My heart gave another jolt. I grinned back at Loria. “Wow, that’s so great! Thank you!”
She winked. “Of course. Enjoy yourself.”
A few hours later, after showering and changing and reading a couple Wulf essays—to soothe myself, to purify my excitement over this walk into ardor for the bigger project of revolutionizing relationships—I stepped out of the Farmhouse living room and into the starry dark. As I climbed the hill toward the barns, a gentle breeze—infused with the sweet, grassy scents of cured alfalfa hay and fresh manure—skimmed the tips of my ears. Gravel crunched under my boots. Anticipation rinsed me in blissful dread, then thrust my heart into the rapid thump of its spin cycle.
Estero’s shop—a long shed—was a few steps downhill from the goats’ milking parlor. I cleared the rise and turned right. Beneath the door I was to knock on glowed a thin band of light. I stalled, seeking a cue in the string of thumps, taps, and clicks from within—until my fear of being caught wavering trumped my fear of stepping forth.
I knocked.
“Come in!”
Inside, Estero stood halfway down the shop’s narrow aisle, probing the blade of an injured blender with a pair of pliers. I was glad the shop’s lone bulb was trained on him; maybe he wouldn’t notice my stiff stance, my deep flush. He grinned in welcome and told me to take a seat, he’d be finished in a minute. I sidled past him to perch on a bare patch of bench. I feigned interest in the set of socket wrenches hanging in ascending sizes from the pegboard across from me—while sneaking glances at that tangled ponytail, that elegant profile.
He gave the blade a final twist and set down the pliers. “Shall we go?” he asked.
“Sure,” I croaked.
We strolled down the hill, past the sloping goat barn, through the salvage yard, past the largest and most prolific wild persimmon tree on the property. By now, most of the fruit, tinged purple, had dropped to the grass and split open, oozing cinnamon, caramel, citrus, winter. We followed a faint trail into a meadow where the does sometimes browsed, then picked a path through the hummocky waste where we’d one day dig a pond. Beyond us loomed Wildcat Spur—our mountain bulwark, home to the highest point in Polk County.
As we walked, I asked Estero for his past, holding back what I already knew from the letter I’d read. I gleaned a couple more details: he’d grown up in rural Illinois and attended technical college in Indianapolis before securing the job he’d quit to come to Zendik. I asked for his future: Did he see the Farm as his permanent home? He nodded, casting his eyes, ridge to ridge, across the sky. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
He took my hand. He was holding my hand. Palm to palm, callus to callus, his knuckles a miracle under my fingertips.
I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else either.
I reciprocated with my own myth, shaping our walk into its latest chapter. In a Wulf essay I’d read and reread, “Friendship unto Love,” he’d laid out the four stages of romantic partnership: Work, Respect, Friendship, Love. If a union was to last, he said, it had to begin in the Work of building the Zendik movement. Through Working together, the lovers developed Respect for each other. Respect made way for Friendship—full knowledge and acceptance of the other—which in turn made way for Love. A special, ineffable Zendik kind of love. Unavailable elsewhere. Before Zendik, I told Estero, I’d flailed at mating: shy of approaching guys I liked, I’d taken touch where I could get it. This walk, right now, was my first intimate encounter with a man I respected and hoped to know forever.
How could I have made such a declaration without sounding ridiculously earnest? Maybe that’s how I did sound. Maybe Estero was chuckling into his vest collar as I spoke. Maybe the grunts of the bucks, in their pen across the creek, drowned his chuckle out.
By this time, we’d traced most of a lasso-shaped loop through the hintermeadows and the lower field. We were back in the salvage yard—known as the “wood yard” for the towering iron racks of neatly sorted boards that dwarfed the heaps of sinks and pipes, the stacks of bricks and cinder blocks. Estero led me halfway up the slope, then shrugged his vest off and spread it on the ground to shield my back from the bumpy damp. He reclined beside me. We stared up at the stars. There, again, was the belt of Orion. He slid his arm around my shoulders. I wanted it there. Yet I flinched. He turned to me and smiled. “You’re a virgin, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“Loria told me.” He squeezed my shoulder. “It’s okay, I know you wanna take it slow. You can relax with me. I promise.”
I believed him. Yet I couldn’t relax. I shook with tension and cold.
Estero helped me to my feet, donned his vest, and led me up the slope to a level spot above the burn pile. He pulled me close—chest to chest, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. The shaking stopped, as I sucked in all the warmth I wanted. Then he leaned in to kiss me—and set off the electric rush.
It flashed loose through my body. Jolts of hot joy coursed through my throat, chest, crotch, toes. I felt as if I’d descended to the subway tracks where male meets female and stumbled on the third rail.
Maybe the electric rush erupted from a difference in charge. Maybe it fed on my nervous excitement, my weeks of daydreaming, my hunger, after years of near chastity, for physical love. Maybe I’d just gotten lucky.
But these were not the stories I told myself as I stood, tingling, in Estero’s embrace.
In “Friendship unto Love,” Wulf had said, “Until you have loved and made love with another who shares precisely your Cosmic Responsibility, you have only loved with the eyes and the body, never the mind, never the intelligence, never the total organism, the total Self.” This, I thought, was the first time I’d kissed a man with my “total Self.” That was the source of my pleasure. That, and the fact that Estero and I—as my myth had predicted—were meant for each other.
I gazed up at him and grinned, belly and hips pressed against his, chest swelling with another earnest declaration. “I can’t believe how good this feels,” I said.
He blinked, and smiled back, but not as widely as I had. A soft breeze dusted us with the burn pile’s ashy musk.
Too soon, Estero pulled free. “It’s getting late,” he said. I nodded, though “late” meant nothing to me. Had it been an hour—two hours? more?—since I’d knocked on his door? Time had turned into a thing that stretched and shimmered, like the cloud of possibility hovering around us. I would have pulsed in his orbit till dawn, had he allowed it.
Instead I spun fantasies of what might happen when I saw him in the morning. I’d seen other pairs of lovers eat their breakfast hip to hip, nuzzle on the couch, share a lingering embrace before heading off to separate work crews. Yes, big chunks of intimate time had to be scheduled—but couples who dug each other enough found ways to intertwine in the interstices.
I was baffled when Estero dispatched me with a brisk hug and quick kiss in the living room before dashing off to install outlets in the Bathhouse. Couldn’t he tell that something wondrous had begun? Or had the electric rush been running a closed circuit within my insulating skin?
That evening, after spilling my confusion to Luya—the only other female Zendik Apprentice—I knocked on Estero’s door again. I said what she’d suggested: that I’d really liked our walk and wanted to “make contact.” He set his pliers down, strode to the doorway, and ringed me in his arms. We kissed; the electric rush surged through me, stronger than before. Then he sent me off, saying he had to get back to work. I knew, deep down, that love makes time elastic. That if he’d shared my feelings he would have sought me out. For the time being, though, I’d leave those thoughts in shadow. I’d keep that trap door closed.