Just One Day(32)

“What do you think?” Willem asks.
“Better than the Louvre.”
We go back upstairs. Willem clicks off the flashlight.
“You know? One day one of these might be in the Louvre,” he says. He touches an elliptical white sculpture that seems to glow in the darkness. “You think Shakespeare ever guessed Guerrilla Will would be doing his plays four hundred years later?” He laughs a little, but there’s something in his voice that sounds almost reverent. “You never know what will last.”
He said that earlier, about accidents, about never knowing which one is just a kink in the road and which one is a fork, about never knowing your life is changing until it’s already happened.
“I think sometimes you do know,” I say, my voice filling with emotion.
Willem turns to me, fingers the strap on my shoulder bag. For a second, I can’t move. I can’t breathe. He lifts my bag and drops it to the floor. An eddy of dust flies up and tickles my nose. I sneeze.
“Gezondheid,” Willem says.
“Hagelslag,” I say back.
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything from today.” There’s a lump in my throat as I understand just how true this is.
“What will you remember?” He drops his backpack next to my messenger bag. They slump into each other like old war buddies.
I lean back against the worktable. The day flashes before me: From Willem’s playful voice over my breakfast on the first train to the exhilaration of making my strange admission to him on the next train to the Giant’s amiable kiss in the club to the cooling stickiness of Willem’s saliva on my wrist at the café to the sound of secrets underneath Paris to the release I experienced when my watch came off to the electricity I felt when Willem’s hand found me to the shattering fear of that girl’s scream to Willem’s brave and immediate reaction to it to our flight through Paris, which felt just like that, like flight, to his eyes: the way they watch me, tease me, test me, and, yet, somehow understand me.
That’s what I see before my eyes when I think of this day.
It has to do with Paris, but more than that, it has to do with the person who brought me here. And with the person he allowed me to become here. I’m too overcome to explain it all, so instead I say the one word that encapsulates it: “You.”
“And what about this?” He touches the bandage on my neck. I feel a jolt that has nothing to do with the wound.
“I don’t care about that,” I whisper.
“I care,” he whispers back.
What Willem doesn’t know—what he can’t know, because he didn’t know me before today—is that none of that matters. “I wasn’t in danger today,” I tell him in a choked voice. “I escaped danger today.” And I did. Not just getting away from the skinheads, but I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn’t even known I was in. “I escaped,” I repeat.
“You escaped.” He comes closer so he towers over me. My back is pressed into the worktable, and my heart starts to pound because there’s no escaping this. I don’t want to escape this.
As if disconnected from the rest of my body, my hand raises in the air and goes to touch his cheek. But before it arrives, Willem’s hand whips around and grabs my wrist. For one confused second, I think I’ve misread the situation again, am about to be refused.
Willem holds my wrist for a long moment, looking at that birthmark. Then he lifts it to his mouth. And though his lips are soft and his kiss is gentle, it feels like a knife jamming into the electrical socket. It feels like the moment when I go live.
Willem kisses my wrist, then moves upward, along the inside of my arm to the tickly crook of my elbow, to my armpit, to places that never seemed deserving of kisses. My breath grows ragged as his lips graze my shoulder blade now, stopping to drink at the pool of my clavicle before turning their attention to the cords of my neck, to the area around the bandage, then gently to the top of the bandage. Parts of my body I never even realized existed come alive as the circuits click on.
When he finally kisses my mouth, everything goes oddly quiet, like the moment of silence between lightning and thunder. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.
Bang.
We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I’ve had in my life has been wrong.
I tangle my hands into that hair of his and pull him toward me. Willem cups the back of my neck, runs his fingers along the little outcroppings of my vertebrae. Ping. Ping. Ping, go the electric shocks.
His hands encircle my waist as he boosts me onto the table, so we are face-to-face, kissing hard now. My cardigan comes off. Then my T-shirt. Then his. His chest is smooth and cut, and I bury my head in it, kissing down the indentation at his centerline. I’m unbuckling his belt, tugging down his jeans with hunger I don’t recognize.
My legs loop around his waist. His hands are all over me, migrating down to the crease of my hip where they’d rested during our nap. I make a sound that doesn’t seem like it could come from me.
A condom materializes. My underwear is shimmied down over my sandaled feet and my skirt is bunched into a petticoat around my waist. Willem’s boxers fall away. Then he lifts me off the table. And then I realize that I was wrong before. Only now is my surrender complete.
After, we fall to the floor, Willem on his back, me resting next to him. His fingers graze my birthmark, which feels like it is flashing heat, and mine tickle his wrist, the hairs so soft against the heavy links of my watch.