The Man I Love (7 page)

“Do you have good memories of your father?” Daisy asked. She was lying on Erik’s chest, playing with the little gold fish on his necklace. His hand moved slowly up and down her back underneath her shirt. His, rather: she had taken to buttoning herself into his clothes at night, wearing one of his flannel shirts and her underwear and nothing else.

It was a sweet look.

“All my memories of him are good,” he said. “That’s what made it so bad when he left.”

“What did he do, what was his job?”

“He owned a construction company, did some carpentry on the side. He built my and Pete’s bedroom. It’s a good memory.”

“Tell me.”

“He knocked down the wall between our rooms, made one big space for us. Then he built these beds—mine was a loft, and he cut tree shapes out of plywood, screwed them onto the front, so it looked like a forest. I had a swing, an actual rope swing hanging down from the bed. Pete was young so his bed was down low, but it had the trees all around it, and a little hammock for him.”

“Sounds like something you’d see in a magazine,” she said. She was making the boat charm sail in and out of the hollow of his throat.

“He built it all one summer. I remember watching for hours. Watching him work.”

“So he was a set designer.”

“Huh.” Erik smiled. “Didn’t occur to me. You’re right.”

“Do you remember his voice?”

“Sort of. He said
Prosit
when I sneezed.
Skål
for a toast. Those were the only Swedish words he used. I can hear them in my head. In his voice.”

“What did he look like?”

Relaxed and warm, Erik thought about how to answer. He loved lying in bed with Daisy, in the gold haze of the Christmas tree lights, talking. She asked him the funniest things. Unexpected questions often startling him into thoughtfulness. He found himself opening up in a way he never had before, telling her everything, answering anything she asked.

“Like me,” he finally said, laughing a little. “I don’t know how else to describe him. He looked like me. But with blue eyes. Dark blue.”

“Was he tall?”

“I was a kid. Everyone was tall.” He gathered her hair up in his hands, then slowly let it fall. “If you come to my house someday I’ll show you his picture. I have a few I kept.”

“I’d like that.” She dropped the charms and pulled herself up and onto him. “And I like you.”

“I can’t keep my hands off you…”

It was their honeymoon.

With the rigors of the fall dance concert behind them, and no other stage productions on the docket, life had downshifted into a more relaxed pace. Only classes and homework demanded their attention, and a heady surplus of free time was available to be together and evolve into a couple.

They went out often with Will and Lucky. The four of them laughed and carried on, all around Philadelphia, ambling through museums and galleries, going out to dinner or the movies. Sometimes David came along, sometimes with a date. But usually it was the four of them on the town, young, crazy, high on life and each other.

The nights passed in slower, quieter hours. Being alone. Falling in love.

And fooling around.

Spoiled by Lucky’s regular sleepovers at Will’s place, Erik and Daisy had the room to themselves, and together they were constructing a sexual fortress. She was still a virgin, spoon-feeding Erik her body. He ate what she offered, relishing it. He knew the pace wasn’t set out of mistrust or teasing, but from her own desire not to throw any of the journey away.

“It’s not that I’m totally inexperienced,” she said, the first time he spent the night with her.

He tucked her hair behind her ears. “I’m stunned you’re not with someone. And I’d be more stunned if there never had been anyone.”

“I’ve had boyfriends,” she said, gazing off over his shoulder. “But this is the first time everything I feel about a boy and everything I want from a boy, I want to feel inside me.” She looked at him. “David’s such an ass. I have no delusions about sex and marriage. I just wanted to wait until I knew. And I figured I would know when my mind stopped debating and my body said ‘Him. All of him. Inside me.’”

It wasn’t the first time Erik had heard a girl say she wanted to wait, but he had never heard a girl articulate why so clearly. She was so self-aware and fearlessly true to herself and it made his heart peel open to its most tender core. She was beautiful in his arms, a mermaid in jeans and a silvery-grey bra, her long hair spilling down her back. He made to gather her to him but she hung back, touching his face.

“You’ve done it,” she said.

“I have,” he said, hestitating to admit the particulars of who and when. Not because he was considering lying, but because his gallery of sexual encounters, so thrillingly delicious at the time, were now revealed as being so void of emotional connection he regarded them not sadly, but the same way a parent would indulge a child’s mediocre artwork—
oh yes, lovely, dear
—and then secretly chuck it.

Daisy touched his face, bringing him back. “What were you going to say?”

“I’ve done it. But what I’m doing with you is totally different.”

He had more experience yet he was following her in this dance of slow, intense exploration.
Daisy wasn’t meek or passive. Not prudish or shy. She knew her body, knew what turned her on and what got her off and she trusted Erik with the knowledge
. He didn’t take it lightly. He was on his own journey—learning what it meant to be a lover. A good one. To take pleasure in pleasing her. To make love instead of assuming its perpetual existence.

In her bed they devoured the nights. More often than not when he slept over, they woke up naked, tangled in each other’s arms. She was ardently curious about his body and what she could do to it. Not a square inch of him went untouched. She wanted to know him down to the electrons. And for a young man naturally averse to being scrutinized, Erik was becoming addicted to her attention. The more he let her look and let her in, the more open and responsive she became to him. And the more she gave, the more he wanted.

He had never wanted so much.

He wanted all of her. Her thoughts, her words, her silences and her stillness. He wanted her skin, her smell, her taste and her noises. He loved to make her come, could never get enough of the sound she made when he was bringing her around. Or rather, it was the absence of sound. Other girls he’d been with seemed to explode when they came, but Daisy would implode, pulling everything into her—light, air, sound, even her own voice.

He would never forget the first time it happened. Locked up in her room one night, they were making out, making in, making time stop. Erik was half-sitting, half-leaning on her desk, holding her in front of him. Kissing her mouth, kissing her bare breasts, feeling her head loll around her neck. And then, in an astonishing move, Daisy took her hands off his shoulders and unsnapped her jeans. Started pushing them down. Herself. Never had a girl loosened her own clothing for him with an open, unabashed invitation for him to come in.
Come in. I want you.
He held her steady even as he was exploding with stunned arousal. He felt like thanking her.

Graceful and confident, she stepped out of her clothes and kicked them aside. Slid her arms around his neck, pulling up tight to him. “I like this. Being totally naked while you’re totally dressed.”

He swallowed hard, running his hands up and down her back.

“I love feeling your clothes against my skin,” she said.

He moved more of his forearms along her spine, then down around her waist, letting her feel the material of his shirt bunching up around his elbows then smoothing out again. He slid his leg between her calf, then drew her closer so he could feel on his thigh where she was softest and warmest. His hands curved around her ass and the air in his chest thickened.

“Your body,” he murmured. “I swear.”

Her hips rocked back, then forward, pressing down on his leg, rubbing as she pushed deeper into his kiss.

He started to draw her over to the bed but she resisted. “Stay here, stay like this,” she whispered.

Kissing, he slid his palm down her soft stomach, then further down one hard, sculpted quadriceps muscle. Up the tender, smooth skin of her inner thigh until his fingertips reached that secret nest of damp heat.

“You’re so wet,” he whispered, his heart pounding hard in his ears.

Her breath shook by his ear. “I know.”

He touched her. Easily. None of the awkward, hit-or-miss fumbling he’d experienced before, trying to guess where things might be. He didn’t guess with Daisy, he just knew. It was right
there,
that little bright pearl of flesh, right where he knew it would be, cozying up against his fingertips.

“Feels so good,” she said against his mouth. Little hitches of air on his lips. His own trembling breaths back to her.

“Like that?”

“Yes. Just slide on it. Like that.” Her hand at the back of his head, the other’s nails biting into his arm. Her voice got thinner, with no breath behind it. A click in her throat as she swallowed. Her forehead down on his shoulder. “That’s gonna make me come.” The words fell apart in her mouth.

“Come, Dais. Come for me.” His mouth caressing her breast, one hand flat on the small of her back, the other sliding into her, sliding along her. Transfixed he felt it rise up and bring her around. Her hips bucked against his hand, sending a rolling motion through her ribcage. First her shoulders, then her head flew back, taking the wave of her hair with it, and she came. No noise, just a keening rush of air through her throat. Her chin dropped down, and as it did, her teeth chattered. That sound was an arrow to the core of his maleness. It hijacked his breath, thoroughly did him in.

I made her teeth chatter.

He was holding her up by then, holding her carefully in his hands, running his lips along her face, holding her as her body quieted and her breathing slowed. He kissed her, craving the taste of her mouth and how it felt in his. Slowly he felt her getting her feet back, and her hands on him grew heavier and intentional.

It was his turn.

That first night, it took some effort for him to convert to a passive mentality, to take his hands off her and not engage. To scale the walls of vulnerability instead of taking refuge behind them. He stood still. Tried to expand instead of contract under her touch. He was utterly exposed with no way to divert the attention or diffuse it by adding his own actions. It wasn’t his home base. But he let her at him. He breathed through it as her fingers unbuttoned his shirt, opening his skin to the Christmas light. He breathed as her lips nudged his apart and her fingers trailed down his chest and stomach. He kept still and slowly he came out the other side into a new place of electric arousal, his entire body taut and coiled and wanting.

Her mouth drew long silken lines up and down his neck. Her fingernails in his chest hair. The tightening and release of his belt, the metallic whisper of the zipper on his jeans. She pushed them down, helped him out as he had for her. Then he was naked in front of her and he was hard, so hard in her warm, eager hands. A moan escaped his chest, knuckles tightening white on the desk top. “Dais.”

“Let me,” she whispered.

He let her. And she got him. She was good at him. As nights gathered into weeks, she made both his teeth chatter and his toes curl. She could make him come like a freight train, or come in slow motion. Climax laced with emotional intensity made him lose his mind, and in the divine insanity, he became expressively fearless. Verbally uninhibited. Things he had never imagined saying to a girl came tumbling forth unchecked.

“I want to kiss you until I die.” Which was the truth.

“Your mouth feels amazing.” She was going down on him, the warm wet of her tongue and throat advancing and reatreating like the tide, her head dipping and bobbing under his hand. The words floated out of him into the dark and her response was a fiercely pleased sigh from deep in her chest.

“I love watching you come.” Another one—in his head and right out his mouth. She took his hand, slid it due south down her stomach, her hips yearning up and her knees swooning open, and she whispered, “Do it again.”

“You taste so good.” He groaned it one trembling night when he finally got into her sweetness, a tart rush along the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. Her palm heavy on his crown, her fingers threaded in his hair. Her shoulder blades plowing furrows in the mattress and her calves warm and smooth on his shoulders. He practically hummed with contentment as he drank her in, feeling her unfold and shiver, closing his eyes as she came against his mouth.

“Let me get this straight,” she said a little while later. “I’m supposed to leave this room, dance thirty hours a week, earn a BFA and get an education… All the while knowing you can do
that
to me?”

“Mm-hm.” Her body limp in his arms and her taste lingering on his tongue, Erik was swaying in a hammock of perfect contentment. “Any time you want.”