35
When I arrived at boarding school in England, I had a decent amount of sex.
In retrospect, it was both a reaction and an outworking. It was an act of self-discovery and the commencement of my decompressing of the last year, as well as the start of a long road to processing the complexities of what happened with Becks.
It was also me stepping into the role my parents had set the stage for me to play.
The first couple of times I did it were weird and traumatic for both parties because I obviously didn’t tell them the situation around how I’d had sex before, just that I’d had it—and that didn’t end well for anyone. Neither me nor them. I’d cry and flinch and freeze, but I’d never tell them to stop.
Three boys. I slept with three boys in my first year of boarding school. One of them’s gay now.
And then after that, I dated a boy from school whom I did love, and our sexual relationship was littered with good and bad. I never told him what happened, but I think he eventually guessed because I was pretty up and down.
After he and I broke up, I went off it for a bit. Midway into my second year at university, I began to see a therapist because my lecturer said she saw in me repressive behavior and watched me avoid normal things my peers liked as a means of self-preservation, and she confronted me about it.
If today I could be classified as a functional person, she and my therapist, Lucy, were and are the reasons that I am.
Then there was a guy called Henry. We had a few mutual friends—he knows Hattie and Bianca. I slept with him mainly just because he was super-duper hot and very good at it. But even then, very early on in the developmental stages of my particular and niche-market skill set, I could tell he was spotted with issues himself. He and his best friend had fallen in love with the same girl. I was the distraction, which was kind of sad, but the sex was good, and I wasn’t a whole enough person at the time to care that he was only with me because he couldn’t be with someone else. I think I was just grateful to be having sex on my own terms.
Not long after Henry came Anatole (with a few spatterings of one-night stands in between), and I can’t stress this enough: he was so beautiful, and beautiful really can cover a multitude of sins. Literal and figurative. And I think once upon a time I thought Storm was my endgame, but he wasn’t. If he was, we’d still be together.
A romantic endgame is something I’ve spent much of my adult(ish) life considering. It sounds ominous, and I guess it is in some ways, but so is love if you’re doing it properly. Ominous and hopeful in one fell swoop.
And this is the feeling I have as I wake the next morning in the exact position I fell asleep in after Sam and I had finished.
The sun’s barely up. Light’s cracking the horizon and the birds aren’t out yet. Sam hasn’t moved an inch, his arm thrown over me the same way it has been this whole time, and his chest is rising and falling in the same rhythm it has been all night, and I’m hit with this surge of dread and wonder.
There’s a chemical your body releases after you have sex. Oxytocin. It’s a neurotransmitter and a hormone. Its base evolutionary function is to bond you to another person, so mothers don’t leave babies even when they cry all the time and they’re annoying, so cavemen don’t leave vulnerable cave women for hotter cave women.
It tricks you into thinking you’re in love.
And as I lie here, sneaking glances at Sam Penny, I tell myself what I’m feeling is the remnants of the oxytocin, but if I was reading myself, I’d know it was a lie. I couldn’t say it with a straight face.
It’s been seven days today since I first met Sam Penny and I can confirm with absolute certainty that I am completely in love with him.
Ridiculous, I know. It’s fucking insane, actually.
I’ve flown off the handle and it isn’t like me at all. And if I wanted to pull it apart, I could say I’m in distress; it’s a trauma response and I’m latching on to him because of that. There are a lot of emotions swirling around me at the minute—that’s true. Sam Penny is a safe harbor—also true. But what else is true is this: Sam Penny is undoubtedly the greatest man I’ve ever met.
Besides the obvious—that he is without a doubt the most flawless-looking man on the planet, and I could write a sonnet about what it’s like to be wrapped up in him, and I’d need a full day just to graze the surface of describing the shape of his mouth—there is, maybe more significantly, the invisible.
How he thinks, how he feels, how he processes, how he wonders, how he breathes… He does all those things better than the rest of us, and not because he’s perfect—he’s not, I know he’s not—but that’s just why he is .
He is fully aware of and thusly alive in his weaknesses; it’s where his humanity thrives.
He’s the most human person I’ve ever met, but not in the same way I could say about Anatole. That would be true too, but it’s different.
Storm is a slave to his impulses. He acts on a whim, he’s trigger-happy (and -sad), his emotions exist on the most accessible plane of who he is, and he responds to all of life from that place—which is, large in part, incredibly human.
But Sam, he’s like the embodiment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s übermensch—that elusive archetype—and frankly, a daydream of someone who is persevering and strong-willed enough to master the entire spectrum of what it means to be a human. Ugly, beautiful. Happy, sad. Terrifying, wonderful.
Sam sees the world through this peculiar and raw lens of knowing there’s bad out there. He knows it, can see it, recognizes it—he might even acknowledge it, but it doesn’t seem to affect him. He just breathes deep and constant until the good he knows is coming comes.
And I don’t know if that’s innate or learned. I don’t know whether nearly dying a couple of times gave him perspective or turned him into the Dalai fucking Lama, or if that hike he took in the Himalayas really spoke to him or whatever, but—
He never seems to react; he only responds. Except for that night he hit Beckett in the face with the pool cue, but I feel like that’s a free pass.
He’d tell you, if you asked him, every weakness he has, every flaw in his character… But then you’ll watch him be bigger than them, and you’ll watch me turn into a puddle of goo.
So I love him. I know I do, and I know that that’s insane, but nothing is more insane than the part where I think he might love me back.
And there are things I could do that would bring absolute clarity to the question mark that hovers over that statement, but the older I grow and the better I get at seeing people the way I see them, the more I understand that all truths aren’t just apples hanging off a tree waiting for me pick them.
Some things people have to tell you themselves.
And I could be wrong anyway. I mean, I’m not—the way he hovers, the way he watches me, the way his breathing shifts when I walk into the room, the way the edges of his face soften when he talks to me—I’m not wrong.
This is the hopeful part.
And here is the ominous one: I don’t know what happens next, because today is the day of the will.
And then what? Then he goes back to California with my brother and I go back to Blighty? Oliver won’t stay here longer than he has to, and neither would I, but maybe for Penny I would (which is another reason that I know I love him). But I don’t know what I’ll do.
When I was twenty, I started using La Mer’s Crème de la Mer. Before then, my skin was fine, good even…but once I started using that, it became great. And now I can’t unknow how great my skin can be. And this is how I feel about Sam.
I can’t unknow him.
I think I’m probably different now because I’ve known him.
But I don’t know what that m—
He stirs. His eyes flutter a few times before they open slowly, and as soon as he sees me, he smiles, and my heart’s in my stomach.
“Hey,” he croaks.
“Hi.” My cheeks go pink.
He rolls on his side and smiles more. “Hi.”
I drop my head and stifle a laugh, face on fire, mouth watering.
He ducks his head so he can find my eyes. “You going shy on me?”
I peer up. “Your unflinching gaze is pretty intense for zero o’clock in the morning.”
He gives me a little shrug. “Yeah, well, get used to it.”
He brushes his mouth against mine.
I roll on my back and look up at the ceiling, twiddling my fingers, and I feel him watching me—eyes pinched a little, waiting.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask the ceiling with big, round eyes.
“Yeah, for sure.” I can hear the smile in Penny’s voice. “I’ve been waiting since last night for you to ask me something weird and possibly invasive.”
I flick my eyes over at him and throw him a dark look.
He licks away a smile.
I clear my throat so I come off nonchalant. “How often do you have casual sex?”
Pause.
“Was that casual sex?” he asks. I can’t totally pick out his tone.
I purse my lips and keep staring at the ceiling. “Was…n’t it?”
He shifts so he’s in my line of sight, looking down at me. “Was it?” He lifts his eyebrows. “Casual sex I have sometimes. That…wasn’t it.”
I squint over at him. “What was it, then?”
He cocks a smile, then drags his lips over mine again. “You’re cute.”
No doubt an intentional sidestep of my question.
I can see a hint of trepidation in his eyes. He thinks we’re on the same page, but because I’ve asked it, he isn’t irrevocably certain, so he doesn’t want to say. His mouth’s twitching with all the things he isn’t saying.
I’m not cute, he’s cute. Cute as a fucking button, and I find myself chewing on a nail and grinning at him, and I’d feel like a loser if he wasn’t smiling back how he is.
He pushes some hair behind my ears. “You feeling okay?”
“About?”
“Us.” I like that his cheeks go instantly pink, and he shakes his head quickly once but laughs at himself anyway. “This,” he clarifies, gesturing casually between us.
I give him a look. “You really need to get that slip of your tongue under control…”
He gives me a look back. “That’s not what you said last night…”
I pinch my eyes at him, and he does it back but a smile cracks over his face. He glances at my window, then back at me. AU14. His mouth pulls at the sides a tiny bit.
“I should probably go grab a shower before Oli wakes up and gets fucked off.” Contempt. Minor and subdued, but there.
“Okay.” I nod, flashing him a quick smile.
He gives me a long look, then kisses me again. It’s not rushy or urgent. It’s not a bookend kiss, he’s not signing off, he doesn’t say goodbye—he just kisses me, hands in my hair, soft and melty, and then he slips out of my room.
His kisses are commas.