“I’m your girlfriend?” I yelp when my toes touch the water. It’s colder than it was this morning.
Finn bends down to kiss me again. “Yes.” We wade farther in. The water is up to my chest and Finn’s waist. Both of us duck under.
I know it will warm up the longer we stay in. I am up to my neck, then over my head, treading water. The ocean is nearly flat. Finn swims to where I am bobbing up and down. My hand brushes across his skin under the water. He pulls me close.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You’re smiling.”
I smile harder. Finn wraps his arms around me and I wrap my legs around his waist. I try not to think too much about what I’m doing. I lean in and kiss him. Then I unwrap my legs from his body and dart away, closer to the shallows.
“Hey, where are you going?”
I dive under, my hands reaching for the ocean floor. I plant them there and kick my feet up until they feel air, before I right myself again. “I’ve always wanted to try and do a handstand.”
Finn laughs. “Another thing on your list?”
“No. But I’m adding it now.”
We stay in the water until my teeth are chattering. Finn still has to drag me back to shore, because I could stay in the water all evening. He wraps me up in the towel with the turtles. We grab our clothes and walk back to his house, our bathing suits soaked and dripping. When we get there Finn points to the bathroom so I can change, but of course, it didn’t occur to me to bring a spare set of clothes. I dry off as best I can, leaving on my bathing suit bottom and pulling my skirt over it, but taking off my bathing suit top so it doesn’t leave two damp marks on my shirt. I decide this would be worse than going without a bra. I drape my bikini top on the towel rack and head into the hall. Finn’s door is open and I see him standing there, shirt off, searching for another one. I knock, then push and walk up to him, running my hand across all that bare skin.
“Well, come on in, Marlena.” He laughs, but there is also a catch in his voice.
I’m too busy studying the heart on Finn’s arm to answer, brushing my fingers across it. When I look up into his eyes, his mouth is suddenly on mine and we are kissing. These kisses are hungry and wild and dizzying, our bodies pressed up against each other. Before I’m aware of what I am doing, I’m pushing Finn backward toward the bed and climbing onto him, my legs around his waist like when we were in the water. I’m wearing more clothes this time, but somehow it feels like I’m wearing less. My skirt rides up to the tops of my thighs. Our breaths come quickly as we kiss. I press harder and harder against him, as if I want to move through him. Even though we are as close as we possibly can get I want to be closer. I grab the hem of my shirt, ready to pull it off.
“Marlena? What are you doing?” Finn’s hand shoots out, stopping me. There is a dazed expression on his face.
“Getting undressed?”
His hand is firm, preventing me from moving my top any higher. “Wait a minute.”
“Why?” I demand. “Why wait another second?”
“Well, let’s see.” Finn lifts me up and sets me to the side on the bed. Then he lies down facing me. “Oh, let me count the ways.”
“I want to do this,” I tell him.
“Do what exactly?”
I tap my hand on the bed between us. “This?”
Finn gives me a look. “If you can’t say it out loud, then we’re not doing it.”
“Sex, sex, sex,” I burst out, staring straight into Finn’s face.
And he laughs. “You certainly said it, there.”
I stare down at my hands.
Finn leans down and kisses each one of my fingers. “Marlena, please don’t think that I don’t want to be with you.”
I look up again. “See. You can’t say it either.”
Finn is smiling. “Do I want to have sex with you? Yesssssss.” He draws out the word with such agony that it brings a smile back to my face. “Of course I do. But we can take things slow. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
I groan and flop onto my back. “Everyone keeps telling me that!”
Finn laughs. “Maybe because it’s true?”
“All or nothing. All or nothing! Why can’t it be all? What’s so wrong with all? Why is everyone always warning me against it? Are extremes really that bad?” I let my eyes slide back to Finn, down his face and over his chest, so much beautiful skin. “All looks pretty good to me right now.”
This makes Finn laugh again.
“I’m serious. I’m eighteen. I’m ready. Haven’t most girls my age already done this?”
“Plenty, sure, but not everyone. And none of them have the history you do, since there’s that part about being a healer your entire life.”
I glare. “A few minutes ago, you were loving the saint girl in a bikini.”
It’s Finn’s turn to groan and flop back onto the bed. “Oh no. I haven’t forgotten a single bit of that image.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one, not technically,” Finn says. “But there are lots of things we can do other than kissing, Marlena. And there are many kinds of sex.” Gently, Finn reaches out to grasp the hem of my top and raises it a little. His hand sears a trail across my skin, a trail that would be a dark-pink riot of peonies if I could paint it. I close my eyes, the light touch of his fingertips along my ribs ticklish.
“What’s so funny?” he asks. When I open my eyes he is grinning.
I bite my lip. “I don’t know. I guess maybe I’m a little nervous.”
“Good. I am, too.”
“But you know what you’re doing. You’re the one who’s talking about all the things we can do and all the different kinds of sex. You’ve done all of this before.”
“Not with someone like you.”
I sigh. “I know, I know, sheltered miracle-healer-saint.”
Finn’s face loses the grin, his eyes growing serious. “Not with someone I love.” He kisses my stomach, just above the waistband of my skirt. His breath falls across me in soft bursts, petals falling from a tree.
My breathing has stopped. “I’m someone you love?”
Finn lifts his head to look me in the eyes. “Yes, you are,” he says. Then, “I love you, Marlena. I knew it from the first moment I saw you.”
I hold his stare, like a beautiful but fleeting treasure. “I love you, too, Finn.”
Then, in the fading light of the day, Finn gets up on his knees and leans over me. I sit up so he can slip my top the rest of the way up and over my head. “Look how beautiful you are,” he says, eyes on my body.
The body, my body, as a source of miracles, has also been a source of shame. I remember when I turned thirteen and my breasts began to poke through my long white sheaths, two points I could no longer hide, how my mother looked at me, horrified, how she mourned the changes of my body. She immediately went to the store and came back with these tight, stretchy half shirts. They were bras that pressed my breasts so hard against me they nearly disappeared, which was the point. Any curves on my silhouette have always been regarded as embarrassing, shameful, something to make disappear. Evidence of the profane on this sacred body of mine. This sense of needing to hide myself has even carried over into moments when I’m changing clothes, or getting out of the shower. A girl like me is not only never to be touched, but never to be naked, at least not for long. A big part of that girl knows she should feel shame right now, being so exposed in front of a boy. But the thing is, I don’t.