Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Page B

after that.
    I bid Monty farewell with a spine-slapping embrace on a Connecticut train platform. An unpleasant mix of affection, nostalgia, disdain, and guilt percolated inside me. I drew myself away so the couple could have a last intimate moment, a handful of kisses, some hurried words, the language of suspended love.
    A few hours later, after a diner meal with stilted conversation, too many cigarettes, and the requisite drinks, we walk into her childhood bedroom, and look at each other in the first privacy we’ve had since California. We sit on the edge of her bed and listen to cicadas sing, rising and falling with a wind from the fallow fields beyond her suburban house. She’s fiddling with a lighter, getting up and rifling through drawers, sitting again.
    TV,
she says suddenly, like an announcement.
TV was the best company when I was a kid. It was always there for me, you know? No better nanny than that.
She speaks loudly and laughs at her own joke, which is unnatural. I know she has decided I will have to start this. I flip off the lamp and put my hand on her neck.
    God, what an awkward start. I can see us still: her, the most caustic, forward person I’ve ever known, the girl that tortured me with innuendo for thousands of miles—her, in that TV-lit bedroom, turning shyly away, whispering:
I’m a big dork when it comes to this part.
Me in the grip of performance anxiety, overwhelmed by the arrival of a moment I’ve lived in my head many times, finally lying her down and beginning—too tenderly, I think. In the deceptive currents of TV light, the long curves of her bones—her jaw, her clavicle, her cheeks—are like swells in a sea. And I move as I might in a precarious life raft, careful with every inch. We treat each other like we are both virgins and by the time we get the logistics worked out, she arches on top of me, her face now a distant planet, only her thin, double-jointed arms with the scars propping her on my chest. I am half-mast with nerves, scared of her parents waking, distracted by the TV images that silhouette her from behind. She moves stiffly for a while and I’m sure I am boring, terrible, failing at the crucial moment, convinced she is listening to the sitcom. We finish it out with me on top, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory by then.
    But there is a kind of comfort beneath the blanket that I didn’t expect, as if we moved from new lovers to old ones in the space of those few tense moments. She rubs my head and we tangle together, more natural in rest than in lust. The moon rises through the sheer curtains and it cools me, like her hands on me. Lulled, I sleep the sleep of the dead, like I’ve had the wildest loving of my life.
    When I awakened the next morning, she was gone and the sheets were cool, her pillow squared—in its place. I spent a few minutes squinting at the few photos around the room, trying to learn from these frozen moments of her youth. I willed brightness into my face before stumbling out to greet her mother and the rambunctious chocolate Lab.
    But things felt heavy. We had only our separation now, which arrived quickly with my friend Gordon and his NYU duffel bag. Her mother packed us a road cooler, we thanked her profusely, and I hugged Serala quick and hard to skip the threat of tears. But she tugged me aside into the shadow of a pine.
    Look,
she says, gazing downward at the perfect suburban lawn,
I feel like this isn’t the end of anything—not the beginning either.
She scuffs her sandal on the curb, breathes and looks up.
And “this” is nothing that you can define, by the way
, she warns, with the pantomime of a gut punch that makes me flinch.
But I want to know that there’s more ahead of us, Eli. I think . . . maybe I even need to.
    I just nod and hug her tight as she wraps those skinny arms around my neck again.
    We pull away while the Rolling Stones sing “Under My Thumb” from my tape deck. Next