Worship You

Chapter Three. What It's Like To Really Be In Love

We spent the whole night together. Since I turned sixteen, I'd waited to feel that, to really be in love. And then, BOOM, there it is. No doubts, no questions, suddenly every thing slides, it just works and you don't have to try or pretend or lie. You just are. You're not doing your feelings, putting them together one by one and squeezing them out. Now your feelings are doing you. Something is handling you, shaping you, you're floating along on a cloud, an imperceptible half a centimeter above the ground. Everything's beautiful and nothing hurts. 

And it's passing back and forth between the two of you, this beautiful electricity, except it doesn't burn, it feels so good and so right and now finally you're home where you belong. And everything they say you should care about is suddenly real, not fake, it's right there inside this beautiful package of skin and blood and explosive, atomic... rapture.  

It just feels so good and no drug can beat it. A reporter asked me right after I was arrested: "What's the lesson of your life? What can we learn?" I didn't say it to him, he was an asshole, but the answer is: Fall in love. No matter what it may do to you later, you'll never be sorry.  

I'm not sorry and I've got a lot of regrets. Tons. But I'd still do it again. I'd have to feel that thing no matter what. It's all there is. There's nothing else that justifies existence. Without it, everything is stupid. 

But, so what did we really do? I can hear you: "Yeah, yeah you're in love and everything's everything and all that, but what did you do?" 

What do people do? We hung out. We went to the mall. We drove out to the quarry in my car and watched the stars. What do people do? We played the radio and held each other and smoked and kissed, the taste of the smoke on our tongues. And all the time the stars turning and turning over our heads, spiraling and making us dizzy in slow motion. 

At one point my heart started to pound and something built up in me like steam in a boiler. My heart made dangerous thuds and rose into my throat. I looked at Cassie who was staring at stars, her eyes big, pressing out of her body towards eternal light.  

"I read something in a book called The Last of the Just." She said, "'The light of dead stars...' touches our eyes? Hits our eyes? I can't remember. But the idea is that, since it takes so long for light to travel here, that we see stars that are, at this moment in time, dead. And when the light that leaves a star right now, when that light gets here... we'll be dead. We'll be dead and that starlight I promised myself will fall on an empty space." 

Her hands were at her sides on the car seat, palms up. Her chin, her throat and the notch of her clavicle bones, which are so beautiful and then the sternum, the beginning of the ribs that start in her chest and spread out to support her shape. I could see them in the low cut V neck of her sweater, the swelling of sweet soft flesh... Oh man. I reached.  

Because she was right, we would be dead soon, so forget about starlight, we were here now, alive, and my heart was hammering in my throat harder than I could stand. I could feel it because of her, I could feel how we someday wouldn't be warm, that we'd be dead and cold and I shivered and I reached for her. 

She caught my hand gently and wrapped it around her waist.  

"Wait, baby," She said "Wait. Everything comes at the right time."  

"Bull shit," I said, "It comes now." 

I pushed my head toward her, like I was playing football. She turned her head away just enough to stop me. Then she lay her hand on my cheek and turned her eyes on me. Her eyes got bigger and bigger and I slipped into them with my whole body like sliding into a hot bath when you ache and need relief. She brought her face closer and almost kissed me, but not quite, just so close, close enough to feel the warmth of her lips. Her lips were so real to me, there was nothing else in the world. Then they touched me in a kiss so soft.  And just before there was a snap of static electricity, a little sting to let us know that it wouldn't be easy. That some of it would hurt.

Lips. And then everything is now.  I'm aware of Cassie's lips at that moment in a way that I never have been of anything else before, that her mouth is part of something bigger and free and mystifying, that they're part of HER and that there's more to it than I know or can understand. Lips. Tongue. A mouth. So beautiful, so much so that they're everything for me. I don't know what I'm trying to say... They were like a door to new life, the entry way to Cassie. They were lips and a tongue for kissing and for love and talking, for eating and I wanted them, I wanted to keep them touching me, on me, kissing kissing kissing. And I never really liked that before, kissing, you know? But now? Suddenly it's all I want to do. And those lips - I'm watching them so closely - they move and form into shapes... and I'm trapped on her lips, like caught and a prisoner or something, while I wait and wait for them to tell me what's next. 

Finally she says, "You've got to be patient with me. I need gentle treatment." 

Huh? What? What is she saying? Of course, gently. All I want is the gentleness of your lips, touching. For two years ever since Things Changed, I've been barging around, crashing through and trying to make it happen for me, to force it through and make it already to have happened. I want it over so I can chalk up the score and have it done. But not now. Now I want it to last, I want to stretch each second out long and thin until I suck every bit of living out of it. And make sure I get it all. 

She puts her other hand on my face.  

"I know. Just look at me. And breathe with me... just like I do. In..." 

And every breath we take seems to tie us closer, like something is sewing us up together, putting stitches in our flesh and making us one thing. And all the time I'm in her eyes, swimming in the deep. 

Then her face moves closer and her eyes get impossibly big in mine, but I keep looking until looking has no meaning anymore, because I'm not outside anymore, it's just being being being. With her.  

And I swear I can feel it, our hearts are beating together. And it's just like that: together together together.  

And Cassie kissed me. Just the softest touch, but it's like a shock goes through me and I shudder and suddenly grab her in my arms and crush her against me. 

And she gasps, "No!" Really scared.

I throw myself back off her, disgusted and angry with myself that I destroyed something so sacred as what she had been making for me. What did you want? A ten second spasm and then nothing? As usual? Or to feel Not Alone? Feel Part Of. That's everything. And I ruined it. 

Frustration is a word a young guy learns young and he learns how to work it. I groan and make a violent show of swollen disappointment. Arching my back until my spine cracks and my legs are tight against the steering wheel. I'm ready to break something. 

But then her hands are visiting me, flowing softly over my chest and face soothing the pain. 

"Don't worry," she says. "Don't worry. There's other ways." And she reaches to find my belt buckle. At first I don't get it. But then of course I do. And I find her hands and stop her because whatever happens I don't want her to think that it's like that for me. I want her to know I'm willing to pay any price to be with her. Whatever that means, I'm willing to give it. And I gently pull her to me until she's resting like a bird on my chest. And I feel it, the gift she's giving me: the real her, the real Cassie, the face she has in her room alone at night when she looks into the darkness and confesses the truth.  

I wasn't a virgin, of course. 

Until that night with Cassie.