Chapter 9
We have a half day off, so Juniper texts me in the morning and ends up coming to my room.
We sit on the couch and watch a movie—Spirited Away, one of Juniper’s all-time favorites.
I feel like she’s looking at me as much as she’s looking at the movie, hoping I’ll love it the same way she does.
Fortunately, I do. We order room service breakfast, but Juniper eats almost nothing—just a couple bites of her eggs—because she’s worried about how she’ll look at the premiere.
We watch the movie in a kind of reverent silence.
It’s one of those movies where the final scene hits in an unexpected way.
I find myself feeling really overwhelmed, thinking of the kid I used to be, and the kid in the movie whose life is restored in a way that real lives can’t be.
Juniper leans into me as she likes to do, and she says, “I know.” I tell her, “Maybe this is the point of movies,” and she says, “What?” And I say, “To let people feel things together.”
“Art gives form to the formless,” she says.
“Kierkegaard?” I ask.
“Original,” she says.
“God, I really do love you, Juniper.”
“You too, Kai.”
As the credits roll, she tells me, “I’m so sorry, Kai. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all of it again.”
I tell her something I learned in therapy.
My dad isn’t a big feelings guy, but he paid to put me in therapy immediately after it all came out, and it really helped.
“My therapist says that one of the hallmarks of trauma is that you don’t know when it’s going to end.
We can endure almost anything if we know there’s an end to it.
No matter how much it sucks to run a marathon, you know it’ll be over in twenty-six-point-two miles.
But when you’re going through something really traumatic, you don’t know when it will end or how it will end.
Or if it will end. And that’s what makes it so destructive. ”
“I probably need to go back to therapy,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Juniper, but you need therapy.”
Juniper tells me she has to start getting ready for her last photo shoot at one, that’s when her hair and makeup people arrive, but she’s free until then.
It’s only eleven. I ask her what we should do, and she tells me she doesn’t want to go outside because she doesn’t feel like being perceived, which is a very Juniper thing to say.
I tell her that we can watch another movie—we have just enough time.
So we rent another thirty-two-dollar film on the studio’s dime, this time the Barry Jenkins movie Moonlight.
It’s such a tender film from the start, so earnest without being cheesy, and we watch in rapt silence.
I feel very aware of Juniper sitting next to me.
I am aware of the unfinished room service atop a white tablecloth.
I am aware of how she smells—like her lavender-scented shampoo.
I am aware that I want Juniper, that I want her like I have never wanted anyone before.
I want to kiss her and see her naked. She is impossibly, phenomenally beautiful to me right now, her smell exhilarating me.
She has her feet curled under her body as she likes to, leaning into me so that her shoulder is pressed against my upper arm.
_____
I don’t know how to tell her what I want, or if it’s okay for me to want it.
My therapist says I can’t blame him for everything, can’t make him the axis mundi around which my life spins, but on this front, he really is.
I loved him. Admittedly I’ll love anyone, but I loved him.
He was so smart, so worldly. He could quote any poet.
He understood me, or at least it felt that way for a while.
And he used all of that. I’m so fucked up now.
Can’t even tell a girl who clearly wants me that I want her back, and it’s all because I love her.
I am terrified of sexualizing love, of ruining it, of making it dirty the way he made my love for him dirty.
It was easier with the social virology scholar because there was never the same bubbling in my belly, the mere thought of her breathing into me like so much pure oxygen. “I like you too much,” I finally say, squeezing out the words.
She pauses the movie with the remote. “How’s that?”
“When you touch me, when you’re touching me, I can hardly breathe.”
“I don’t have to—”
“I am not sometimes in love with you. I am not sometimes anything with you. It is all the time. It is incessant. It has been incessant since I first saw you in that Pittsburgh hotel. But if I tell you that, if I tell you the truth, I put everything at risk. All of me. All of us.”
She’s just staring at me for a long time, and then she says, “May I kiss you?”
I nod, and we kiss, and it is gentle at first—just like when we filmed—but then it is something more and greater, a devouring, her mouth on mine and then on my neck and ear.
I’m kissing her collarbone, her gorgeous collarbone, and she has her hand on my face and I take her hand and kiss her fingers, and then return to her mouth, and she says, “I want to see you,” and so I strip off my shirt and feel her hands against my biceps, my chest, tickling along my belly.
I kiss her forehead. “I’ve wanted this for so long,” she says, which makes me want her more, and I strip off her shirt and we’re still sitting up, so she leans away from me while I stare at her eyes.
She unhooks her bra, and I ask if I can look and she says, “That’s the idea,” and I glance down at her small, perfect breasts and go back to kissing her, our hands discovering each other.
“Stand up,” she says, and I stand up, and she asks me if I want to take off my pants, says she’ll show me hers if I’ll show her mine, and I laugh and strip down.
I feel utterly exposed in front of her, my hands at my side, and she asks me to turn around and says I have a cute butt, and I say thanks and she says and also I like when you turn back around.
Your turn, I say, and then she wriggles out of her pants and her underwear and turns around for me.
I swallow hard and take two steps toward her, and she steps toward me, and he isn’t allowed in the room for this.
No one is. It’s between Juniper and me, the only two people who will ever know the rest of what happened that morning in my hotel room.
_____
My hotel phone rings me awake. She’s still naked beside me, one knee draped over my leg under the covers. I roll over. “Hello?”
“Do you know where Juniper is?” It’s Ellen.
“Yeah, she’s here with me.”
“She’s late for hair and makeup.”
“Ah, right. She’ll be up in a moment.”
“Are you—Did you—” Ellen starts. “You know what? None of my fucking business. Send her upstairs.”
“We were just watching a movie,” I say.
“Not my circus, not my monkeys. Send her up to the room, though, will ya?”
Juniper is already pulling her underwear back on, and then hopping into her pants.
“Well,” she says. “This is a major development. This is breaking news. Can, uh, can we do this again?”
“I think so,” I say.
“Unfortunately I fly to Paris tonight,” she says.
“Incredible news: I also fly to Paris tonight.”
“Great. I’ll make a note of that. The boy I love is flying to Paris with me.”