“They’re going out tonight,” I tell him. “Around six.”
“I’ll be there at six-thirty,” he says.
And he is. Exactly at six-thirty the doorbell rings. I come down the staircase, my hand tracing the long curved line of the wooden banister, dressed in my one purchase from this afternoon—a light pink bra and matching thong. When I open the door to him, Seth’s eyes widen with surprise, something that I haven’t often seen, and then he smiles.
He snatches me up like a cellophane-wrapped candy and kisses me on the mouth. His arms circle around me and I want to be devoured, I want to be sweet for him and melt on his tongue. I hop up and wrap my legs around his waist, feel already his satisfying hardness. We go like that up the stairs, all sixteen of them, with me in Seth’s arms, my tongue in his mouth.
In my room I’ve lit candles, which Seth doesn’t mention, and when he throws me onto the bed, the one on the nightstand flickers out. He shrugs out of his sweater, pulls his T-shirt over his head and tosses it aside, then kicks out of his shoes and yanks down his jeans and his underwear in one fierce movement. Then he’s there, naked, the thick horn of him wet-tipped and hard, and a rush of wetness floods the cotton lining of my thong.
“Take off your bra.”
I feel, thrillingly, like I’m in a movie, like I’m on display for a vast and important audience, like the whole world is watching as I reach behind my back and unhook the strap. My bra falls into my lap and I push my chest forward, pretending that I think my pointed little breasts are beautiful.
Seth thrusts forward onto the bed and between my legs and against the thin lace barrier that separates us. The hard nose of my teddy bear pokes against my back and I twist to reach it, grab it by an arm or a leg, and toss it to the ground.
My thong gets twisted as Seth takes it off, and I hear it rip when he grows impatient and yanks too hard. I shouldn’t care but I do, because the thong is brand new and it matches the bra, and lace can’t be sewn back together. But I don’t say anything, and then Seth rises above me like a wave and smiles, and I smile back and then he pushes into me, hard and fast and it hurts and feels good all mixed together.
He puts one hand on my stomach to hold me still—he likes it best, he says, when I don’t move a lot, when I let him be in charge, and I know too that he likes to feel himself inside of me, under his hand, the back and forth motion of it.
It’s clear from his face when he’s close, and I brace myself for a second, for the way he usually pulls out roughly right at the end, but then he looks into my eyes and grins, asks, “Okay?”
“Okay,” I answer, and then his eyes close and his mouth twists and a vein on his forehead bulges out and he thrusts again and again hard into the center of me and I want to like it but I sort of don’t, and I feel him spasm, and spasm, and he makes a sound that would be funny in different circumstances before he is still.
“Fuck,” he says, collapsing against me. I run my fingers up and down his spine, feel a few bumps back there, new ones. He hates that he has acne on his back—bacne, he calls it—so I move my hand away to not draw attention to it. Soft now, his penis shrinks inside me and then slips out.
When I get up to go to the bathroom, a runny path of semen, like egg whites, trails down my leg. I am horrified. It feels like I’ve just peed myself. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought it would just sort of absorb inside me, or really, I guess I never thought about what would happen at all. The other times when we didn’t use a condom, Seth would pull out and come on my stomach or—those two times—on my back. And then he’d use his T-shirt or a sock to wipe me off. But this time, as I walk to the bathroom connected to my room, the sticky wetness drips down my thigh, a couple of drops falling silently to the carpet.
???
It’s not that I don’t have orgasms. It’s just that I don’t have orgasms with Seth.
He doesn’t know this because I haven’t told him. Why would I? It would just make him feel bad. And it’s not his fault that I don’t have orgasms when we’re together. And I don’t need the stupid vibrator, either. Part of me wants to yell at him, What kind of a present is that?
But I don’t yell, and I don’t tell Seth about the orgasms I do have, that I’ve been having since I was fourteen years old, all by myself in all kinds of ways—with my hand, with the sharp spray of water from the showerhead, with a pillow, under the covers and between my legs.
And maybe none of these counts. Maybe they’re not “real” orgasms, since they’re always when I’m alone. It’s like that question: if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Probably solo orgasms don’t count if a boy isn’t there to witness them. To cause them.
In English class, we’re reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and learning about Magic Realism. This is how Mr. Whitbey defines Magic Realism: making the ordinary extraordinary.
We read the part about José Arcadio Buendía seeing ice for the first time. The author describes it as “an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars.” When his son touches the ice, he pulls his hand away immediately, exclaiming, “It’s boiling.”
José Arcadio Buendía calls the ice a miracle. And, to someone without refrigeration who lived in a place where water was never cold enough to freeze, ice would be a miracle, I guess.
“You see,” Mr. Whitbey says, leaning against his desk in the way that makes his hips look wide and womanish, “to the modern reader, ice is an invisible convenience. We take it for granted. It’s everyday. It’s boring. But when we see ice through the eyes of José Arcadio Buendía—” (he breaks into full-on accent to pronounce the name, the way he did last year when we read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary)—“then, we see it as magical. Miraculous.”
This reminds me of something else, but I can’t quite pull it up to the surface. I can feel it itching at me, the connection, and I almost have it, but then my phone vibrates in my pocket and whatever it was—whatever I almost thought of—slips away.
It’s a text from Seth. I see him, just a row away, his phone in his hands under his desk, eyes downcast, a little smile that I know is for me even though he’s not looking in my direction.
Saturday, the text reads. You’re busy all day.
I’m supposed 2 hang out w/Louise, I text back, which is not true at all. But I know Seth. I know what gives things value.
Like at the shelter—if two people are considering adopting the same dog, that dog becomes precious. Suddenly, they both must have the dog, even if moments before they were on the fence.
Seth’s reply is immediate. Cancel.