I became uncomfortably aware of what she was about to do—her tongue on me, inside me, a great intimacy. I wanted it, but I was also embarrassed to want it, to display so blatantly the degree of my desire for her. I wanted to be cool. Remembering that now makes me laugh. I was so far from cool at that point. She might have been kneeling before me, but I was the supplicant.

I raised myself on my elbows to look at her and said in my cool voice, “You don’t have to do that.”

She paused. Her eyes were dilated as her gaze swept over my stomach, my breasts, my face. I wanted to take a picture of her looking at me. She said, “I want to.”

Her words lit me up inside.

I lay back down. Above me the ceiling was bathed in yellow light from the bedside lamp. I curled my fingers into the coverlet and thought, I’ll have to wash this tomorrow. And then—

It’s not as if I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but I was still stunned when I felt her mouth on me. Her tongue, climbing the swollen ridge of nerves at the cleft of my body. Her fingers inside me, that exquisite friction. I closed my eyes but I still saw her face, her hazel eyes. I would see her face for years to come. The way she opened me, as if she had always possessed the key to this lock. A smooth, well-oiled click, the tumblers sliding into place, effortless. And I was there so soon, so fast, shuddering against her mouth, the center of my world. She made me feel transcendent, exceptional.

Afterward she crawled up beside me, her head on my pillow, her hand cupping the warmth of my sex, and I realized she was still completely dressed while I was naked, splayed open for her exactly the way I’d wanted to be.

Chapter 40

I was sixteen when I had sex for the first time. It was during the summer I lived with my mom in New York while she was performing at the Met. She had a fifteenth-floor apartment in Battery Park City with a view of New York Harbor, and when I first arrived, she was full of plans to show me the city and do all sorts of mother-daughter things, but very little of that happened. If she wasn’t at the opera house, she was meeting with her vocal coach or her trainer or practicing Italian with her language teacher. She was rarely at home unless she was asleep.