My Holy Girl, she let me look at her.
She consented to my inspection, so I stood there, now in my loose boxer shorts, the pink Oxford ones she had stolen for me at the outlet mall, and I studied her. It was not so easy as head to toe or toe to head or anything like that. I would watch her chest for signs of heartbeat until I saw it, the skin over her breastbone literally pulsing, perspiring. I remember sitting beside her looking down and noticing for the first time her tiny purple dots where the hair follicles on her calves had been traumatized from her last shave. I saw the curve of her toes, thick and characterless. The balls of muscle on the inside of her knees were shiny in the firelight of the room.
No doubt I said things that were juvenile and ill equipped. 'I can't believe how beautiful you are' and 'you're a goddess sent here for me' and 'don't move, just wait, I want to memorize you for all time' and all those things you will laugh at now, but I meant them, and they were true. When I said she was a goddess, I understood that she held a power over my soul, and that if she were to command me to end my life with her at that moment, I surely would have. I believed in her the way one comes to believe in any other god, a work of genius, a fact of life, that song. The horizons revolved around her soul and her soul was the sun. Holly Bauerman was love incarnate.
Her heart was strong and rapid, so different from her expression, which remained languid like her pose. I traced her breasts with the speed of a tortoise traversing a desert, I marveled at the pebbled brownness of areoles, the network of veins, the fine blonde hairs sprouting around them. I'd looked at them a hundred times before, but I had never seen them. At my touch she tensed and told me my fingers burned. As I traced her belly and hips I let my fingers rest on the stretch marks, those clues to her history like white tiger stripes in miniature.
I suppose this watching went on for hours, but it could have been minutes. Each moment was condensed and stretched out like a rubber band as time elasticized. When at last I could not resist I drew my two middle fingers from her calf behind her knee and up her thigh in a slow arc until they brushed against the lips of her sex (she called it her chi-chi, which at the time sounded to me like a toy poodle but now recalls something more accurate, the chi, or life force, in Eastern philosophy) and they came away instantly wet in a way that shocked me. She had remained so calm, I did not realize what had been going on inside of her. I looked down, of course I did, and watched my fingers exploring her, trying not to gasp as I saw not only the color and quantity of her desire but the markings we were making on the sheet. I confess that my adolescent mind did not understand fully what was happening at first. I worried for a moment she had lost control and truly wet the bed. She reacted to my touch by reaching out for me - Enough is enough, she said without so many words. Come to me now.
But I could not, yet. I needed to understand, to create, to wallow. I let my fingers roam back to that spot and around and inside and over her hips and thighs and back inside until she was covered in her own salty sweetness and on the verge of her first of this night's orgasms, and only then did I lose all thought and sit upright to allow her to pull my shorts off.
I felt clumsy on top of her and we slid against each other, searching for the right angles. The prospect of feeling all of her made it like the first time again. The heat of her soft belly flesh pressed against me as her hand encircled me and slid down, and in the confusion I assumed I was inside.
She was staring at me, wide-eyed with desperation and patience. That she had planned this and wanted me without protection, that when she said she loved me like no one else and would always love me, filled me with the power and purpose of a righteous man.
'I want to be with you forever,' she said, whispering to me, watching me as I watched her. 'I want to love you forever. Can I love you forever? Will you promise me there will never be anyone else and that we can have each other and be like this forever?'
'Yes.'
'Do you love me?'
'More than anything. I love you.'
We spoke fast, repeating these declarations until they became vows.
I moved against her and slid into her and up against her and out again, over her triangle and to her navel. I was shaking all over and she cradled my head in the back of her hand, pulling me down, moving her hips up against me. Without guilt or thought I cried out in actual pain and shuddered as the pulses of my ejaculate made us comically wet and still we had not done the 'it' part of it.
'I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . .' I was mortified.
'Shush, no, it's beautiful,' she said, kissing me. 'This is only the beginning.'
I felt her hands reaching for me, or pulling on me to keep me up. This latter, if it was her intention, was not necessary. At seventeen and coming down from one of the most powerful climaxes of my life, I had lost nothing. In a way it was better, for now I could start again and do it for her.
'This is what I want,' she whispered. I waited for an explanation while her hand circled between us, on me and then elsewhere. 'I want you, I want all of you. Inside me. I want you forever. I want to have your baby.' Her eyes glowed as she said it again, making sure I understood the words she had never spoken, not even in jest. 'I want to have your baby.'
I lifted myself off of her so that perhaps twelve inches of space remained between our bodies and I watched as, eyes closed, her breath coming in gulps, she gathered the threads of my semen and applied them to her sex with a repetitive motion that was somehow repulsive and graceful. I did not understand. Just know that, whatever distortions you are tempted to assign my recollection, don't make the mistake of thinking she was putting on a show for my benefit. Though it was the most erotic act I have ever witnessed, it was also without thought, instinctual. Her hands moved as if she were not in control, efficiently cleaning up the mess like the sweep of that woman's hand in the paper towel commercial, only more primal, the way one imagines our ancestors weaving reeds. Each sweep of her palm gathered whatever fluid it could find, and then smoothed it over the cusp of her belly and further, down into the place God intended. She pressed her fingers into herself, rubbing herself until she was bucking against me.
I watched. I kissed her. I watched.
What did I know, at seventeen? She could have been performing some secret act only women learn when they have sought counsel to help them conceive. I certainly did not know that this was an act no woman, including my wife, would ever perform in my presence again. I knew only that this was it, the greatest proof my girl could offer that she loved me, that when she said forever she meant forever. Because, when you think about it, what is more risky to a teenaged girl than getting pregnant? What commitment is more long term than having your child, knowing she will likely be ostracized for it?
On another, more selfish side, my ego soared. What so many women understandably find repulsive - this thick, bleach-smelling substance - Holly was devouring to a place so much more dangerous than her mouth. I watched her hands do their work until her muscles clenched and pulled my seed deeper within her, and I understood the degree to which I had misjudged her love for me, how all-encompassing it had become, and that our future was sealed, that we would forever be us. I understood I would never, ever be alone again in this world.
Whatever you think happiness is, whatever you think it really means to be safe and secure and loved, I can tell you this. It is never more present in us than when we have coveted and loved and risked everything to claim another, and having done so found our equal, having reached the mutual understanding that we want the same thing, and that the thing we want is nothing. Nothing. Not money not fame not cars not houses not artistic greatness not even children, nothing except the person we are mated to, lost and found. This ecstatic mental state so perfectly in tune with our physical design is our home, the only real home we are given a chance to find in this life, the place we are lost, found, safe, forgiven, remade and forged into better men, the home we are forever trying to get back to, the one true birthing house.