I wake this time to Bella kissing under my chin, asking me to let her up, telling me she's going to shower. She twists, and I free her, opening my eye that isn't in our pillows to watch her climb away.
It's still dark in our room, before dawn, but her rainbow nightlight lets me see little cheeks, discreetly hugged by sea foam green briefs, peeking out from under the edge of my tee-shirt. She walks from our bed with the same adorably sweet, unfucked sway in her hips she always walks with, and I smile in our pillows. So-warm, too-full beats, course quickly and collect at the base of my dick.
Closing my eye as Bella closes our bathroom door, I press the heel of my hand there and shift, bearing and placating the concentrated want just to touch and fill, and fuck. I turn and stretch, and curl back up, flipping my pillow to the cool side. The heated increase in my blood flow and the looming hangover tightening around my head make me want to stay in bed, but I get up.
While everyone else sleeps, Bella showers, and I pull on a clean tee and dark denim cut-offs. Cuffing them up at the knees, I step sockless into black Sauconys and drop my hat on backwards, grabbing my iPod, headphones and bag before heading downstairs.
The lake house I walk through is Mikey's dad's, but it's home away from university for the next two and half months. Bella and I have a room upstairs, down the hall from Doe and Paul, and Mikey's is downstairs, across from Senna and Mackenna.
It's summer time, and living here is so easy.
I pour a glass of sangria that Doe and Bella made last night and roll a joint in the breakfast nook. Daylight breaks through as I'm sealing it, and I head outside.
Morning smells like laurel and wild sweet pea, like freshly poured soap. Bright blue and golden-white sky reflects in Deep Creek Lake on my right, and the Railey Mountains surround me on all sides. The sun's barely up, but it's already warm on my back as I walk from the deck to the worktable in the grass.
Shuffling songs, I pull my headphones on when Is This Love? starts, turning it up as I set fire to the joint. Flipping my hat around to keep the sun from my eyes, I run my hands along the round tabletop in front of me. More woodgrain has come up through yesterday's coat of stain. It needs one more before we start putting handlebars in.
"I want to love you," Nesta Robert Marley sings while I grab the hand-sander.
"And treat you right," he promises over easy beats. "I want to love you every day and every night..."
Of course I think of my love.
When we met, I'd just started my third year at Columbia. I'd crashed at Paul's after a party the night before, and had assumed I was alone the next morning. His off and on girlfriend, Doe – as in Jane – was sometimes there, but I hadn't heard her. I made coffee, smoked a roach and had a shower.
I was pouring a second cup of coffee when this slip of a girl walked up beside me to reach for an orange, and I about jumped out of myself. I had no idea there was anyone else in the house. She had to have come downstairs right behind me, and I hadn't heard anything.
Not a footfall, not a breath, nothing.
She had to have tiptoed through the whole place like it was made of tulips.
"Is this love?" Bob Marley asks my eardrums. "Is this love? Is this love? Is this love that I'm feeling?"
It was off-putting it was at first, feeling disarmed by her. I had no idea then where little tiptoes learned to be so silent.
Working the sander across rough woodgrain, I wish they never had to be.
Over coffee and an orange on Paul's couch, I learned she was only seventeen, a genius-autodidact baby here on scholarship. Dark on pale, on every kind of soft all over, she slipped right under my skin.
Over coffee between classes in the weeks that followed, I learned I'd never seen here anywhere the rest of us gathered because she didn't like crowds, or anywhere too loud. She didn't like to be looked at too long, either, or touched.
At all.
Bella was very aware of her personal space and intensely protective of it.
I was twice as patient as I was intrigued, though.
I remember wanting so much to be worthy of welcome in that space, the way Doe only barely was.
It took another six months of trading books and music for coffee between classes to become naps on my couch. She loved falling asleep reading while I read, too, and there I was on my floor with my back against the where she was, loving her in my space and wishing so hard my spine was bound to covers and I was made of pages.
Not only did I not want her out from under my skin, I wanted her deeper under it, and I wanted to see and touch and feel every inch of hers.
Curiosity had grown into more than liking, and I knew she saw it in the way she looked at me. I didn't know what she'd been through then, why she needed to go so slowly, to be so sure, but I'd come from a place where love was fucked up, too. I could wait. I wanted to.
Bob Marley shuffles to Sublime, and the huge wooden circle feels smooth under my right hand, but its edges still need work. Puffing twice, I keep going.
The first time I finally touched love, it was because we reached in the same moment.
It was November and crazy cold. Door just closed, we were standing in my living room laughing about the blizzard that had come out of nowhere, and her nose was so pink. She was all quivering chin and snowflakes on her eyelashes, and, "my hands are freezing."
She smiled as she extended curled-closed hands from under her chin out into wind-bitten-pink fingers, toward me. Palm to palm, fingers between fingers for a double-heartbeat, she smiled so high, and emboldened by it, I covered both of her hands and brought them cupped to my mouth for warm breath.
She smiled higher.
I was twenty one then, and my heart had never beat so hard.
I pull a deep hit.
Four months later, I drove over in the middle of the night to kill a spider, and Bella was on her tiptoes, hugging me tightly. It was the first time I'd seen her in pajamas, and she had my hoodie on over them. Faded navy blue all but swallowed her, and I could feel her heart beating against my chest. She was looking up, smiling so gratefully, and everything in me said kiss her.
When I leaned down, and she ducked away, it hurt more than anything before.
Blowing my hit toward the sky, I rub my thumb over a rough spot, smiling to myself as it smooths with careful effort, because there's nothing this love can't do.
Headphones around my neck, late June sunlight warming my back, my last hit is half in the wind and half still in my lungs when I hear the patio door open behind me.
Turning, I find my girl and her best friend on the deck in sundresses.
Setting my hat further back, flicking the roach, I smile at Bella. She doesn't make a sound, but she fucking beams.
Doe says something about breakfast and bong rips, but all I can do is see love's smile, and walk straight toward it.