Everything, Everything (24 page)

“It’s your first time for everything, Maddy, but it’s not for me.”

I don’t understand. Just because it’s the first time doesn’t make it less real, does it? Even the universe has a beginning.

He’s silent. The more I think about what he’s saying, the more upset I get. But then I realize that he’s not trying to dismiss or belittle my feelings. He’s just scared. Given my lack of choices, what if I’ve just chosen him by default?

He takes a breath. “In my head I know I’ve been in love before, but it doesn’t feel like it. Being in love with you is better than the first time. It feels like the first time and the last time and the only time all at once.”

“Olly,” I say, “I promise you that I know my own heart. It’s one of the few things that’s not completely new to me.”

He climbs back into bed and throws an arm out. I curl into him, put my head into the Maddy-shaped nook of space between his neck and shoulder.

“I love you, Maddy.”

“I love you, Olly. I loved you before I knew you.”

We drift off to sleep curled around each other, neither of us talking, just letting the world make some noise for us for a while because all the other words don’t matter right now.

ALL THE WORDS

I COME AWAKE
slowly, languidly until I realize what we’ve done. I glance at the clock. We’ve been asleep for over an hour. We barely have any time left and we’ve spent some of it sleeping. I glance at the clock again. Ten minutes to shower and another ten to find the perfect spot on the beach to watch our first and last day together come to an end.

I shake Olly awake and rush to get dressed. In the bathroom, I slip into my one-size-fits-all dress. One size can fit all because the skirt flares out and the top is ribbed elastic that can stretch to accommodate most anyone. Forgoing my scrunchie, I let my hair have its way, and it falls curly and full around my shoulders and down my back. In the mirror my skin glows a warm brown and my eyes glitter.

I am the picture of health.

Olly’s seated on the top rung of the railing on the lanai. His position looks precarious, even though he’s holding on to the railing with both hands. I remind myself he has plenty of control over his body.

He smiles, more than smiles, when he sees me. He’s Olly and not-Olly again, eyes sharp and tracking my approach. I’m aware of every single sparking nerve in my body. How does he do that with just a look? Do I have the same effect on him? I stop at the sliding glass doors and look him over. He’s wearing a close-fitting black T-shirt, black shorts, and black sandals. The angel of death on vacation.

“Come here,” he says, and I nestle into the V of his legs. He goes still and his grip on the rail tightens. I inhale the fresh scent of him and look up. His eyes are a clear, summer-blue lake that I can’t see the bottom of. I touch my lips to his. He hops down from the railing, pushing me back against a table. Before I know it, I’m flush against him and he’s kissing me with a groan. I open for him and we kiss until I can’t breathe, until my next breath is one of his. My hands are on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, in his hair. My hands don’t know where to stop. I am electrified. I want everything and all at once. He breaks our kiss and we stand there, drawing ragged breaths, foreheads and noses touching, his hands gripping too hard on my hips, my hands flat against his chest.

“Maddy.” His eyes are a question and I say yes. Because it was always going to be yes.

“What about the sunset?” he asks.

I shake my head. “There’ll be another one tomorrow, too.”

He looks relieved, and I can’t help but smile. He walks me backward through the lanai doors until the backs of my knees are pressed into the bed.

I sit. And then stand right back up. It was easier jumping from Black Rock than doing this.

“Maddy, we don’t have to.”

“No. I want to. This is what I want.”

He nods and then squeezes his eyes shut remembering something. “I have to go buy—”

I shake my head. “I have some.”

“You have some what?” he asks, not catching on.

“Condoms, Olly. I have some.”

“You have some.”

“Yes,” I say, my entire body blushing.

“When?”

“At the souvenir shop. Fourteen ninety-nine. That place has everything.”

He looks at me as if I were a small miracle, but then his smile turns into something more. Then I’m on my back, and his hand is tugging at my dress.

“Off. Off,” he says.

I scramble to my knees and pull it off over my head. I shiver in the warm air.

“You have freckles here, too,” he says, sliding his hand across the tops of my breasts.

I look down to confirm and we both laugh.

He puts his hand on my bare waist. “You’re all the good things wrapped into one good thing.”

“Um, you too,” I say, inarticulate. All the words in my head have been replaced with one—
Olly.

He pulls his T-shirt off over his head and my body takes over my brain. I run my fingertips over the smooth hard muscles of his chest, dip them into the valleys between them. My lips follow the same path, tasting, caressing. He lies back and keeps himself still, letting me explore, and I kiss my way across the landscape of him down to his toes and back up again. The urge to bite him is irresistible and I don’t resist it. The bite pushes him over the edge and he takes charge. My body burns where he doesn’t touch, and burns where he does.

We gather each other up. We are lips and arms and legs and bodies entangled. He raises himself above me and we are wordless, and then we are joined and moving silently. We are joined and I know all of the secrets of the universe.

MADELINE’S DICTIONARY

in•fi•nite
(ˈinfənit) adj. 1. The state of not knowing where one body ends and another begins: Our joy is infinite. [2015, Whittier]

THE OBSERVABLE WORLD

ACCORDING TO THE
Big Bang theory, the universe came into being in one single moment—a cosmic cataclysm that gave birth to black holes, brown dwarfs, matter and dark matter, energy and dark energy. It gave birth to galaxies and stars and moons and suns and planets and oceans. It’s a hard concept to hold on to—the idea that there was a time before us. A time before time.

In the beginning there was nothing. And then there was everything.

THIS TIME

OLLY SMILES. HE
will not stop smiling. He gives me every variation of smile that there is and I have to kiss his smiling lips. One kiss leads to ten until our kissing is interrupted by the sound of Olly’s stomach growling.

I break our kiss. “I guess we should eat something.”

“Besides you?” He kisses my bottom lip and then bites it gently. “You are delicious, but inedible.”

I sit up, holding the blanket to my chest. I’m not quite ready to be naked again despite our intimacy. Unlike me, Olly’s not feeling at all shy. He’s out of bed in a single movement and moves about the room completely naked. I lean back against the headboard and simply watch him move, all grace and light. No dark angel of death now.

Everything’s different and the same. I’m still Maddy. Olly’s still Olly. But we’re both more somehow. I know him in a new way. And I feel known, too.

The restaurant sits right on the beach and our table faces the ocean. It’s late—9
P.M.
—so we can’t really see the blue of the water, just the whitecaps of the waves as they crash against the beach. We hear it just beneath the music and chatter all around us.

“Think they have humuhumu on the menumenu?” Olly teases. He jokes that he wants to eat all the fish that we saw while snorkeling.

“I’m going to guess that they don’t serve the state fish,” I say.

We’re both starving from all the activity of the day, so we order every appetizer on the menu: poke (tuna marinated in soy sauce), crab cakes, coconut shrimp, lobster pot stickers, and Kalua pork. We don’t stop touching for the entire meal. We touch in between bites of food and sips of pineapple juice. He touches the side of my neck, my cheek, my lips. I touch his fingers, his forearms, his chest. Now that we’ve touched so intimately, we can’t stop.

We move the chairs so that we’re sitting right next to each other. He holds my hand in his lap or I hold his in mine. We look at each other and laugh for no reason. Or, not for no reason, but because the world just then seems extraordinary. For us to have met, to have fallen in love, to get to be together is beyond anything either of us had ever thought possible.

Olly orders us a second helping of lobster pot stickers. “You make me very hungry,” he croons, eyebrows waggling. He touches my cheek and I blush into his hands. We eat this plate more slowly. It’s our last. Maybe if we just sit here, if we don’t acknowledge that time is passing, then this too-perfect day won’t have to end.

As we leave the waitress tells us to come back and visit again soon, and Olly promises that we will.

We head away from the lights of the restaurant and toward the darkened beach. Above the clouds have hidden the moon. We slip off our sandals, walk close to the water’s edge, and sink our toes into the cooling sand. Nighttime waves crash mightier and louder than daytime ones. The further we walk, the fewer people we see, until it begins to feel as though we’ve left civilization behind. Olly steers us to dry sand and we find a place to sit.

He takes my hand and kisses the palm. “My dad apologized to us after he hit her the first time.” He pushes the sentence out on a single breath. It takes me second to realize what he’s talking about.

“He was crying.”

The night is so dark that I feel rather than see him shake his head.

“They sat us down together and he said he was sorry. He said it would never happen again. I remember Kara was so angry she wouldn’t even look at him. She knew he was a liar, but I believed him. My mom did, too. She told us to forget all about it. She said, ‘Your father has been through a lot.’ She said that she forgave him and that we should, too.”

He gives me my hand back. “He didn’t hit her again for another year. He drank too much. He yelled at her. He yelled at all of us. But he didn’t hit her again for a long time.”

I hold my breath for a moment and ask the question I’ve been wanting to ask. “Why doesn’t she leave him?”

He snorts and his tone turns hard. “Don’t think I haven’t asked her.” He lies back in the sand, links his hands behind his head. “I think that if he hit her more often, she would leave him. If he were just a little more of a bastard maybe we could finally go. But he’s always sorry, and she always believes him.”

I put my hand on his stomach, needing the contact. I think maybe he needs it, too, but then he sits up, pulls his knees into his chest, and rests his elbows on them. His body forms a cage that I can’t get into.

“What does she say when you ask her?”

“Nothing. She won’t talk about it anymore. She used to say that we’d understand when we’re older and in our own relationships.”

I’m surprised by the anger in his voice. I never guessed that he was angry at his mother. His father, yes, but not her.

He snorts again. “She says love makes people crazy.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.”

“You’re not supposed to use all the answers,” I say.

He smiles in the dark. “Yes, I believe it.”

“Why?”

“I’m all the way here in Hawaii with you. It’s not easy for me to leave them alone with him.”

I tamp down my guilt before it can rise.

“Do
you
believe it?” he asks.

“Yes. Definitely.”

“Why?”

“I’m all the way here in Hawaii with you,” I say, repeating his words. “I never would’ve left my house if it weren’t for you.”

“So,” he says. He lowers his legs and takes my hand. “What do we do now?”

I don’t know the answer to this question. The only thing I know for sure is that this, being here with Olly, being able to love him and be loved by him, is everything.

“You should leave them,” I say. “It’s not safe for you there.” I say it because he doesn’t know it. He’s trapped by the same memory of love, of better times, that his mother is, and it isn’t enough.

I rest my head on his shoulder and we watch the near-dark ocean together. We watch the way the water pulls back and turns over and beats against the sand, trying to wear the earth away. And even though it doesn’t succeed, it pulls back and pounds the shore again and again, as if there were no last time and there is no next time and this time is the time that counts.

SPIRAL