Spending the Night.
I wish for even a moment we would stop running.
Strands of sunlight are slicing the walls in Evan’s bedroom. He snores next to me, one arm underneath my pillow, the other at his side from where I’d wriggled out beneath it. It’s quiet enough that I can hear my watch ticking, moving us past the points of hesitation and staggering away from last night, from my last moments preserved on the wrong side of womanhood.
I turn on my side, moving my arm under the pillow to meet his. When our fingers brush, he takes my hand and squeezes, still asleep. A jolt of affection shoots upwards from the pit of my stomach. Maybe this space could stay still for us.
But I can’t sleep. It’s one of those dawns where I can feel the internal pathways and movements that keep myself alive. I want to wake him and walk us back to the moments defining last night, but instead I lay stagnant with our hands intertwined. I’m frightened of what could come if I start our day. With the sun rising higher, I wait on him to set our pace.
Finally his alarm goes off, with which I shut my eyes, hoping I look peaceful, inviting. Evan stirs and reaches over me to shut it off. I hope the sheets are crumpled enough he can’t hear my heart pounding through them. I wait, I wait, until finally he leans down to kiss my cheek as he pulls back. I open my eyes then, feigning awakening.
He presses his lips to me, hand resting on my stomach. Somewhere between a peck he says “good morning,” his voice reverberating over the points of my body where he’d been before.
“Hi,” I greet my friend. We lay in silence for a while, a static quiet that stretches over the question of what we are, his lips occasionally pressing against my forehead. I think about my clothes scattered on the floor, the world outside his bedroom door. The world within we’d spent pressed together, inhaling each other’s moans and running our hands over every opportunity of sensation and flesh. Each interval in between he’d let out the reasons why he came to Los Angeles and what he’d run from. I had listened, I had held him, and he had thanked me for hearing him. I had thanked him in return, and he’d smiled, his dimples creasing up towards his gorgeous eyes, alive and calm. We had torn apart the seam barring intimacy behind his bedroom door. What will happen when we cross back through it?
“I’m gonna take a shower,” he says between kisses. I want to suggest I join him, but I refrain, afraid he’ll say no, and he doesn’t offer. He leaves me alone, and I burrow back under the blankets, feeling this milestone pass and letting its grace flood to my fingertips. I feel the larger space between my legs, and exhale in relief. I am twenty-three years old and eighteen at last.
He comes back and we dress, his hands landing less and less on me.
“Do you want coffee?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say.
“I don’t have cream or sugar.”
“That’s okay,” I lie.
He opens his door and I cross through it, inhaling the smell of stale carpet and coffee beans.
He can’t sit still while the coffee brews. His roommate is in the shower, and the sound of water running makes me sweat. I try to get closer to him, paying precise attention to what he’ll do, where his hands will land. But he can’t stop moving, making himself busy amongst the cupboards, always two steps away from me. My watch ticks.
“Coffee’s ready,” he says, just as I touch his arm, and I move away to watch him pour.
He hands me a cup.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’s nothing,” he answers.
I take a sip. It tastes like hot water and gravel, but I smile at him from above the brim. He smiles back, careful his grin doesn’t reach too far into his dimples. He doesn’t need to. I already know.
He kisses me goodbye when I leave, but even with the electricity lingering on my lips and the rotten coffee grounds on my tongue, my heart has gone dull. Evan lives next to the 101, and I coil over the sound of tires crawling over pavement. Los Angeles was never the city for quick getaways.
Traffic opens up once I hit the 134, but despite the relief of watching my speedometer creep over eighty, despite the electricity that fades from the places he’d been before, I wish for even a moment we would stop running. I wish for a morning where he could have let me in, I wish that in the parts of our hearts we’d opened up to each other that he could have found a place to stay, that somehow in the intensity of his words and the pleasure of his tongue he had found a residency that could be as good for him as he was for me. I emerge from my car a larger person, and the cold wind of morning greets who I will forever be. I love how it feels, I love what it means, but I can’t help wishing for even a moment that I hadn’t spent the night alone.