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.

"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.

Zac told her there was no deadline and no shame in waiting. His former wife had been a virgin when they met, he said; they had learned each other and enjoyed a very good sex life. He meant the reassurance kindly. He also preferred a conversation in which he knew what his role 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."

Zac had just been chosen and excluded in the same breath.

Natalie thought Zac was attractive, experienced enough not to panic and decent in ways she had observed rather than imagined. He did not punish women for refusing him or trade their private details with other men. Once, when she missed the last bus, he drove her home without converting the favour into a bid for sex. At twenty-two, she was tired of her inexperience becoming larger every time she postponed it. She trusted him to help make the unknown smaller.

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.

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.