Chapter 38
Greta
It’s two thirty in the morning when I reach the RV park.
I try not to make noise, but the gravel crunches with every footstep.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. Or maybe I do, but it’s so stupid I try to convince myself that I don’t and that I’m just letting my impulses take over.
On the drive here, I thought about the word madness and how often it’s associated with love.
Maybe because both things can be imprudent, unreflecting: You can’t think about love, wonder whether or not to dive in—it’s pointless.
Reason can only take you so far. In the end, love and madness both require daring, and that must be why all of us, deep down, want to fall madly in love.
I don’t know… I don’t know what I’m feeling. And I need to find out.
So I knock on his door and look up into the starry sky saying Don’t open, don’t open, do open, do open, do open. It’s exhausting to fight yourself, head versus heart, and that’s why I need to see Will now. Open.
When he does, I can tell I’ve woken him up. I’d like it if my heart didn’t skip a beat when I see him, but it does, as if my body is determined to sabotage any and every attempt I make at being logical.
“Sorry for showing up like this. I needed to see you.”
“Greta…” His voice is hoarse. “Come on in.”
I set foot in his tiny kingdom. Will lights a candle.
He’s wearing pajama shorts and a tight white shirt.
I realize this simplicity of his is the fruit of effort, of closing himself off from the person he once was.
For the first time, looking around the RV, I try to imagine what it meant, changing his life, trading a luxury apartment in New York for the shoebox we’re in now, a law firm for a part-time job at a bar, his friends and family for solitude.
“You okay?” he asks, worried.
“Yeah, I just can’t stop thinking, you know?” I shake my head. “How many versions of one person can there be?”
“Lots. In a sense, we never are anything except a version.”
“How do I know then that the Will I have in front of me is the real one?”
“Because I’m too tired to be fake, Greta.”
The orange splendor of the candlelight shimmers softly, as though the flame can feel the tension in here and didn’t wish to disturb it.
“I couldn’t sleep, I felt so guilty,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I was cruel.”
“You weren’t. I understand. I get it,” he says.
“Stop being so nice!”
Will sits on the bed, sighs, and rubs his two-day growth of beard. We’re across the room from each other, but the space is so small. I decide to be honest. It’s the least I can do after I knocked on his door in the middle of the night.
“Maybe I’m trying to hurt you.”
“It’s working,” he whispers.
“Maybe I need to see you feeling something and know that you’re human. I’m not proud of it, though. More like the opposite.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Because I’m scared and you know how I feel: The best defense is a good offense, right? Life’s a game too, Will. Everything is. You’ve got to anticipate the next move.”
“What are you scared of?” he asks quietly.
“Not mattering to you.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?” His voice is sweet as a caress.
“I do sometimes when I think about what will happen the day you pick back up the reins to your life. I don’t want to just be the girl you amused yourself with while everything was on hold. It isn’t right, me giving so much and you so little.”
“You’re not anticipating the next move. You’re just making things up,” he says.
“Well, I wouldn’t have to if I had even one solid thing to go on. Look at you: You’re so far away, you’re inaccessible, and there’s no way to know what you’re thinking. I put my cards on the table, it wasn’t easy, but on my birthday, I told you how I felt.”
Will stands slowly. “I thought my feelings were evident.”
“Well, they weren’t. And even if they were…”
“Keep going.”
“I’d like to hear you tell me aloud.”
The candle burns down, and the scent of wax fills the room. He comes toward me and takes my hand before I even know what he’s about to do. Gently, he places it on his neck, then brings it down to the center of his chest. His heart. And he leaves it there.
“Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel how fast it’s beating,” he asks, and I nod. “It’s for you. Do you understand what that means? That should mean more than a bunch of words. Because it’s real.”
My knees weaken. This isn’t just some declaration. It’s something Will needed to do and something I needed to feel. When trust hangs by a thread, words aren’t enough. This, though, this is palpable. This is truth.
“Greta…” He lets my hand go and looks me in the eyes. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known.”
I close my eyes to sharpen my other senses—and also to keep myself from crying.
No one has ever said anything so simple, so precious to me before.
He doesn’t use fancy words, but I think that’s one reason it hits me so hard.
I had seen things like this happen in books and movies, but it had never happened to me.
And all of us deserve that: to be special to someone, to be able to shine, just a little.
He comes closer and pulls me into him. He’s shivering, but then the warmth of his embrace grows between us and gives us solace. I hold on to his shoulders, sink my nose into his neck, rock with him a long time.
“You want to know when I realized you’d be a problem for me?” he whispers into my hair.
“Yes,” I whisper back, my lips still close to his skin—I can’t stand to be apart from him now.
“When I read that list of things you liked. It was here, really late, just like now. I got to the end, when you changed from the present to the future, and I thought, Damn it I’m going to fall in love.”
“How nice. Damn it and love in the same sentence.”
I hear his soft laugh, feel it on my cheek, and wish that vibration would keep echoing forever in my pores.
“It’s poetry,” he says.
“Tell me more. Just a little something, please,” I ask, and he laughs again.
“I knew I wanted to do all the things you had written down with you. Show you the constellations. Walk through the streets of Vienna at sundown. Catch a train, not knowing what station we were going to get off at. Watch you skate on the ice thinking of nothing, nothing at all.”
I pull back to look into his eyes. “Did you memorize the whole list?”
“Yeah. I’ve read it countless times.”
My heart speeds up. “Stay still. Don’t move.”
I reach up and cup his chin. His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t look away.
I trace out his eyebrows with my fingers, cross the bridge of his nose, graze his lips.
There’s something prideful in his expression—even when he’s trying to be kind, there’s a contradiction there, but that only makes him more human.
And maybe that’s the thing that attracted me to him right from the start: how he’s so real but so fugitive, so fragile and so strong, so melancholy, so alive, so simple, so complex.
All of us are like that, really, a fusion, a mess, a drawer full of random objects that can’t be classified.
I follow the curve of his lips, the upper one that struggles upward when he half smiles and you know he’s trying not to. That curve is beauty itself, there’s no doubt about it. That curve exists to be kissed.
And I stand on my tiptoes to do it.
We hardly even touch, but Will starts panting.
He seems to realize he’s been still too long.
His tongue finds mine, and they dance together for a few seconds as we move around the caravan.
I pull on the edge of his T-shirt until he realizes what I want and pulls it over his head.
I press my hands into his belly and stroke up to his clavicle, to his neck.
I step back and take off my shirt. My bra is sheer, without an underwire.
I have to fight the urge to cover myself when he comes back toward me.
He holds my chin in his hands and raises it as he kisses me.
This kiss is different—wet, intense, capable of erasing every thought in my head except one: that we are here, now, stripping off far more than just our clothes.
And I understand that for someone to find you, you have to let yourself be seen first, drop your weapons, abandon yourself like the woman in The Kiss.
And I do it. I can’t help myself. His mouth blazes a trail up my neck and back down until I feel Will’s hot breath against the thin fabric of my bra.
He pulls it off. Now there’s nothing between us.
I sink my hand into his hair and ask for more, more. And he gives it to me.
We fall into bed. I tug at Will’s shorts, and he pulls my pants down. I stroke him. I plunge for the first time into the landscape that is this new body waiting to be discovered, memorized. And I want it.
He kisses me. I kiss him.
We kiss each other, and our hands search for our delicate points. His is hard. I can feel it on my thigh. His whole body is hard, and I wish I could shelter there on those gray days when the sun won’t come out. And he’s warm, unlike my skin, which is cold.
“Will…” I murmur when his hand slides between my legs.
“Something wrong?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Good.”
I lose track of time. I don’t know how many minutes pass as he touches me, so self-assured, so skillfully, that it’s almost as if my own hand is doing it.
Pleasure creeps up my body in waves that build into a devastating tsunami that knocks me down, and as my orgasm reaches its peak, I collapse in Will’s arms like a rag doll, clutching his neck.
Intensity replaces calm. And he is its source. We connect—we need to connect—in every possible way. Touching, looking, hearing, and saying. Above all, when our lips collide.
I climb on top of him. That’s an advantage of such a tiny space—he doesn’t have to get up to reach for a condom. I feel like we’re alone in our shell under the sea, far from the world, alone, just the two of us and the flickering of the candle.
He tries to turn me over, but I don’t let him. He understands when I rest my hands on his chest and he freezes, looking up at me, his pupils so dilated I can barely see the green of his eyes.
I want to set the pace. Slowly, I take him inside me. As I rock back and forth, I can feel him holding back, and I watch his fingers curl in as he tries to resist grabbing my thighs to push in deeper. His sighs are impatient. For a few minutes, he holds out. Then, finally, he grunts.
“You’re torturing me,” he hisses.
“It’s not that. It’s that I never want this to end,” I confess.
“Don’t be silly, Greta. We can always start over. Come here.”
He sits up, leans his back against the wall, and wraps his arms around me. I ride him and he kisses me passionately and it turns me on so much to know he’s the source of that tingling sensation on my lips.
I start moving faster and faster.
He grabs my waist and guides me as his mouth moves to my chin, my earlobe, and other erogenous zones I didn’t even know I had.
I know he’s close to finishing when his breathing turns shallow and his shoulders tense.
We are nothing but our skin, those square inches that touch and separate and touch again, cells mingling in the sheets of his bed, sex and sweat and saliva and an orgasm about to explode.
And beyond the physical, I can feel the tie between us strengthening, and everything, absolutely everything around us, is purple: the RV, our bodies, each kiss.
And the pleasure that runs through me is purple, and the moan I muffle in the hollow of his neck, and the hug he gives me as he lets himself go and finishes, and everything stops, and everything around me melts.
He doesn’t let me go. I don’t let him go either.
“Stay here. Live inside me,” I whisper, and Will laughs and kisses my nose. “I’m serious. We could get by on sex alone.”
“Yeah, we could just order takeout and have them leave it outside. I’d get raviolis with a pound of cheese on top. That’s what I’m craving right now. We could shower together, obviously. Other stuff might be a problem…”
“Details, details,” I laugh.
He gives me a very serious look and says, “I love hearing you laugh like that.”
“I feel like I’m drunk.”
“Drunk on us?”
“Yeah.”
We stay there wrapped in the sheets awhile longer, till Will needs to go to the bathroom.
He gets up and disappears, and I feel cold.
And all the doubts I left behind come back.
I wish I could just think things in order, following a straight line, but no, my ideas branch out like trees, endless, all of them going their own way.
When he comes back and lies next to me, he realizes almost instantly that something’s changed.
“What is it, Greta?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me. Not now.”
“Okay, you’re right,” I say as his legs wrap around mine. “I don’t know what I’m more scared of with us: getting too close and you breaking my heart or me pulling away and breaking yours.”
“Are those the only two ways?”
“Do you know another one?”
“We dust ourselves off, lick our wounds, and keep going together.”
“Together,” I repeat, savoring the word.
And Will kisses me again, and now that word is his.