The Man I Love (6 page)

“I hadn’t seen it in years so at first it was like, ‘Oh wow, I remember this, the lady and the boat.’ But then I had to be sixteen about it, you know, prove he was no big deal to me. I told her I didn’t want it, I didn’t want anything of his. Screw him. All that shit.”

Under the table their ankles had cozied up together. It felt intimate and close there in the booth, holding her hands and feet, telling her secret things.

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t push it. Just reminded me it had been my grandfather’s too, and his father’s before, and back on through the generations. It was mine now, to give to my son if I ever had one. She said, and I still remember this, she said, ‘It’s an heirloom, it belongs to your name. Don’t let one asshole ruin it for you.’”

“Don’t let one weak link break the chain.”

“Right. I kept in a little box in my dresser for a while, and then my great-uncle died, my grandfather’s brother. And he was the last Fiskare brother, the last of his generation and… I don’t know. I was just moved to start wearing it.”

She leaned forward again, touched the chain, then put her chin on the heel of her hand. “For the record, you know what my favorite candy is?”

Which seemed a random question but then it hit him. “Swedish Fish?”

She nodded, smiling, and looked away, the color rising up in her face a little. He laughed. She looked back. And then they were staring again. And it happened again, just as it had in the theater yesterday. Time slowed, atoms and particles separating and recombining into a secret sphere around them.

“I like you,” he said.

Her hand out on the table again, between them, and he put his on it. “I like you,” she said, almost soundless.

They stared on through another timeless moment, after which she went back to her book, and he bent his head over his work again. They held hands on the table, held feet beneath. Erik had never been so relaxed with a girl, never known such comfort with another human being. He had no desire to leave this space, and yet within it, he was free. He could sit with her and feel what he was feeling, with no need to explain it, dismiss it or joke it away. Every time he looked up at her and thought,
I love this,
she looked up too, and her eyes seemed to nod at him.

Final dress rehearsal. The atmosphere backstage was significantly calmer, but still carried a buzzing pulse of energy. Erik threaded his way through dancers and techs, looking for Daisy, not even bothering with the pretense of an errand or task.

She was being sewn up. David was standing by her, with the sole of one foot against the wall. His arms were crossed and he looked both calm and content. A rare stance for David, who was one moody son of a bitch. He always kept you guessing. His compliments were backhanded, his humor dark and sardonic. He joked everything away, constantly pushing buttons and boundaries. And just when you had him pegged as an asshole, he showed his softer side: he sat still for a serious conversation, or showed sympathy for someone in a bind, offering a fix or a favor without the “you owe me one” implication. Once you relaxed into this kinder, gentler David, he abruptly turned into an asshole again.

Erik felt a stab of jealousy at the sight of David and Daisy chatting, smiling and laughing with ease. Probably in French. He didn’t feel right barging in on the conversation so he was forced to invent business after all. He fussed with cables that didn’t need fussing with, shielded his eyes and gazed up at the catwalk as if in contact with someone up there. When at last he saw David pat Daisy’s shoulder and walk away, he counted to thirty before casually putting himself in her sight.

She smiled at him and held out her hands. He went to her and took them in his. His skin seemed to peel away like a dry husk, leaving him a core of pure joy. They stood in silence, fingers clasped, staring in a way that felt like kissing. Her gravity was so strong, his attraction to her so complex and layered, he felt he was drifting in another dimension. Turning over and over like a satellite broken free of its mother planet, re-orienting itself to the center of a new universe. He ached to touch more of her, longed to pull her against him as he had never longed for anything before in his life.

“Do a triple tonight,” he said.

She looked a long moment back, then smiled. “Are you daring me?”

“I’m asking.” He couldn’t bear it. He had to touch her. He reached with shy fingertips and brushed her small diamond earring and then trailed down her jawline. Her eyes followed his hand and closed as he touched her, her chin lifting a little. She opened them again, put her own fingertips on his necklace charms.

“All right. I’ll do one for you.”

But she didn’t.

Erik watched her in the Prelude, feeling the pull of her across the rows of seats and through the glass of the lighting booth. She was dancing well—a heightened energy in her movements, a palpable transcendence of all thought and calculation. She was on her game, in her element. This was everything she was, everything she was born to do.

The end of her solo passage now, the circle of turns, the dizzying rush down the diagonal of the stage. The controlled preparation onto her right foot, the step onto the pointe of her left, followed by blind speed turning into spin.

“Dave, watch this,” Erik whispered.

One turn. Two turns. Three.

Four.

“Holy fuck, Marge,” David said, a hand on his head.

Marie Del’Amici was sitting just outside the lighting booth. They could hear her bubbling laugh. “O mio dio, Margarita. You naughty thing…”

Me,
Erik thought, as triumphant as if he’d pulled it off.
She did it for me. That was mine.

Daisy and Will’s Siciliano was beyond description. Erik had watched it so many times this week, memorizing whole sections of the dance despite not knowing the names of steps. He thought he knew it. Now he watched Daisy and Will take it to yet another place, and he followed them there, mesmerized and connected. Through the medium of Will he could feel Daisy’s body, its weight and warmth and closeness. Her arms here, her leg there, her waist in his hands, her back arching against his chest. He had it. He understood now. He felt the meld of music and movement and grasped how it became something greater, an expression beyond counts and beats and the vocabulary of steps.

Watching Daisy, his throat was tight, his heart swollen in his chest. Will took her back in his arms, laid his cheek at the base of her throat. Erik’s own cheek grew warmer. Daisy’s hand languidly came up to Will’s head and Erik felt it caress his hair. He was being touched by her. He felt his entire being condensing down to one truth:
I’m falling in love with her.

He was grateful for the dark of the booth and the simplicity of the lighting cues for the Siciliano, which left him free and alone to savor this moment, hold it in his hands and press it into his memory.
I am falling in love.
This was the first time he had felt so powerfully and instinctively connected to a girl without yet possessing any intimate physical knowledge of her. This was the profound realization that sex was the fruit of an emotional bond, not the dirt in which it grew. How limited his experience was in this realm of human affinity. He was a baby. As much a virgin as Daisy. At least she was waiting to make love.

He wanted to make love with her, to partner her and create something together, to find their own dance.

And he wanted it badly enough to wait for it.

So rapt was his attention he missed his cue at the end of the pas de deux. David reached over him to slide the levers, bringing the lights down. Erik snapped back to the present, his face burning. “My bad,” he mumbled.

David gazed at him, smiling, his expression neither reproachful nor teasing. “Love will do that to a guy,” he whispered.

Erik nodded, not looking away. He felt caught between declaring his love, and apologizing for it. Such a strong urge to say to David, “I’m sorry.” But for what? Not for loving Daisy, he wouldn’t back down.

David looked away then, still smiling. Chin on his hand, staring at the stage. It was dimmed down to the lowest beams on the boom stands, illuminating the hushed interval between pieces. “Fishy, fishy in the brook,” he said under his breath, “many things, but not a crook.”

A bag of Swedish Fish was no problem, but Friday night, Erik had to go to three different convenience stores and a gas station before he could find a bouquet of daisies. He separated two from the bunch and taped them to the candy, leaned paper and pen against the wall backstage and wrote a note:

The library had a Swedish-English dictionary.

Sax = scissors.

He almost wrote “good luck,” then remembered it was bad luck to say it in the theater.

He stopped Aisha Johnson, one of the contemporary girls. “You wouldn’t say ‘break a leg’ to a dancer,” he said. “How do you wish good luck before a show?”

Aisha raised her eyebrows and held out an expectant palm.

“Goddammit,” he muttered, reaching for his wallet and the dollar he now owed.

“I’m teasing,” she laughed. “No, no, I don’t want your money. You say ‘merde.’”

“Merde.”

She spelled it for him. “It’s French for shit.”

He went to sign his name, then decided not to. He took the note and his gifts to the row of little wooden cubbies, which served as mailboxes for the performers and stagehands, and slid the offering into the one marked Bianco. Checking his own cubby, he found a short note of appreciation from Leo, and a longer one from Allison Pierce, heavy with exclamation points and smiley faces. He put it politely in his pocket, then nervously checked his offering to Daisy hadn’t inexplicably fallen out of her box in the last sixty seconds.

The dancers performed to a full house. Daisy danced beautifully. Even though she behaved in the Prelude and did a double pirouette at the end of her solo, the audience still gave her a small, spontaneous ovation. Erik didn’t miss any cues, but he watched the ballet program filled with distracted anticipation. He wondered if Daisy had found the gift in her mailbox, worried she wouldn’t know it was from him, then both wondered and worried how he could see her after the concert when he had the whole second act to run and she could just leave.

She did leave. After the curtain came down, and Erik and David had closed up shop, he searched backstage, but she was gone. He stood in the wings a few confused moments, not knowing what to do. He needed a cue here.

He saw Will crossing the stage, his arm wrapped around Lucky Dare’s curvy body. Erik had never worked with a wingman but maybe now was the time. He started walking over, passing by the wooden cubbies, and a flicker of yellow in his own slot made him stop short. He reached in and retrieved the now-empty wrapper from the Swedish Fish. His face filled with swift heat, then it went numb, as if he had been slapped. He didn’t understand. He turned the wrapper over and over, not understanding. Then he looked and saw his own note to Daisy folded inside the plastic bag.

She had eaten the candy, but given the rest back.

She didn’t want him.

With shaking fingers he drew out the paper and unfolded it, re-reading what he had written. Where had he gone wrong? Ten simple, almost stupid words, and she had changed her mind?

He turned the paper over.

A pile of penciled lines on the back of his note. Words jumped out at him.
Heart. Happiness. Want. Hands. Whisper.
Shaking, Erik pulled back into the privacy of the curtains to read.

I don’t know what to do since I met you. I don’t know how to be since you showed me your necklace and told me about your father. You let me touch some of the sadness you carry in your heart and now your happiness is something I need. I’m looking for you all the time. I want to talk to you about everything.

Who are you? I feel like I already know. Like I always knew. I want to be near you. I was born to be near you. I want to know you in the dark. I want you to look at me with your hands. To talk to me with your body. To show me without words. To trust me with your most secret self while I trust you with mine. I want to feel your smile against my mouth when I tell you things and hear you whisper, “I know. Me too.”

I didn’t know love would be like this. I didn’t know I would love like this. And I want to see you seeing me love you. Like this.

I’m in my room.

If you don’t feel the same, please be kind.

But if you are thinking right now, “Me too,” then please come here, come talk to me.

I need to talk to you.

Right now.

God, I can’t breathe…

Erik lifted up his head and let go the breath he had been holding.

But if you are thinking right now, “Me too,” then please come...

He left the wings, leaped off the apron and ran up the aisle to the booth. Seizing his jacket, he bolted out the lobby doors, out of Mallory and into the icy November night. He ran. Ran for his life. Ran to start his life. Across campus to the south quad, to Daisy’s dorm.

Heart pounding in his heaving chest, he knocked on her door.

It opened.

Daisy stood before him. Sweats and her Lancaster hoodie, her hair down, the makeup scrubbed off her face. Her hand reached out to touch him. Her brimming eyes glowed blue-green.

“Me too,” he said.

Daisy drew him in, closing the door behind.

The room was dark except for a reading lamp clipped onto one of the beds, and a string of Christmas lights around the window. She slid her arms around his neck. Her head settled on his chest. He put his hand on her head, the other arm across her back, pressed her to him. He exhaled.
Thank you,
he thought, rubbing his cheek against her hair.

For a long time they held each other.

“I can feel your heart,” she whispered.

“I can feel everything,” he said. A thudding pulse in his ears, the hum and roar of his own blood coursing through his body. Daisy unzipped his jacket and peeled it down his back and off his arms. She put it down on the bed and switched off the reading lamp. They stood together, her hands lightly touching his chest. His fingers traced her eyebrows, pushed her hair behind her ear. He felt himself expanding, swollen with emotion, unfolding for her like a map.

“Have you ever felt this way,” she whispered, beautiful in the Christmas lights.

“Never,” he said, his voice squeezed tight through his throat. He thought about maps, roads taken and untaken. The twists and turns of life, choices and their consequences sending a person in a certain direction. He could have chosen a different school. He could have come to this school but not gone with the tech theater minor. Anything could have thrown him off course. He could have missed her. He might have gone his whole life not knowing who or where she was.

“I don’t think I can explain,” she said slowly, “what this week has been like for me.”

“Dais, I—”

“No, wait,” she said, a finger at his mouth. “Just listen. Let me say this. You have to understand something. I’m such a practical person. To a fault. A lot of people think I’m cold but it’s just… I don’t like drama. I don’t like ooey-gooey sentimental shit. I don’t coo over babies or cry at movies. And I never believed in love at first sight. I don’t write love notes, either. I mean, I don’t bleed my feelings on paper. Especially for someone I just met. But I swear, Erik, I wrote to you tonight and I… I just breathed it. Breathed myself onto the paper. It was so easy and it was like seeing myself for the first time. Who I really am. I should be thinking ‘This isn’t me. This isn’t what I’m about.’ But it is. This is me. I just didn’t know it until I met you.”

Running his hands over her face and hair, Erik could not speak. He had made her become herself. What else could love be? How could he have imagined love was anything but a force which made you your most authentic being?

“God, I love looking at you,” she said, putting her palm on his face. Her thumb ran along his bottom lip and desire smacked him hard in the chest. He closed his eyes, leaned out over the edge of the abyss behind his lids. He opened them, kept them open as he brought his mouth to hers.

“Keep looking at me,” he whispered.

They kissed, staring at each other, breathing each other’s air. Each touch of their mouths was longer, and in between her fingertips grazed his lips. He’d never kissed with his eyes open like this. Never known a girl who made her fingers part of a kiss. He would never want it any other way now. Already he was changed.

Long, magic, elastic stretches of time, holding each other, kissing. He gave her a little of his tongue and her throat let loose a tiny sigh. Then her tongue against his, their kisses blooming like flowers. He took it all in, how she opened her mouth for him, her arms twining up around his neck, her body pressing against his, fitting into his hands.

I want to be inside you,
he thought, following the aching, physical concept into another dimension of need. His soul cried out for her. He wanted to be conjoined. His atoms and cells combined with hers. Their perceptions melded so he could see the world through her eyes. How different this was from being fifteen and consumed with desperate, hormonal curiosity. Willing to take it from anyone, just for the sake of getting it. His brain swirled in a mature and masculine revelation as his mouth found her neck, sweet with her sugar-soap scent. He tilted her head back, set his tongue in the hollow of her throat and tasted what was there. Carefully. Selectively. He didn’t want just any experience. He wanted hers.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. The bite of her fingernails was in his skin as he worked his mouth up her neck, over her chin, and then onto and into her mouth again. Finally their eyes closed and they fell into each other, kissing deep, kissing like lovers, sighing, clinging, drowning in each other.

“I want you so much,” he said against her mouth.

“You know I’ve never—”

“I know,” he said. “You said you were waiting for the one.”

“I think I was waiting for you.”

He slid all ten fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. “What is happening,” he whispered. “I only met you a week ago.”

“Do you feel it’s going too fast?”

“I’m feeling a lot of things. But doubt isn’t one of them.”

“I’m feeling so much. I don’t even have names for what I feel.”

“I know.” He wrapped his arms around her slender body. She fit him. Fit him perfectly.

“I’ve never wanted something so bad, Erik.”

“I’ll wait. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll wait, I don’t care how long.”

She put her hands on his face, her eyes wide and shining, a cluster of Christmas tree twinkles pooled in each iris. “I’m so happy,” she whispered.

He stared down at her, transfixed and transformed. “I love seeing you happy.”

She was all up in him again, her mouth wonderful. She kissed like a dream, kissed him like she was born to.
Born to,
he mused, lost in her.
I would move in her like I was born to.

He pulled her tight against him. Let her feel him hard for her. Let her feel his want while his hands stayed soft and patient on the bare skin of her back. Let her know he couldn’t wait. And yet he would gladly wait. It was all there for the taking. Time was plentiful, a spilling basket of golden minutes and hours. Time was a gift from this girl who had waited for him to find her.