It was strange, yet familiar in a way. I was in alien territory, yet I still felt at ease somehow.
I knew why I felt the way I did. It was because I was with him. It was only with him that I experienced the whole gamut of human emotions at once, much like playing every note in an octave on a piano at the same time. I was myself in this seemingly chaotic din of sensation, and yet, I was not myself.
I cautiously entered the room. The bedroom was spacious and immaculately clean. The midafternoon sun streamed in, radiantly reflecting from the white walls. Outside, I heard the familiar sounds of the construction of an unnatural creation of man or possibly even the even more unnatural deconstruction of a tree, which was the natural creation of its surroundings.
Yet whatever was outside didn't matter. Even some aspects of the inside didn't matter either. I avoided looking at the picture frames in the bedroom, or even into the mirror.
The room was perfect, yet it was not mine. Obviously not, my room is far from perfect. It was not his either. The house, rooms and everything in the rooms, belonged to strangers. Strangers who would probably be angered by what we were doing in their bedroom.
I tried to block these thoughts out of my head. As strange as it was, the time was right. We were right. Even the universe seemed to be right in balance despite me knowing better.
He looked at me. Surely, these were not the same eyes that once looked upon me with concern and pity. The eyes of a doctor examining his patient, seeing what was wrong. Now that nothing was wrong, the searching eyes had far much more depth to them. Granted, he had looked at me this way once before, yet I was always surprised when he did. I always felt like I had stumbled into a schizophrenic's dream whenever our eyes met in that way.
Then again, I'm sure that I wasn't the same person when I was alone with him either.
It was almost as if we were guided by unseen forces. Soon, we were drawn to each other, and without saying a word, we knew what to do. I felt him, still warm from an afternoon of laying out in the sun, tense and tightened up despite my attempts at loosening him up earlier. We kissed, occasionally nipping at each other's lips, coaxing each other's tongues as if to say "you can come in."
My knees grew weak as his hands explored wherever they could reach on my clothed body. I whispered to him quietly, almost with the fear that someone could hear me or that if the silence were broken, the spell we were casting would be broken too. I told him that I was afraid of falling. Yet we fell anyway, like celestial beings falling to earth, yet still managing to find our own heaven among the ruins. We landed on the bed softly, barely even displacing the comforter.
My swimsuit and hair were still wet from being in the pool that afternoon. Naturally, I feared that when the real owners of the house returned, they would immediately notice a wet spot on the bed they slept on at night, the bed that he and I were currently fooling around on when he was supposed to be housesitting.
Soon enough, all my apprehensions disappeared. All I could see was his face, smiling at me, staring at me as if to anticipate my next move. I enjoyed lying on top of him, like a housecat waiting for its ears to be scratched. Still, I enjoyed the weight of him bearing down on me. Although most people believe that positioning has a lot to do with the power situation in the relationship, I could care less. I still knew that I was pretty much in charge of whatever I did, regardless as to whether I was on top or on bottom. So, I rolled over, pulling him on top of me, breathing in the smell of chlorine and mid-afternoon sunshine.
He was everything a summer romance should be, but I wanted more. I wanted our senior year fling to last well into the fall semester, maybe the spring, depending on my luck. Sadly, I had already come to the realization that I might not have a say in the outcome. Either way, I was going to have fun with him this summer. Either way, I would make sure that he would remember me long after I was out of his life.
I wouldn't forget. How could I forget the way he looked at me with those deep, dark eyes? How could I forget the feel of his heat or the taste of his skin? How could I forget the late nights where we would just hold each other in my car as if the rest of the world stopped moving and time halted entirely? How could I possibly forget the feeling I got when I knew in my soul that I had finally found what I had been missing out on for what seemed like eons?
Yet like those who had come before him, this probably wouldn't last. However, this time, I realized it first, so I could keep my head in the situation. I knew what I wanted from him, and I knew that he was willing to oblige me. Then again, maybe it was this difference that made him my favorite. He wasn't the first person who I said "I love you" to, and he most likely wasn't going to be the last, but I had the uncanny feeling that there was some lasting quality about him, something innately special about this time that improved my chances of not ruining the memory of him as I had the others.
