The sense of freedom was so delicious it seemed I could actually taste it with every breath of crisp autumn air. My sophomore roommates, Sydney and Marissa, were more than happy to show me around the neighborhood with fellow freshman Jane, from Connecticut, and Carter, a Southerner who constantly needed reminding to close her mouth and stop staring when we were out in the city between classes and on weekends. Manhattan wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I’d never before had the chance to make my own mark on it, staking out my favorite coffee shop, the secondhand store that sold the best faded jeans, a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day and made killer scrambled eggs for just a dollar fifty.
Sharing my experiences with Michael wasn’t easy, at least not in letters. He was the writer, not me, and his lazy, detailed descriptions of his Cambridge neighborhood were like something out of a travel guide. So the notion of him visiting didn’t take long to be born—unlike last year, when my parents had looked at me with a combination of horror and amusement at the suggestion I take the train up to stay with Michael one fall weekend, this year we were both free to come and go as we pleased.
“Y’all do know Thanksgiving is just around the corner, right?” Carter had drawled when I broached the subject of Michael’s impending visit.
“So they can’t wait,” Jane argued, folding laundry she’d brought up from the dorm’s basement. “It’s romantic. Which is more than I can say for me at the moment.” She’d had a fling with a junior philosophy student she’d met in the dining hall, which had ended in tears and avowals that Kant had ruined her attempt at a sex life.
In the end, Jane and Carter were both a bit awed that I had a sex life, and Marissa and Sydney agreed to let them bunk in their room when Michael arrived. The countdown began at that moment, after an excited and expensive call to Cambridge, and I spent the next week alternately pacing the confines of my room, daydreaming about what we would do while he was in the city, and feverishly trying to get ahead on my class readings so I could enjoy the weekend without guilt.
I met him at Penn Station on a Friday afternoon, hovering at the Amtrak arrival gate, dressed in my favorite jeans and a new sweater, a scarf looped around my neck that I knotted and unknotted with nervous fingers. When his face appeared on the escalator ascending from the track, blurry with sleep but searching me out with those dark, wide eyes, I nearly yelped with excitement.
The good thing is, when you don’t care who happens to watch you kissing your boyfriend in greeting, you can’t be embarrassed about it. I certainly wasn’t. If anything, it was a little thrilling to give all those gray-suited commuters an eyeful.
That evening is still a blur. There were the introductions to my roommates, a brief walking tour of Washington Square, which was windy and crisp in the fading light and studded with gold light from the main campus buildings bordering the park, and then a noisy, crowded dinner at a local hamburger place.
I was a bit giddy—I can see that now. The excitement and anticipation on top of a grateful rush of love for my roommates, who were being incredibly generous, was heady stuff. I wanted Michael to be part of everything in my life at NYU, and even then I knew that I didn’t sound quite like myself. I was babbling, laughing too loud, my cheeks hot and my pulse racing. But part of that was due to a mounting sense of panic.
Michael was friendly with the girls, and he was as affable as ever about the evening’s plans, but something was wrong. Aside from those initial kisses, some connection between us had shorted out—for the first time ever, being with him felt awkward. The physical space between us seemed bigger, colder, devoid of our usual silent language of expressions and glances.
He was quieter than usual, withdrawn in a way only I would notice, despite his nodded replies to my friends. That dark head was set low, hunched into his shoulders, and his eyes were somehow too bright—they looked nearly as panicked as I felt, I realized as I stared at him across the table while we divvied up the bill for dinner and Marissa and Jane figured the tip.
The others were heading to see An Officer and a Gentleman over on Sixth Avenue, so Michael and I waved them off at the corner of West Fourth and turned toward the dorm. He took my hand as we walked, and I held on, grateful for its warmth in the chilly night air. Upstairs, my room was quiet and dark, the only sound a gentle shush from the filter of Jane’s small fish tank, the only light its fluid blue glow.
I reached for my desk lamp, but Michael stopped me. “Don’t,” he said, reaching for my hand and spinning me so he could shrug off my coat. His worn denim jacket dropped to the floor next, and then we were on my bed, a fumbling, tentative meeting of mouths and hands.
But minutes later, skin to skin, hearts beating in time, everything shifted. Our bodies remembered each other without hesitation, and in those hours that seemed to stretch out endlessly till morning, we were able to find our way back to each other, somehow communicating everything we hadn’t yet been able to say. Sometime long after midnight, we found the words, too: I wanted him to like my new life; he was ashamed to admit that he was slightly jealous of it; we still missed each other; college would be difficult when it meant spending so long apart.
There was more, silly things that no one but us would understand—I called him Hemingway sometimes, and he liked to hum “Tiny Dancer” in my ear to make me giggle—and then the conversation melted into kisses again. With Michael around me and above me and inside me, everything melted away—school, my friends, the world, all gone, subsumed by a rush of sensation and emotion. Michael snored as I lay there afterward, blasted, wrung dry, yet grateful that I could spend the night with him in arm’s reach. It was foolish, and it certainly proved how young I was, but in those moments before I drifted off to sleep, I believed that nothing would ever truly be wrong between us that couldn’t be solved by a night in bed.
WE DIDN’T SHARE THE NEWS about Drew at dinner, by tacit agreement. Emma was in one of those rare effusive moods that seemed to come too seldom in fifteen-year-old girls, chattering about the play and her friend Simon’s run-in with their French teacher, and neither Michael nor I had the heart to shatter the atmosphere. She set herself up in the dining room later, books spread across the table and iPod humming in her ears, while Michael and I settled in front of the TV.
There was nothing in particular to watch, but neither of us minded. I flipped channels aimlessly, landing here or there for a few minutes, but what we were both enjoying was our physical proximity. We were curled into one end of the sofa, his arm around me, my head nestled into his shoulder, our hipbones knocking together when either of us shifted. The window over the sofa was open, and the soft night air carried the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and wisteria. For the first time that day, I was content, or nearly so.
We cleaned up the kitchen when Emma took herself off to bed, blowing kisses over the banister and reminding me she needed lunch money for tomorrow. When the dishwasher rumbled to life and Michael had shut off the lights, we went upstairs together, but we didn’t go right to sleep. I slipped into bed after cracking the window to let the breeze wash through the room, and when Michael joined me, I reached for him. I was naked under the sheet, and he fit himself against me, his hard, lean length so familiar, so beloved. I let my body speak to him again that night, and he answered me, every touch tender, reassuring and full of love. It’s all right, his body said. I love you. I won’t hurt you. We’re together here, and forever. What I couldn’t hear was how he felt about having a son. The boy we’d never had. Someone he could talk baseball and beer with, another male in the small circle of our family, where Emma and I had him outnumbered. What I wouldn’t know, unless I asked him, was if he was actually happy about this news.
I fell asleep holding his hand, staring at the pale, fat moon through the maple outside the window, hoping that he had heard I love you and We’re together when I touched him, too.
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