If He Had Been with Me

Jamie and I are holding each other and listening to the rain. My wet hair is splattered across his bare chest and his hand is tucked inside my bikini top. The air is cool on my bare skin.

I’m glad now that it started raining.

I sigh and nuzzle his shoulder. His smell is so familiar to me, so comforting, that my muscles relax even more with every breath I take.

“You sleeping?” he mumbles.

“Not yet,” I say. I’m trying to make my breath rise and fall with his. I’m feeling satisfied, which does not always happen when he and I are together. I’ve never told him this though; since I’m always silent when he kisses me, all I have to do is say nothing when he stops moving against me and he assumes I’ve finished too.

Today though, my toes curled and my fingers dug into his back. Nearly skin-to-skin, it felt so real that I couldn’t think of anything but the moment I was in, with him.

“I love you,” Jamie says. He moves his hand over my breast as he says it.

“Do you really?” I ask.

“You know I do,” he says. I think about our future together, how perfect it will be. We’ll buy a house and have a family and be happy together. Jamie is perfect and his life will be perfect, so if I am a part of his life, then I will be perfect too. I trace my fingers down his chest and he flinches away. “Don’t,” he says. “That tickles.”

“Sorry,” I say. I lay my hand back on his shoulder. There is another silence. My eyes start to drift closed.

“I want you,” Jamie says. I feel my eyelashes graze his skin as I open my eyes.

“I want you too,” I say. “Just not yet.” I feel him sigh beneath me.

“Why?” he says, even though I’ve already told him.

“I want it to be special,” I say.

“It would be,” he says.

“How?” I ask. “Here, in this room?” I look at his room with the rock posters and anime action figures lining the shelves, his dirty socks on the floor, and the view of the back patio from his window. When I daydream about my first time, I see it happening in a beautiful room with a gilt canopy bed and a view of the Eiffel Tower out the window, or in a leafy green forest on a velvet blanket with wild flowers surrounding us.

“Yes,” he says. “Or your room.”

I grimace and struggle for words while trying to control my panic at the very idea of my room or, worse, his.

“No, you don’t understand,” I say. “It has to be perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Jamie shifts underneath me, trying to sit up. I let go of him and sit back facing him.

“If it’s you and me, then that’s all that really matters, right?” he says.

“Yes.” I draw the word out slowly, feeling the incompleteness of my reply, how much it leaves unsaid.

“And nothing in life is ever really perfect. I mean, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m just waiting for it to feel right,” I say. I look down at his comforter and pick at a ball of lint.

“When will that be?” he asks. I shrug and don’t look up.

“Are you mad?”

“No, I’m frustrated,” Jamie says. His voice is hard and sounds as if it’s coming from very far away.

“Are you going to leave me?” I ask. Swiftly, Jamie moves closer to me and pulls me into a hug.

“I will never, ever, never leave you,” he says.

“I love you too,” I finally say.