Exposure

chirp of the crickets, ours the only voices for miles.
She takes a seat on the blanket and I join her. We kick our shoes aside and lie down together, sharing the pillow. I stroke her cheek. Her eyes are drinking up the stars, and I roll onto my back as she is to stare into the sky. I clasp her chilly hand in my warmer one. In moments my body seems to rise from the ground, no periphery here on this hill, the black dome of night suspending us utterly. The starscape appears to rotate, spinning slowly, a vast, black, twirling umbrella peppered with pinholes.
“I feel very strange,” I say at length. A cannabis high, lethargic and soaked in awe, a heightening of the senses, a shedding of the body.
All of this is as foreign to me as weightlessness to a normal person. Paris makes me feel small, but not like this. The insignificance I feel is thrilling, a release that dissolves every muscle, every nerve, every cell, leaving me floating somehow. “Either that wine was spiked, or the sky is.”
She squeezes my hand. “I feel it too. Like gravity’s gone away.”
“Like we’ll peel away from this blanket and tumble into the blackness.”
Another squeeze. “That’s how I felt when you took me up to the roof and told me you loved me. Like I’d drift up into the clouds if you’d let my hand go.”
I let her words linger before I speak, not wanting to chase them away. The stars are multiplying as my eyes adjust, too many to even conceive of.
I tighten my hand around hers. “You’ve brought me so many gifts. Beyond wine and clocks and clothes. This sky and this air, and all the doors you’ve opened.”
A pause, then her voice returns, sounding fragile. “I’m glad.”
“You’ve been so patient.”
“And you’ve been so brave.”
“Perhaps. But I needed the shove, to have stumbled out the door in the first place.” So many times she’s shoved, and so many times I’ve had to suppress my reflexive reactions to the pressure—panic and resentment—ultimately coming to recognize my disorder’s voice for the liar it is.
“The outside is dangerous,” it whispers, selling me fear, calling it fact. “Stay indoors, where you belong.”
Indoors, safe and snug as a corpse in a sweet-smelling, satin-lined coffin, content to decay.
I turn back on to my side to trace her cheek, her jaw, the divot between her nose and lip.
“Yes?”
“I’m admiring you. I’ve never seen you in this light.”
“Do I look different?”
“A bit. You even sound different out here, with all my walls gone. With Paris gone, and only us left. Us and the crickets.”
She smiles shyly, pursing her lips.
I smile back. “Kiss me.”
Cupping my jaw, she draws me close.
Her mouth is soft to start, growing bolder by the moment. The way she kisses echoes that infatuated gaze she often beams at me, a consumptive lust we act as though only men possess. But even when she came to me a virgin, I saw that look, at once a gleam and a glazing, hunger peering from behind heavy lids. I feel it in the way her lips claim mine, in the lap of her tongue, how she clutches my hair. Six months ago she’d never have kissed me this way. She was a passive, receptive thing, eager to learn but frightened to act. She’s grown shameless since the spring, a fascinating evolution.
Curious hands stroke my chest, survey my shoulders and arms, caress my belly under my top. A deep shiver moves through me, warmth gathering in its wake. I’ve been wanted before, and felt it in a woman’s touch. Countless times. But to know a lover cares for my mind and my future—my very happiness—as much as she desires my body…
She leaves me weak. Reduces me to a joyful ruin with the merest touch. She must sense it when my mouth has lost the rhythm of our kiss and hear it in my shallow breaths. And if she slipped a hand between my legs, there’d be no mistaking it.
But it won’t do to lose control so soon. Tonight’s finale is not one to be rushed.
I rise to sit cross-legged, gazing down at Caroly. She looks like art in the moonlight, alabaster against the blanket’s collage, framed by the crosshatched strokes of the grass. Her blue irises seem black, her skin white as milk. Without a word, I reach for her waist to free the bow of her stretchy bottoms. She lifts her hips so I can slide them down her legs, and I see the little bumps along her thighs as the cold encases them.
Her voice is soft in the darkness. “So it’s become that sort of picnic then?”
I lower to my hip and elbow, tracing the hem of her panties with my knuckle. “Tell me you’d prefer more cheese.”
“No no, this will do nicely.” She strokes my hair, everything about the moment feeling as it has a hundred times before, in my bed, yet twisted.
We’re the same, but the air is cool and so clean, the starlight so distant, not warm and close like candle flames. And it’s us, only us, with more than a fortuitous Sunday lying between this moment and the arrival of my next client. There is no next client.
I stroke her thigh, run my fingertips over the lace at her hip.
This affair feels like none I’ve fostered before. All the ones before this were as pleasant as a beautiful song or a delicious meal. Though a twinge of sadness accompanied their conclusions, the world kept turning. With Caroly, it’s rousing as a symphony, nourishing as a banquet, but vital as oxygen as well. Should all of this end, it won’t go with any pang so simple as sadness. I’d grieve it like a death.
I hold her hip tighter.
No one can guarantee security. We promise it, of course. But no romantic proclamation can ensure permanence, neither can wedding vows, and even the truest love can be lost in an instant…whether that instant comes at