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sforzando
noun. an emphasis followed by a sudden decrease in loudness.
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SOMETHING HAS CHANGED IN CALLUM ever since we came back from Pittsburgh.
Usually, I would describe Callum and his drumming as something innate. He's trained his skill since childhood and can just let the spirit of the music take over his body, whereas to play well I have to concentrate harder not less. I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with him, obviously, performing and then sightseeing and then corralling our percussionists through the check-out, pack-up and bus-boarding processes on our way back to Massachusetts. Monday we didn't see each other, and today we had drill rehearsals in the stadium, as usual.
But throughout all these encounters, Callum didn't have his usual carefree fervor or energy. I don't think he was upset—he was just wholly absent, no spark behind his eyes, his thoughts gone somewhere deep inside of himself. I would ask, but if he trusted me with it, he probably would have brought it up already.
In advance of Thanksgiving break (for which Callum is going home like the dutiful son he is, and I am staying on campus like the daughter of no-one I am) we see each other one more time. I ate dinner with Renata, then went over to his house to have sex, watch a movie, and fall asleep in the middle of it.
I wake up in the dead of night to find Callum at the other end of his bed, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling. In the darkness, I can only tell he's awake by the faint reflection off the curve of his eyes.
"What are you thinking?"
He hesitates, I wait.
"I get sad when I slow down," he says, at length, uncertainly. In my sleep-addled mind, the connection takes a while to form, but then I recall the conversation we had about baggage. How everyone has some, despite their privileges.
He's telling me his?
I'm stunned. I didn't think I would ever be a person he would open up to.
I shift closer, slinging an arm over his torso. "What do you mean by that?"
He sighs. "I haven't made peace with mortality. I don't know how to be idle and alone. I have so many friends and pastimes because if I didn't, I would probably self-destruct. I love living so much that when I think about getting old, settling down, and dying that I make myself sad. It's probably vain. It's probably my inner child speaking. But there's my baggage."
"Thanks for telling me," I whisper.
"It's a first-world problem," he responds.
Irritation flares up; not at Callum, at that sentence. It's one of my most hated. "Whose problems are you supposed to have, if not your own?" I reason. Not every sad person can be the neglected child of a neglected child—or should be—and I don't understand why people would want to win the trauma Olympics. When Callum remains silent, I tell him, "Sometimes you need to wrap yourself in sadness."
"Okay, sure," he snorts.
"I mean it. Sadness is revealing. It's cleansing. You never know if the beliefs you have when you're happy are just because you're happy—up to a point, sadness shows you the truth of who you are."
The way I am now is much better than when I was in high school, at the heights of my sadness. I think I was addicted to it. I've tried to explain the feeling to Renata, but she didn't understand.
When life gets to be so consistently disappointing, choosing to be sad feels like the healthy option. At the very least, it's the most stable and most protective. You don't have to have your hopes dashed anymore because you have none. You don't have to ride the healing roller-coaster (the high of recovering and the low when it feels too forced, a painful metamorphosis) if you refuse to heal. You don't have to try for happiness because you're not trying anymore.
You've decided. You're going to be sad.
You can just numb yourself, abandon yourself to the current, and float along. Sadness is a sedative, and at one point I needed it like air. Then I came to Halston, and I got better when my support networks and options and horizon opened up. Still, occasionally, it gets tempting to shut down again, to run from people and their inherent risks.
Callum reaches across me to turn the nightstand lamp on. His brown eyes waver in the yellow light, and I surreptitiously smell his arm as it withdraws, inhaling long and deep. He smells so fucking good.
"The reason I try not to dwell in negative feelings is my brother, Christian," he begins. I've seen Christian on his social media, I know that Callum's little brother's story must be a large part of his own. "He has Down syndrome, but for his whole life doctors, speech therapists, teachers—even my parents—have told him that it's not a barrier to anything he wants to do. It's just a ticket for the scenic route. Chris can be as happy as anyone else, and they say this while staring down the statistics about heart disease and depression and dying in his 60's. Do you know how heartbreaking it is to think about outliving a younger sibling?" I begin to say no, I don't have siblings, but Callum bites his tongue and exhales. "Sorry. Dumb question."
"It's not. I can imagine it. You were saying?"
"Yeah," Callum nods. He turns his face to me on the pillow, face vulnerable like I've never seen. I'm struck by the awareness if I said the wrong thing tonight, it would probably be the last straw Callum's willing to give me. I know how much he loves his brother.
"He's already had to overcome things I never did. As the big brother, I should support him and cheer him up. As the oldest son, I should share the housekeeping responsibilities. As someone who just loves my family, why wouldn't I want to make everyone's day brighter, lighter, and easier?"
"I think if your family loves you the way you love them, they'd want to share in your burdens."
"To share my burdens, I first have to accept them, though. That's my problem," he says, frustrated. "I don't even want to think of life after graduation. I haven't reconciled how people who don't deserve suffering are just supposed to take and take it. Not that I think you or Christian are just defined by suffering. I mean in general, talking about everyone. Life is unfair because life is unfair—how am I just supposed to swallow that? You're a Philosophy major. Tell me the answer."
Of course, I have no answer. If I did, I would have chosen a different major. My eyes trace the sharp edge of his jawbone when he turns his head to glance at the ceiling again, now breathing in long draws. In a soft voice, I say, "For an optimist, you're very existential."
"For a pessimist, you're very..."
"Very what?"
"I don't know," Callum sighs, releasing the thread of the conversation. He rolls onto his side, propped up by his arm, carrying his smoky, earthy smell right into my head. "There's no singular word for you, Bay."
I reach out to touch his cheek, caress my fingers under the ridge of his jaw. His eyes fall shut, like even a gentle caress from me is a balm. Look at me, making another fantasy out of him. He's probably just tired because it's the middle of the night and I'm keeping him up existentializing.
Then he rolls further, moving over me and bracing himself with a hand planted on the mattress. I lie supine against the soft blankets, staring up into his twinkling brown eyes. Fuck's sake. He's always been attractive. But in this moment, with shadows hugging the planes of his face and promises of tenderness in his eyes, I struggle to think of any view that exceeds him.
"Do you want to sleep now?" he wonders, completely oblivious to the thoughts in my head. I shake my head. My throat tightens up. "You want to stay up with me?" he clarifies, his wild hair falling down toward me.
"Yeah," I whisper, reaching a hand up to cup his cheek, gently running my thumb across his bottom lip.
Callum in his element—with other people—is like watching a field of sunflowers turn to the sun. He is bright, warm, charming, and just irresistible. Even now, I can feel an urge welling up inside me like a king tide. I want to tell him my history, to share how sad I was in high school and how afraid I am of graduation, too. I want to share. I want to gush, me, whom he has to work at with a chisel and a hammer.
Callum doesn't even try to get this reaction from people. It's just his nature. And I've always hated romanticizing real-life people—pedestalling and writing poems and making them the sun—I fought for years against letting Callum sweep away my rationale and my defenses and still he's doing it. He's won, I've lost.
His nose bumps against my cheek, and Callum follows the contours of my face, and finally I taste his mouth on my mouth. This kiss is tentative, his lips pillowing against mine for one blissful second then pulling away. The reverence in his eyes, like I am delicate, stops my heart for a brief moment.
His second kiss lasts two seconds longer, lush and warm and wet. I rest one hand on his shoulder and the other on his ribcage. The next kiss is accompanied by a firm grip on my hips, holding me against his erection. The pressure sends a flood of warmth through my core, and urgency overcomes both of us. Callum rolls out of bed, hastily stripping his clothes and hunting for a condom, I kick one of the duvets to the end of the bed, knowing it'll be too warm, and peel off his oversize t-shirt and my underwear.
Callum returns to the bed and pushes me back, one hand wrapped around my waist and the other at the back of my neck to cradle my head against the fall. I slide my hands into his hair as my legs wrap around his hips, his skin radiating a searing heat that I hardly even register through the rushing of blood in my eardrums.
I draw Callum's bottom lip into my mouth and stroke my tongue across his. His hard body against mine is protective and so addicting. When Callum sucks on my neck, hard enough to bruise despite our agreement for no marks, no traces of our affair, I release a guttural moan that has his hand wandering lower and squeezing my ass, his hard length pressed against my heat. Holy shit.
Something about the way he smells, like spice and fireplaces, is unwinding every conscious thought I've ever had about him—imagine how many people have loved him, will love him in his life, he is not yours and never will be, don't let him touch you, affect you, know you—and replacing more dangerous ones in their wake.
I can name this feeling, but I don't want to. It is so fragile. It goes so wrong, so often. Anything could break it, and with it, break me. If I have to say goodbye to one more person I think something inside me, whatever last scrap of humanity I have left, will just die. The realization sends a terrifying emotion roaring up my throat, and I want it gone.
"Callum," I whisper, "I don't need anything else but you. Right now."
Our bodies are covered by a thin blanket, but they are so familiar to each other at this point that he doesn't need to see what he's doing. "Are you sure?"
"I need you," I repeat. I slide my hand around Callum's neck and pull him closer.
His hand traces down my hip, then leaves to guide himself to my center, his cock pressing up against me, soaking and twitching and hungry. I'm sensitive from a few hours ago, but even the idea of the ache makes me want it more. I want him, I want him so badly.
He hovers still above my body. Everything feels less urgent in the shadows. Morally-bankrupt scientists have done experiments in sealed white rooms; when you can't see the sun, it is like time stops flowing. The distance between us hums with static electricity, his presence calling to me as the ground calls to lightning. I don't even want to speak or breathe, the anticipation is so heavy but so heady, like the wooziness of getting high. But better. Always better.
Callum pushes himself into my core, working with slow thrusts, withdrawing when my flesh resists him and and surging back with more force. My legs tighten around his waist, and I start wondering why no-one is afraid of the sun—aside from its volatility and the fact its absence could kill us all in eight minutes, its emission is constant and intense. That is what makes it dangerous. When we are degrading, we only feel shined-upon. We want to keep that warmth on us, even if that same warmth falls on every other soul in the world, even if I am but one sunflower, and not even the healthiest one in the field.
Even if I burn.
I roll my hips against his, meeting each slow thrust with a juddering impact. He's so deep inside me, the ache in my gut spreading, sinking into my bones and between my legs and the pit of my stomach. Callum is making low, breathy moans in the back of his throat. He lowers himself, his elbow planted by my head. I feel the mattress dip towards the weight, then the plane of his chest on mine, numbly in the back of my mind, because all my coherent thoughts dissolve when he sinks deep into my pussy and rolls his hips in steady circles. His pelvis is keeping the perfect pressure on my clit.
"That," I pant, "Keep doing that."
"Okay." His other hand cups my jaw, he angles my face to kiss me deep, and I coax his tongue into my mouth and hail it. If Callum's shuddering groan isn't proof enough of his reaction, his hard strokes, slowly getting faster, urged by my body, is. My orgasm is building like a tensed rubber band, each time Callum slams into me an extra unsteadying inch.
I hook a leg around his hip and pull his body firmly into mine as the heat between us soars. Where our skin touches, goosebumps frost over me. I arch into Callum, craning against our kiss. A shiver races down my spine, and I orgasm in a slow rolling thunderclap, echoes and tremors lasting for longer than I can count.
Callum feels me coming and all his control goes out the window. He wrenches his lips from my raw, kiss-swollen mouth, "Holy," is all he says, before, "you're going to end me," fucking me harder and faster, pinning me against the mattress.
The pleasure sweeps everything but the deepest truths of me away; there is nothing to hide from, and nowhere to hide.
I love him.
I can't even tell myself not to think these thoughts; they're just skimming over my lagging brain, leaving static tingles in their wake, true and current and unfolding before my very eyes. But I comprehend nothing until Callum crawls back up my body and fixes his dark lust-filled eyes on mine, guiding us both down from our orgasms with languid, deep strokes. He leaves lingering kisses at the corner of my mouth, hunching down to let his nose trail the ridge of my collar bone. I'm still pulsing around him, heels hooked together on his back.
I love you.
Sex hasn't felt like this with anyone else but him; kissing hasn't been so good until him; I used to hate love longs and romantic poetry and rom-com films but now I think of those smitten fools and begrudgingly accept, okay, so this is what you were talking about. This is what all that art is for. A feeling so big you need to pour it out of your body into something that can hold it forever.
I think I get it now.
Shit.