All this and it’s great and this is what I wanted but another part of me goes: so my genitals are entering Sunita Habersham’s. That’s it? This is the physical act I’ve obsessed over performing with her? This simple contact? Has anything truly changed between us? Because we both allowed our hidden skin to meet? This is just a literal expression of the attraction I already feel for this woman. Nothing more. Except it also feels fucking amazing.
Sun takes the pillow she’s resting on and puts it over her face. She holds it there, with two hands. For the rest of the act. I can’t see her. So she won’t see me. And for a moment I get a glimmer of just how bad she’s going to hurt me.
“Shazam!” Sunita Habersham screams, and throws the pillow across the room. She’s so loud that I expect a thunderbolt to shoot down through the blackened ceiling and turn her into Mary Marvel. There’s no lightning, but her body thunders, shaking for seconds afterward, and that’s the only thing that keeps me from laughing. Then she rolls away like I’m not even there.
Sun falls asleep almost immediately. Or pretends to fall asleep. I lie on my side, staring, waiting for her to open her eyes, to talk to me or something, then fall asleep that way.
—
She said just that night, but it happens again in the morning. I wake up sore on the hard floor, fully engorged, and then we’re at the dance once more. The second time is more of a digestif, sure, with only one position, the side by side spoon we woke up in, yet it’s enough to remind me that the previous night not only happened but was seemingly deemed worth the inevitable trouble.
Sunita won’t look at me, won’t turn her head when my lips slide up her shoulder and neck, kiss until they run out of epidermal real estate. Instead, she thrusts her hips back into mine in several heavy jolts, finally shudders, then pulls suddenly off and away from me. No “Shazam” this time, but she’s clearly finished.
I watch Sun stand up, her knees even less prepared for the change of posture than I am.
“Can I marry you?” I ask. “Like, right now? Let’s run away to Costa Rica together. Tal too. Let’s do this!” I know I shouldn’t say this but I am so blissful in this moment that, though my testicles didn’t, my mouth is ejaculating.
Sunita Habersham gathers her clothes from across the floor in response, holds them to her chest and starts heading out the door. Then she stops, looks back into the room, but not directly at me. “I was engaged once. He jumped in front of an Amtrak train. No note,” Sun says, and then before I can respond she’s gone, down the hall, into the bathroom.
She stays in there for an hour. Which is fine because it takes me that long to stop asking myself, What the fuck just happened?
When the bathroom door opens, I hear her walk back through the hall, then down the stairs. I don’t believe she’s leaving until I hear the front door close behind her.
There are no more sounds. Not in the house. I’m still on the floor. It’s even harder than before. I get up when she honks my horn.
Sunita Habersham is waiting at the car when I get there.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?” Sun asks me, refusing to look my way.
I go to kiss her, right after I buckle. She leans her head away from me.
“We’re just apes,” Sunita Habersham tells me.
“We’re just apes, sure,” I mirror, then go in for the kiss once more. She meets me with her cheek.
“There are no monogamous apes. Humans are like bonobos—”
“Bonobos are famous for screwing everything. I get it. Fine.”
“It’s like a stress-relieving thing. It’s not about ownership. You don’t own me now. I like you, so that’s why I’m saying this. Just know this doesn’t end with us walking up the aisle.”
“Don’t worry. I’m still trying to pay off my last failed marriage.”
“I’m saying this because openness is important. Honesty is important. I’m trying not to lie to you.”
“Look, we went through this. I don’t think just because we had sex, a few times, that I have some kind of exclusive rights to you,” I tell her. This seems to work, because Sun finally buckles up, so I can start pulling out of the driveway. As I’m driving in reverse, contorted to peer through the back window, she pops a kiss on my cheek.
“Shazam!” she says again, mocking her own breathless tone, and starts giggling, putting a hand on my knee to brace herself. “I’m so embarrassed. I should have yelled, ‘Kimota.’ ”
“Yeah. Miracleman is definitely cooler than Captain Marvel. But given that they’re both rooted in the same intellectual property, I forgive you.”
“It makes me really happy when you talk like that,” she tells me, and squeezes my flesh in a way I take as a thank-you. And I look there where Sunita Habersham touches me, past the end of my shorts, and the skin of my thigh and her hand. Our skin. It’s nearly the same color. It’s the same flesh as my flesh, just in feminine. Which I’ve never seen before. The way it blends, the illusion it creates that both leg and fingers could be part of the same body, all this I’ve never seen before. I am naked and exposed, but not alone. Not paler or darker or any kind of other.
—
After dropping her off, I catch myself driving back to my father’s house out of habit, then continue on past reemerging fear out of stubbornness. Once there, I immediately go to my laptop at the dining-room table, opening the security program. It’s my first time scrolling through the CCTV archives, and it takes a minute to navigate the system. The camera aimed at the driveway is labeled CC9. I know it’s named CC9, because I checked cameras 1 through 8 and that was the last one I installed, stuck right on the garage’s rain gutter. But the feed doesn’t have that angle, the footage doesn’t make sense; it’s all black. I go back through the other feeds, every one of them, 1 through 8. They all look good. It has to be CC9 messing up. I pull up a window again for CC9, this time a live feed. Really dark, but you can kind of see something, something there. To get a better look, I turn on the table lamp. And oddly, I can also see the image on the screen better, because it’s also gotten brighter.