Chapters (72)
I stop listening. I’m alone with Marcus. We’re in his house. His family is gone for the weekend. He’s drinking, and his mouth fills with whiskey. First, I smell it. He pats the couch. “Move closer.” Then I taste it. Whiskey burns on the tongue. It’s for grown-ups, a smell and taste I’ll forever associate with him, with wanting and needing and illicit secrets.
For an hour, Marcus’s sole focus is my pleasure. He touches and strokes until I am limp, until I am crying and begging, please, Marcus, please.
“Please what?” he wants to know.
Please, I think. It’s too much. “Please don’t stop” is what I say.
Marcus kisses me until there is nothing else, just his mouth, his tongue. His voice brings me along, steady and reassuring. His eyes are half-closed like he’s drugged. His fingers slide inside me. My own eyes close; I, too, am drugged.
Cassandra. His voice changes. It’s deeper, stronger. The voice of a man who isn’t amused, a man considering serious business. “Stay with me,” he says. I stay, of course I stay. Where else would I go? He is urgent. “I need you; I need you.” His palm hovers over my nipple. He brings it down slowly. He barely skims the surface, but the feeling the feeling the feeling. When he looks at me, there are tears in his eyes. There is nothing else; there is only this; only us. The stillest point of the turning world.
My body is between us, young, agile, flexible. I can’t live without you, he says. You own me, he says. Your tits, your pussy, your ass. I can’t live without these feelings, he says.
Suddenly, the therapist makes sense. Feel your feelings, she advised.
Our feelings dominate us, push us forward, make us dizzy, desperate. Our feelings reduce us to want. Our feelings clarify there is no turning back. We spend one night together. But for me that night is my whole future. That night, my life with Marcus is laid out, glamorous and heady, like a long red carpet unfurled in our honor. Together, we race toward the rest of our lives.
The story of Marcus + Cassie is a story of true love. It’s the story of a beautiful man’s beautiful voice; a voice that says, come be with me, come, Cassie. A voice I will follow to the ends of the earth then over the side. I wait and wait and wait, and now he is sliding into me, so strong and so hard. We are moving so closely. This is how you build a girl from the ground up, from the inside out; you give her a voice she can follow and then lead her forward. Wherever you go she is there because she is becoming a woman, she is becoming herself. I am coming, Marcus. I am, I am, I am.