something wrong before she’d even sat down?

  Josh brought his head back up and stared at Heather, his eyes reflecting in the sun like blinding blue neon. “You can’t look this good at nine in the morning,” he said. “No one looks this good at nine in the morning.”

  “Oh.” Heather smiled, feeling her feet melting into her Steve Madden shoes. “Well, I…” She could do nothing other than smile and look like an idiot. Was there any possible response to that? Probably there was, but not when Josh said it, there wasn’t.

  “You’re one of those, aren’t you?” he said.

  “One of what?” she replied shyly.

  Josh leaned forward on the table. “You’re one of those girls who looks equally as beautiful when she gets out of bed in the morning as she does on a Friday night at seven-thirty.”

  “Okay, stop,” she giggled, averting her eyes from his murderously gorgeous grin. Silently, she prayed that he wouldn’t stop.

  “No, really,” he went on. Her prayers had been yielding unprecedented success these last twelve hours. First he’d shown up at Starbucks last night after her wishful semi-stalker-like stakeout. Then came his suggestion of Morning Follow-up coffee. And now this. “Really. I bet you look like this the second you climb out of bed.”

  Now her legs had pretty much melted as well. When Josh said the word bed, Heather found it somewhat difficult to breathe, let alone put together a verbal response.

  “I’m sorry,” Josh said with an embarrassed chuckle as he leaned back in his chair. “Did that just come out as being ludicrously inappropriate? I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s fine,” she assured him with a nervous laugh. “It’s just not true, believe me. I’m sure you look a hell of a lot better than I do in the morning.”

  Was that the right response? Stay cool Heather, you’re losing your touch here. Heather considered herself to have something of a Ph.D. in flirtation, but Josh was making it next to impossible for her to keep her feet planted on the ground. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he’d already melted her feet. And her legs, for that matter.

  “Look, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. Heather had no idea what he was sorry about, but she immediately felt her heart drop down into her stomach. Good Lord, this was bad.

  “What?” she said, trying to mask her concern.

  “I’m sorry, I just have to ask…”

  “Ask what?” she whined inadvertently.

  “Okay,” he said, planting his elbows on the table with a confrontational glance. “When I found you here last night…”

  Oh God. Busted. Totally busted. Heather grabbed her lukewarm latte and guzzled half of it down, looking for a calming jolt of caffeine. He knew she’d been waiting for him. He must have known that she’d been on a five-hour stakeout for him. She might as well have had a huge pair of binoculars hanging around her neck, a pith helmet, and a group of resentful natives carrying her supplies. She’d fallen down into the ranks of the hunter-explorer girls. The millions of non-self-respecting Stalker skanks across the nation who lived for no other purpose than to entrap some unsuspecting dude and seduce their way into last-resort-late-night-hookup status with him.

  “I just don’t understand,” Josh went on as Heather cringed internally. Go on. Say it. Just say it. “I don’t understand what a beautiful girl like you could have possibly been doing alone at Starbucks last night.”

  Heather’s head suddenly felt much lighter. Another compliment. Not the end of the line. Could she be any more sensitive? Any more of a full-blown loser? Relax, girl. You’re Heather Gannis, for God’s sake. Never to be confused with the pathetic hunter skanks of the world. She tried to shake off her panic as quickly as possible, hoping it hadn’t shown through her long-rehearsed emergency smile.

  “Come on, tell me the truth,” he said with a sly grin. “Did you just break up with your boyfriend or something?”

  She was so relieved to be undiscovered that she didn’t even bother holding back with her answer. “Well, not exactly just,” she said, without even thinking. She guzzled some more latte to ease her sudden dry mouth. “It was a little while ago, but after we broke up… he kind of moved on to this other girl I know.”

  Ugh. That had been unpleasant to say out loud. Did Josh really need to know this?

  “Ooh,” Josh groaned with a comic wince. “Were you, like, good friends with this other girl?”

  “No.” Heather laughed, looking more and more at her coffee. “Far from it.”

  She found herself wondering what Ed and Gaia were doing at this very moment. The last time she’d seen them, Gaia had actually gone pretty much berserk in the cafeteria, spewing out a totally uncharacteristic jealous tirade at Ed and her new Russian roommate (or something), Tatiana.

  Watching them fight could have provided some kind of weird relief for Heather, as if maybe things weren’t so damn heavenly in the world of Ed and Gaia. But the fact was, watching Gaia go nuts on Ed and Tatiana had only made Heather feel worse. Jealousy. It was the ultimate proof Heather had needed. If she’d had any doubts, now she knew for sure that Gaia was in love with Ed. Only love could make a girl go off on someone like that.

  So what were they doing at this moment? They’d probably made up already. And two people are never more in love than when they make up after a fight. They make up. And
then they have the makeup hug. And then the makeup kissing.

  And then the makeup sex.

  That’s probably what they were doing at this moment. Having wild, passionate makeup sex. Whatever. She doesn’t deserve him. She doesn’t deserve to know what it feels like to be with him. I was his first. There’s nothing anyone can do to change—

  Whoa, Heather. New leaf! Where the hell is your new leaf?

  Right. The new leaf that Heather had worked so hard to turn over. She was through with resentment, and selfish thinking, and petty jealousy. New Heather didn’t have those feelings. New Heather was Gaia’s friend. New Heather tried to help Gaia out of a jam when she needed it. New Heather just wanted to see Ed happy—whoever he was with. Right? Yes… yes, that’s right.

  “Heather?”

  “Huh?” Heather looked back up at Josh. His expression seemed to suggest that he was waiting on an answer to a question. Though Heather hadn’t heard a thing.

  “I said, are you jealous? You know, of this girl who stole your man,” he joked.

  Heather tried to answer before allowing herself to think further. “No,” she blurted. “I’m not…. I mean… I’m really trying to stay away from that kind of thinking, you know… petty jealousies and stuff like that.”

  Josh’s grin grew wider as he bored his stunning eyes deeper into Heather’s. “Come on,” he crooned, searching intently with an extremely cute little taunting glint in his eye. “It’s not petty, Heather, it’s human. You don’t have to pretend with me, you know. You hardly know me. And I don’t know them. It’s the perfect situation to confess. Confess, Heather,” he joked, pointing his finger directly in her face with the archetypal glare of the Grand Inquisitor. “Thou wilt confess thy jealousy.”

  Heather couldn’t help but laugh. Gorgeous, smart, and funny. She would have thought he was just a dream if his long, thick finger hadn’t been pointing directly between her eyes.