“You have a dreamy look on your face,” Finn says.
“I’m happy,” I tell him.
Finn lies down next to me on his side, propping his head with his hand. “Good. Because I am too. And I’m so many other things I won’t say out loud.”
A thought occurs to me. “Hey, how does, um, this affect your photographic memory? Do you remember, ah, pretty much everything?”
He grins. “Oh yes, I do, Marlena. This is one of the moments when my photographic memory is truly useful. In the best of ways.” He presses a kiss against my mouth, his tongue searching, parting my lips until it slides against my own. When I pull him closer, pull him on top of me, he shakes his head and pulls back. “Mm-mm. We have all the time in the world, remember?” His stare slides down my neck and over my chest and stomach. Starting at my collarbone, his fingertips move across my skin, down the curve of my left breast, then over the right one. There is a tightening in my belly, between my thighs, a tingling along the skin of my chest. When I close my eyes and a sigh escapes, Finn whispers in my ear. “I think it’s time someone else is in charge of healing all the lost and lonely parts of you, Marlena. I want it to be me.”
As his fingertips continue their journey over my body, I open my eyes long enough to say, “I want it to be you, too.”
The warm feeling between my thighs keeps building while Finn’s hands explore every inch of my torso. He leans over me for another kiss, and when I open my eyes there is a lustful but tender expression on Finn’s face, Finn, whose entire being is forever a contradiction. Young but intelligent beyond his years. Serious but fun. Skeptical but full of faith. Fierce but tender. Full of restraint yet willing to abandon himself completely. To me, at least.
“What are you smiling about?” I manage to ask.
“I feel like an explorer,” he says, “discovering all of Marlena’s hidden secrets.”
“I didn’t know I had any hidden,” I tell him.
“Let’s see what else I can find out.” His hand makes its way down my stomach, sliding softly over the skin of my belly until it slips past the band of my skirt and dips underneath the edge of my bathing suit. He stops a moment, and looks at me.
I nod, unable to speak, and the tips of his fingers reach the place between my legs, gliding slowly over this part of my body that I’ve never touched, not like this, that I’m never supposed to allow anyone else to touch. Certainly not like this. It isn’t long before a feeling so intense, so unlike anything I’ve ever known yet somehow similar to that sheer, blinding ecstasy that accompanies a vision, grows up my back and down my thighs and over my stomach to my breasts and my neck until it is all that I am, one great streak of fire and burning that cannot contain my breath.
If pleasure was a vision, it would start out deep and dark and blue, the color of the ocean, cold and sharp. It would become an arrow of stars, streaming through the body on a crash course with the heart. If pleasure was a song composed by a mystic, it would begin with a chorus of soft voices that rise to a startling tangle of bells. If it had a taste, it would be of the sharp salty sea and the bright tang of ripe berries. I had no idea that love, human love, could permeate every one of the bodily senses, that it could take shape in so many different forms. I cannot believe I’ve lived a life that would have me deprived of this until my death in the name of God, of a so-called gift, with a mother who colluded to do just this. If loving Finn has profaned me, then I wish with all my heart that every ounce of sacredness in me is washed away forever.
But somewhere inside me, too, I know for the first time in my life that I am finally discovering what is truly sacred in this world. No God can ever take that from me. This is Finn’s gift to me, a boy so real I can feel his hands on my body and his breath on my lips, which is so unlike the gift that has hidden in my healing hands for so long and kept me from so much of what is truly good and beautiful.
“Marlena,” Finn whispers in my ear, as my lungs slow their effort to gulp the air. “Are you okay?”
“Hm-hmm,” I murmur back, eyes fluttering open.
I look up at Finn, his face hovering over mine, his beauty a wonder, a vision. I trace the curve of his cheek.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
I hook one of my legs over his and pull him closer. “That all my life I’ve been taught to feel ashamed of this, but now that we are here, I don’t feel ashamed at all.”
“Oh Marlena, shame is the last thing you should feel.” He buries a kiss in my hair. “You are beautiful and I love you and there is no shame in this. Not a bit.”
THIRTY-ONE
There are days when you wake up and the whole world feels good. Like everything you see is beautiful and in its place. The way the sun filters through a break in the clouds, a single ray of light raining down to the ocean below. The strawberries piled in a basket on the kitchen table, plump and red. A stack of books waiting for you to read them. Even the sound of the coffee percolating on the stove gives you a sense of peace and harmony. Sometimes there are entire weeks like this. And when they happen, they seem like a miracle.
Before, I didn’t know that being in the world could feel so good. But now, as the days slide into weeks, I live like I have never lived. Like I’ve always wanted to. I let myself change, I let my life change, I let my relationships change. Most of all, I let myself love and be loved by Finn. We walk the beach, even when it rains. We go through the things on my list, one by one, and things that weren’t on my list, too. Finn takes me to his university campus, where there aren’t any lockers but there are people everywhere, sitting on the grassy quad, carrying their books, heading to classes, and I imagine myself here one day. I think about what I might study. I go to the mall and eat in the food court. Helen and I have sleepovers, and we talk into the woozy hours of morning. I stay out all night, more than once. I learn to ride a bicycle. I get better and better at driving. Then one day, Finn and I go on a road trip.
Before we leave, Helen takes me shopping in the city. We go from store to store on a pretty street with clothes that seem ridiculously expensive, but today I don’t care.
“I need to find the perfect outfit,” I tell her. “For . . .”
Helen and I have just emerged from a dress boutique with price tags the same as her monthly rent. She gives me an exaggerated surprise-face. “For whaaaaat, Marlena?”
“You know what,” I tell her.
Finn has devoted himself to proving exactly how much there is to do other than kissing, and I am enjoying this proving. Before, I’d thought that pleasure just happened. I didn’t know that girls were different from boys, that their boyfriends or girlfriends would have to spend time learning their bodies. Finn has made himself into an excellent student of the body that is mine, and I’ve done my best to do this in return for him. But while there may be many kinds of sex, there is still one kind Finn and I have refrained from having. And I’m glad that we’ve waited.
But I don’t want to wait anymore.
Helen yanks my arm and pulls me into a fancy lingerie store. “Well, if that’s what we’re preparing for, what you wear underneath the outfit is just as important!”
“Helen!” I plant my feet firmly just inside the door. We are surrounded by lace, by things it would never occur to me to put on my body. “It’s not like he hasn’t seen me!”
She pulls harder, dragging me to a rack of pale-pink, flimsy—what are they called, teddies? “It’s not like that matters!”