Crinkle, crinkle, little star

I had a feeling that we both had a feeling that this was something we needed to get done as swiftly as possible — and badly; opening a path to doing this much slower and much better in the future. And that if we truly stopped for even one second, we’d back off and wouldn’t be able to get anything done at all, what with our upbringing and subsequent inhibitions still holding us back, with no booze there to cloud our nemesis brains and help us out.

Inhibitions sucked. Not sucked anything appealing, like cock or lollipops, they just sucked.

We rammed through the front door, kissing and tearing at each other’s clothes the moment it was shut. We bumped into every obstacle while waltzing to the bed in the darkness. We got there by some miracle, albeit slightly bruised by the maneuvering. We managed to turn the night lamp on, instead of dropping it to the floor and shattering it. We flopped on the bed in one plank-like bundle. We were delayed by an unavoidable roadblock: the need for practicing safe sex. We fumbled for condoms, groaning in frustration. He checked every pocket, of which he had many, while I all but tied myself into a knot, trying to reach the drawers underneath the bedside table. We gasped in excitement and relief when each of us found one formerly-glossy flat wrapper. Both of them had been carried around in pockets or gathering dust in drawers, for years. We squinted at the threadbare yet intact packaging, the smudged letters and numbers; growing irritated at this delay, widening and narrowing our eyes, trading squares and guesses, angling the lamp. We determined that we were indeed holding condoms, not condiments, and that neither of the two were expired, although they would be soon, so, perfect timing. Go, go, go! We celebrated by throwing all of our clothes in the air as if each item was a mortarboard. We left them scattered on the floor. We wasted another ten to twenty seconds debating which side of the condom went where, our speech sounding as if we were ultra-caffeinated. We finally concluded, or recalled, or deduced, that the roll of the rim should be on the outside, with the reservoir tip poking up. We remembered the necessity to pinch the protruding tip before rolling the condom on, ‘to expunge the air and leave enough space to collect all of the semen’. Otherwise there’d be a risk of latex tearing, despite its stretching capabilities. He might have quickly summarized the physics of it. Very quickly.

Then we remembered that we were naked.

As soon as my back met the mattress again, Wakuu was on top of me, kissing me like I was oxygen. I wasn’t. I wished I was.

Then we kinda didn’t remember much at all... for no longer than a minute.

No idea who started laughing first. I only knew that we were both perfectly motionless at last, that he was still on top of me, still inside me, his face against the crook of my neck, and that he was trembling, and so was I, and that the trembling was both from the fit of laughter — and from the clumsy, anecdotally rushed, improbably fast, impossibly shared punchline of an orgasm that had hit us both like a speeding clown car, and that the former was prolonging the latter, the vibrations making my entire body tingle as we laughed, and that I was holding on to him, and that he was holding on to me as we were both losing it. Hard.

My nails were still digging into his skin, I realized, so I let up the pressure, smoothing over the red crescents I suspected were left by my fingernails as I’d held on tight through the frantic and incoherent race to the finish line. Wakuu shuddered one more time, his breath hitching, and snorted another giggle, this time against my cheek.

Our foreheads touched, and his dark brown eyes gazed into mine as he attempted, “Did you—”

“Yes! Did you?”

“Obviously.”

I slid my hands up and down his back. “If you say ‘sorry’, I’ll murder you.”

“I’m not sorry.”

“That upward curve. Wow.”

“Wh— Ohh.” He somehow managed to twitch inside me, and I squeaked.

Then we kissed and went on laughing, and kissed some more, and laughed, and kissed, and laughed and kissed until we were two deflated dragster tires, fully out of air.

This laughter felt like a release mechanism. Like pure catharsis. There were so many reasons for it. A hint of incredulity: did this really happen just now? A pinch of shame and awkwardness: turned on, thirsty, and starved to such embarrassing, ridiculous levels. A dash of apprehension and confusion: first times are always so epic on paper and so underwhelming in real life, yet we got one that uuhm, could be evaluated both as best and worst ever, depending on the methodology employed? A tinge of rebellion: managed to do this after tonight’s unwanted show! Managed to do this, period! And a truckload of joy of all sorts... So many layers. Surreal and observational and slapstick and self-referential and self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing and lowbrow and highbrow and blue and purple and polka-dotted.

For once, inwardly deconstructing the joke had not made it less funny.

Wakuu shifted, sliding out of me, and I whimpered, feeling bereft, no longer laughing. Making a brief shushing noise, he collapsed next to me, on the bed that was a little too narrow for two and a little too wide for one. We rolled to our sides and lay facing each other, our breaths normalizing, our heartbeats ratcheting down, our ankles entangled as our hands sought one another and locked on the thin swath of coverlet in between. He brushed his thumb over my knuckles, and I mirrored him.

“You know what’s weird? I’m not sleepy.”

He’d thought he would be, after an exhausting day painted gray by the hangover, then crowned by the emotional turmoil at the lighthouse. I’d thought I would be, too, but— “Yeah, me neither.” The adrenaline might have dissipated, but the lucidity stayed.

“Is it the post-uuh, what’s that called? Something about transparent almonds.”

I smirked. “What, post-nut clarity?” His version was infinitely better.

Wakuu hummed an affirmative, his lips curling upward. “Need to get up. I think my testicles are stuck to my thigh.”

My limbs were stone-heavy, my muscles ached. Physically, Wakuu wasn’t faring any better. But both of our brains were as giddy and hyperactive as children on Haw flakes.

Eh. It’s not like either of us needed to get up early tomorrow.

“You mean your almonds.”

“Mmmmhm.”

The cottage felt like a humid sauna, though, what with all the windows closed and the ceiling fan turned off. We needed to get up, yes.

“Okay, well, let’s amend that, hot stuff.”

Wakuu poked his nose into mine. After another quick kiss — the very last bit of quick — I pushed up, groaning in exertion, crawled off the bed on shaky, wobbly legs, stumbled to the window buck-naked, and opened it wide, letting in a rush of salty air and the weary sighing of the ocean, my next-door neighbor. Then I set the ceiling fan into a lazy spin.

When I turned back around to face Wakuu, I caught him propped up on his elbow, staring at me in a dazed, slack-jawed sort of way.

The corners of his mouth rose up. “Bathroom. The first door handle that hit me on the flank or—”

“No-no-no, the door you slammed me into, right after,” I corrected in a businesslike tone of voice, with a solemn expression that got immediately belied by the grin spreading across my face. And then by another shared snort. “The first one’s the linen closet, you can grab any towel you like ... Oh, wait. I’ve got something for you.”

Just as he was about to get up, to dispose of the used-up condom and test my very non-high-tech shower, I remembered what I’d stashed recently. Not for this precise occasion. Until yesterday, I imagined bringing the offering over to him after another Climb. And yet, no time like the present.

Kneeling over a piece of clothing (no idea whose), I tilted my body sideways, launched my arm under the bed and pulled out a bag from Antonio’s store.

I’d ended up not needing a physicist to explain the great and beautiful yukata-coincidence to me; as I’d learned in the afternoon, Antonio had bought them in bulk. Maybe from the manufacturer, but mostly likely from Ratih or even off a cargo freighter. Same with these. All three pairs of uwabaki, regardless of the size, had been mass-produced at the same place, utilizing the same dyes but in different combinations, and had the same prints of the same cheeky and disdainful Shiba Inus.

“One pair for you, two for your guests. Two should be in your size, though. So do you want the pink Tacos on white with yellow tips, or the yellow Tacos on white with pink tips?”

Wakuu mouthed amazement which shifted to amusement in seconds. His reaction seemed slightly peculiar; as if he knew more than he let on, as if this act of casual gift-giving had an additional contextual meaning I wasn’t aware of.

“Yellow on white seems more accurate,” he decided after a few more beats, then looked right into my eyes with apprehension, and added, a twinge of guilt to his voice, “You didn’t have t—”

Raising my hand, I cut him off with a reminder, “Caretakers will caretake, Wakuu.”

“True,” he exhaled, acquiescing. “What about you?”

I gestured to the hallway where my new house-slippers lay on the metal shoe-rack, one that we’d managed not to overturn. “Pink Tacos on white, with pink tips.”

He asked to borrow my toothbrush, promising to bring over an extra for himself ‘as soon as possible’. This promise felt more sacred and meaningful than many others I’d heard in my life.

The walls were paper-thin, the water pressure was crap. I could hear the echo of his loud, near-cackling laughter as Wakuu showered. This one was almost exclusively joy.

After taking my turn in the bathroom, I wrapped myself in a towel and returned to the bedroom, planning to tidy up. There was nothing to tidy up. Our clothes lay folded in two flawless stacks on a chair, and the outdoor shoes had been carried to the rack. The bed itself was now unmade invitingly.

At first I sighed, recognizing another bittersweet similarity between us: two neat-freaks, compensating for the mess in our brains by always keeping our personal living spaces as tidy as possible.

Then I felt happy over the realization: if we’d ever end up living together, maybe we wouldn’t fight over chores. Happy, full of hope, and excited to get to learn even this: what petty thing, then, we’d end up fighting over, instead of chores. What we’d compromise and reconcile over. What precisely we’d go on to laugh about. Which endearing idiocy would be added to our shared language and shared mythology.

After turning off the lamp, I followed the only other source of artificial light and found Wakuu in the kitchenette. The rest of the cottage was dark, with only the moonlight washing in through the large windows and painting the varnished floorboards silver.

Wearing nothing but the slip-ons and a towel around his hips, he was drinking bottled water straight from its source, by the fridge’s open door, his silhouette limned by the pale electric glow from within. Hair wet and disheveled, pointing in all directions. Deep shadows under his eyes. Up on his flank, several angry red lines scored his good-melanin-lacking skin.

Wakuu looked like a battered mess. I probably looked the same; certainly felt the part.

And he looked so good. So solid and real.

And something about the whole scene filled me with tenderness.

No, not ‘something’. It was the lines of his collarbone, and how my eyes got anchored to them as Wakuu tilted his head to the side and examined the contents of the fridge. It was the way he scratched over his cheek, pursed his lips and squinted, deciding if he wanted a snack. It was the way he planted the bottle back into a side compartment; as if sheathing a sword. It was his deeply contemplative hum over a jar of yogurt. It was the cleaned plastic container on the nearest tabletop, the container I usually kept leftover pickles in, one he apparently — judging by the salt shaker towering next — had filled with a simple saline solution, in the absence of a proper liquid for contact lenses. It was the tiny aquamarine dot of toothpaste above his upper lip.

It was the way he was holding himself — relaxed, confident, with inhibitions and learnt shame in deep slumber. At ease, as if he belonged here. Which he did.

Unwittingly or not, Wakuu was respecting and upholding my cultural context: as soon as you’re invited into someone’s house, it is your house, too, and you should treat it as such.

Dad had told me his favorite punchline to this one: ‘so it’s not a good idea to invite pyromaniacs and demolition men over for dinner’... Lame. Not a pun, but still lame.

Letting out a small cough, I tapped on the doorframe, both so as not to startle. Wakuu turned his head in my direction, and the light caught his face — so shyly inviting, so openly yearning — making his eyes twinkle like stars in the night sky.

“Is it okay that I—”

“Yes,” I interrupted, because whatever he was going to say next would have been excessive and unnecessary. “It is.”

He smiled at me, corners of his eyes crinkling, and my heart skipped a beat. No, it wasn’t a ‘ palpitation; a skipped, extra or irregular heartbeat, a type of abnormal heart rhythm, or cardiac arrhythmia; occurs when an electrical signal fires from the wrong place at the wrong time, causing the heart to beat out of rhythm; might be an indicator of cardiomyopathy, hyperthyroidism, or heart valve disease’. It just skipped a beat. Occurs when someone is a touch-starved dork overfull with affection. Might be an indicator of falling in love.

I walked up to him, wrapped my arms around him from behind, and pressed myself to his back, nuzzling between his shoulder blades, breathing him in: the comforting natural smell of his skin, mixed with the scent of my soap and shampoo. Wakuu threw his head backwards, and his hair tickled my forehead.

“Ohh this feels so good,” he whispered and let out a soft sigh, shifting his weight to lean into me. His arms snuggled over mine.

We stayed like this for a time, making sure to squeeze every possible bit of oxytocin out of the experience and our brains. This still felt like not close enough, so, at some point, we removed both towels.

Raising my head, I poked the tip of my nose into his nape. “Hungry?”

“Not for food,” Wakuu said, his voice dipping lower. “Not necessarily for sex, either.”

“For what, then?” I urged, already knowing the answer, yet wanting to help him wheel over this barrier.

It took him a few seconds, but he got there.

“Closeness ... Intimacy,” Wakuu confessed, and I felt his heart skip a beat, too, as my hand gently glided over it in a show of gratitude. “What about you?”

“Same. Ravenous.”

We broke the embrace, closed the fridge, and padded back to the bedroom in the dark, slipping through the hallway and under the thin blanket, finding our way by touch. Wakuu lay on his side, sharing my pillow.

With the tips of my fingers, I traced over his features: the razor-sharp ridge of his nose, the straight and thick brows, the high forehead, the defined cheekbones, the obtuse-angle jawline, the thin-lipped, boyish mouth. Maybe this wasn’t how he’d always looked, but the Here-and-Now was the only thing that mattered.

With the tips of his fingers, he traced over mine, repeating the sequence, mapping out the shape of my face, committing it to memory.

The intimacy of darkness compelled us to talk. It was easier like this — to let ourselves be seen without being seen. To be more open, less inhibited, more trusting, more vulnerable; to be naked and honest.

Although we abstained from directly discussing the events of the evening — everything that could have been said without further digesting and internalizing them, had been said for now — we, nonetheless, talked about our families. This was a part of the process of digestion, after all.

Wakuu added more context to what I already knew. He explained that his story and his family were far from unique.

“But it’s usually because of a divorce, not because the mother doesn’t want to stick around.”

That his parents had not been married legally. That it didn’t matter; where he was from, joint legal custody was not a thing, and single fathers were marginalized in a very particular, bitterly unique way. For instance, they were offered no child-rearing allowance, as opposed to single mothers who received government support, because of course a woman couldn’t possibly make it without a man in her life, the poor thing, but a single father could easily get by on his own and provide for the child with no trouble. He just needed to ‘man up’. In short, all of the usual archaic, sexist bullshit.

That many others in his and his dad’s circumstances had to rely on the single-parent community and their extended families. That the two of them were luckier than most.

“He had a boat. He knew how to get by and then some. But if he’d have been a white-collar worker—” In the darkness, Wakuu gave a weary sigh, and it tickled my palm which lay between our heads on the pillow. “I was raised sort of as a— Well, not exactly as a cabin boy. A collective ward. Instead of my extended family, it was the Mermaid’s crew. And they were loud and rowdy. Exceptionally ... masculine.”

That children like him often suffered from loneliness and isolation, yet he’d had the opposite problem, in a way, and a dire one, given that Wakuu was sensitive, highly intelligent, and introspective. Introspective almost to a fault. Wasn’t that familiar... At least I had the luxury of being an extrovert, chugging down social interactions like energy drinks. Wakuu was introverted. Ouch.

“As a child, I was never alone. No loneliness, but no solitude, either. We were nearly always out at sea, I had to grow up fast, never had friends of my age, and was always among adults. I think I gazed up precisely because I was looking for solitude.”

That his personal teenage rebellion was also the opposite — of loud and rowdy. Of course it was.

“Yet my reasoning ... so murky. I don’t remember what exactly determined my choice, why I chose to go there for college.”

“What, to the fabled land of dereks?”

He huffed a short chuckle, then turned his head and nuzzled into my palm. Softly. “Yes.”

Silent, wanting and waiting for him to continue, I brushed my knuckles against his cheek.

“Perhaps it was curiosity. Perhaps, confusion. Perhaps, the concept of hyper-individualism got either lost in translation or otherwise misinterpreted by me,” Wakuu said after some consideration. “I thought that it meant ‘free to be on your own’ or ‘free to pursue your dreams’. Or ‘free to be whoever you wish to be, as opposed to perpetually being a part of a bigger whole’.”

“Ah. When it actually means ‘being a self-obsessed dumbass who is delusional enough to believe that life is a story, that everyone else is a background character, and that he’s the protagonist.”

“And an alien,” agreed Wakuu, and I heard him smiling.

“Yeah, it’s a nightmare when an entire country’s culture is based on the worst, most dangerous and destructive delusion of them all. Especially if you come from a polar opposite. But you have found the middle ground in the end, no?”

“Eventually.” His hand reached out for me, landing on my bare waist, thumb brushing the skin above my hip bone. “Why did you choose to travel so far for college?”

“Welp, that’s also because of my dad. He was always fascinated with your home country. Culture, mythology, traditions, history, all of it. Had a few pen-pals. Learned the language on his own, like everything else, and taught me, too. He said he felt drawn to it because both our languages were considered orphans. With no traceable parents and no others in their respective families.”

“Are they?” Wakuu’s fingers ran along the outline of my rib cage, eliciting a pleasant shiver. The sensation was electrifying.

“Nope. It’s recently been proven that neither is an orphan nor an isolated language. Anyhoo, I got into it, too, after him. I mean, I’ve always done well with languages, and I was aiming to go into psycholinguistics. But then he passed away during my first year at uni, and— Well, you guessed it right, yesterday. I projected extra hard. I was in so much pain that I got it into my head that my life’s mission was to help other people in pain, and that it was the only way I could help myself out of that pain.”

Wakuu shifted closer to me, until there was almost no space left between us, his warmth and scent surrounding me like a cocoon. Our legs tangled again. We spent a few long moments in silence, savoring the closeness.

I went on, grateful to him and the darkness for acting as a balm, as a shield, allowing me to get all of this out, for once, after years of bottling it up, after years of uncorking other people.

“He left most of his fortune to me. No siblings. And my mom was dating someone else barely a month after his death. She didn’t want to grieve, and I perceived it as her not letting me grieve ... I don’t hold any of it against her now, or at least try not to, because everyone’s got their own methods of coping, and even back then I was trying to rationalize. But, what I’m saying is, I wanted to get away, as far as possible, as soon as possible, ‘cause I felt that there’d be a lot of ugliness bursting out of me if I stayed, that I’d alienate her and my extended family completely. So, ironically, since that whole academic field is still frowned-upon in this hemisphere, your home pastures had super affordable and accessible programs for foreigners. I mean, they need to fill the auditoriums with someone else aside from the edgiest of the edgy, right?”

His warm breath fanned over my cheek.

There was a beat of silence before Wakuu murmured, sounding rather indignant, “They sure do, but I wish this wasn’t the case.” As if the injustice was personal. Which it kind of was.

I put my hand over his and guided it higher.

“The grand finale and how I ended up here, well, that, you already know. But— See, the most important lesson my dad had taught me was that it’s okay to be average, that being average is the best thing to be. He actually once told me, ‘reaching for the stars should be an astronomer-exclusive expression with no metaphorical meaning’. Can you believe it? I mean, he said a lot of things, always at random because of the whole, you know. Anyway, he was right. But I’m wondering if that particular lesson failed to truly stick on some level. I keep on wondering if my decision to come here was fueled by self-aggrandizing or self-obsession, derek-land-like. I’m... struggling with the fact that I made that decision.”

Wakuu drew in a deep breath, the movement of his chest pressing his warm skin flush against mine, and sighed. His breath stirred my hair. His hand shifted higher.

Then he said, his voice so soft I could barely hear it, fingers curling over my shoulder, his thumb stroking the skin behind my ear, his forehead touching mine, the tips of our noses bumping, his mouth so close, the warm air of his breath a caress in and of itself, his words a confession, a plea, a declaration, a demand, all at once,

“Don’t.”

The next moment, his mouth landed on mine, gentle but insistent, and the kiss was unhurried, as the urgency had left us.

Slowly, his lips molded to fit mine and map the contours. Slowly, his tongue slid out. Slowly, I reciprocated, opening up in a welcome, meeting him as an equal. Slowly, we tasted each other, savoring, reverent, with no rush and no ulterior motive other than to express what we felt for one another. Slowly, our tongues danced, not fighting for dominance, not engaging in battles, but moving in a synchronized flow, their movements guided and choreographed by our emotions; the prevalent among them being a deep, profound tenderness, like the aftermath of an act of kindness, or the aura of a happy memory, or the imprint of a meaningful smile.

There was a languor, a lull to the process. A sense of belonging, of safety, of home. And a comforting certainty that this was something to be built, not just had. We could take our time. We’d do better to take our time. We did. A thorough exchange of oxygen and affection, an exploration so unlike the frantic race earlier, and so, so much better for it.

As if we were doing it for the first time all over again, and in a way, we were.

This was as much a foreplay as a prelude to something else, something unrelated to sex; the coda to the previous chapter, the overture to the next.