She Wanted to Know Before It Mattered

She Wanted to Know Before It Mattered

Natalie asked Zac to have sex with her on a Tuesday afternoon, in a café where the tables were too close together for the request and the waiter kept passing close enough to make privacy feel theoretical.

She did not lower her voice until the important word.

"I want you to be my first."

Zac looked at her for long enough that Natalie took a drink of water, then looked over his shoulder to see whether something behind him had become interesting. Nothing had. A waiter was spraying the empty table beside them with an enthusiasm that seemed briefly personal.

"Your first what?"

It was not a good question, although it gave Zac three more seconds in which the conversation might still become a joke. Natalie had known him for almost two years. They went to the same birthdays and crowded Sunday lunches; they had friends who kept proposing hiking trips none of them appeared to want to take. Zac had flirted with her, lightly enough to retreat from, and Natalie had sometimes smiled as if she enjoyed the attention without feeling obliged to return it.

She was not in love with him. This is important, although not for the reason Zac first believed.

"Sex," she said. "I haven't had it. I would like to have it with you."

Zac looked toward the counter, where a waiter was polishing the same glass for the third time, and asked whether Natalie wanted to go somewhere else.

"Why? Will it be less true outside?"

That was Natalie: not fearless, exactly, but impatient with the extra furniture people arranged around a fact before agreeing to sit beside it. She was twenty-two and had stopped playing volleyball a few years earlier, but her body still carried the sport: long and lean, strong through the legs, with the easy balance of somebody who once trusted a court beneath her. Most men would have found her attractive. Zac was thirty-two, and he certainly did. Until then he had treated that attraction as his to manage rather than hers to answer. Natalie had just changed the terms.

His first response was concern, or he arranged the memory that way afterwards. He told Natalie that there was no deadline and no shame in waiting. His former wife had been a virgin when they met, he said, and after the first uncertainty they had learned each other and enjoyed a very good sex life. He meant the story kindly. He also meant it as a route back toward the kind of conversation in which he knew who he was.

Natalie listened with her head tilted slightly, the way she did when somebody was explaining a rule she had already decided did not apply.

"No," she said. "I want to know what to do with the future love of my life when I meet him."

There are sentences that flatter a man even while removing him from the most important part of the fantasy. Zac had just been chosen and excluded in the same breath.

Natalie did not think he was the future love of her life. She thought he was attractive, experienced enough not to panic, and decent in several ordinary ways she had been able to observe over time. At twenty-two she had begun to feel that she was standing outside a part of adult life her friends had already entered. They complained about sex, laughed about it and occasionally treated it as so ordinary that Natalie felt foolish for allowing her own first time to grow more consequential with every month she postponed it. She was not racing a deadline. She was tired of the absence becoming an event.

Zac's age was part of the calculation, although not all of it. Ten more years had given him experience; they had not automatically made him safe. Natalie trusted what she had watched him do with those years. He did not become cruel when a woman refused him. He did not report private details to the men around him. Once, when Natalie missed the last bus after a gathering, Zac drove her home without turning the favor into an audition for tenderness. These were not romantic qualifications. They were better than that for the purpose she had in mind.

Zac said yes while the coffee was still warm.

Natalie still lived with her parents, so his apartment was the obvious place. He invited her over to watch a film. The film was not camouflage for a week of planning; it was simply the first ordinary thing they could think to place between the café and the bedroom.

That evening she sat beside him on the sofa, close enough that their shoulders occasionally met. They watched the whole film and remembered almost none of it. Zac was too aware of her beside him, of the long athletic line of her body and the fact that she had chosen to bring it here.

When the film ended, he turned toward her and pulled her into a hug. The embrace held for a second longer than friendship required. Then he kissed her.

Natalie leaned into him eagerly. She did not speak, but she answered him with both hands, with the pressure of her mouth and with the way she moved closer each time he touched her. Zac led the pace. He kissed her until the last of the café's practicality disappeared, then began undressing her without hurry.

Her silence was not emptiness. The fine hair along her arms and stomach lifted under his hands. Her breathing changed as he moved over her breasts, down her back and along the inside of her thighs. She had arrived with a decision. Now her body was making the same decision again and again.

Zac kissed his way slowly up her legs and brought her to her first climax before they went any further. Natalie still said nothing. She held him tightly and let the sound of her pleasure answer for her.