Only You

first

"Come on in," Cate says. "The water's so warm."

I let the towel slip from my shoulders. Yesterday we'd gotten to this hotel at around four in the morning, and we'd slept nearly all day. In the evening we went out for dinner and Cate insisted on buying us swimsuits, since this hotel had a pool. Now it was dawn and Cate had dragged me out of bed for an early morning swim. 

"Why can't I just sit in the whirlpool," I complain. 

"Swim a bit with me."

I lower myself into the pool cautiously, then give up midway and plunge inside, taking Cate by surprise and splashing water all over her. She gives a shout and splashes me back. The water's absolutely frigid. 

"You call this warm?" I bite out, my teeth chattering. 

"Well, it wouldn't be for you!" She says with a laugh. "For God's sake, move around a bit!"

But instead I kiss her. The water holds us in a swaying embrace, both dragging us under and keeping us afloat, and I am reminded of how the moon looks among the clouds on a windy night. Cate and I are the moon, we are the figures dancing and guiding the wanderer home with our golden light. We are the lighthouse stranded in the middle of a vast grey ocean. 

"What are you thinking about?" Cate asks. 

"That night we first met," I say. "You remember?"

"Of course."

"What were you doing anyway on that bus?"

"Oh." She lets out the word in a sigh. "I was fighting with Richard."

The name hangs above us like an ugly piece of vapor that escapes her lips. 

Cate runs her fingers through her hair, slick and colored a wet bronze by the water. "We had a fight and I made him pull over and let me out of the car. We were coming back from my parents' house."

I remember how her hands shook, how her blue eyes shone with bitter tears. How lost and broken and angry she looked. I don't ask what the fight was about, nor does she go on to explain. 

"Anyway," she says, "it's over now."

I hesitate, then say the question that's been drifting around in my mind for so long, ever since I first became acquainted with the flame of her existence. "Why did you...sit next to me?" 

Cate doesn't answer right away, but a shyness comes over her beautiful face that I've never seen before. She turns to the rising sun, so that for a moment it looks like her eyes are two piercing blue comets, searing out of an angelic porcelain face. 

"You looked so alluring," she says at last, glancing at me, the shyness still in her smile. 

I am stunned into silence for a few seconds, and Cate laughs at the look on my face.

"Do I look better now?" I ask at last. "You saw me at my worst back then. I'm happy now."

She takes my face in both her hands, her thumb rubbing my cheekbone. Instead of an answer I get a tender kiss. 

The world is beauty, the world is nothing but the lapping waves of the clear pool water, the silence of the morning sun, the smell of chlorine on Cate's warm skin, the empty gold that soaks the entire pool room, the steam rising slowly from the water. 

Soon after we walk back to our room, slowly and shivering slightly, the chill of the winter air outside clinging to our damp hair. 

"Was that your first time?" Cate asks suddenly hours later, when we're sitting in our hotel room and I'm flipping through random channels on the TV. 

"First time..." It takes me a second to understand. "You mean, with a woman?"

"Well, with anyone." 

I hesitate. "...No. But with a woman, yes, it was my first time."

Cate is silent, and I look back at her, leaning on some pillows on our bed and watching me with a queer look on her face. Is she jealous? "Cate."

She looks away. She even smiles, a little. "I'm acting like a child, aren't I? Do you mind if I ask with whom?"

I bite my lip, then switch off the TV. "Do you know that movie Death Becomes Her? It came out last year, I think. Or the year before."

"Yeah," she says. "Meryl Streep."

"That character she plays, Madeline Ashton--" I break off abruptly, overcome with a sudden fear. If I tell her this, wouldn't she surely think less of me? I would think less of me if I were her. But Cate waits, and her calm blue eyes watch me steadily, and I know, like that evening in the library, that I'll have to tell her. And suddenly she's so far above me, suddenly she's back to being Ms. Blanchett and not Cate, because I know what I'm about to tell her will sound so revolting and immature and below her. 

"I guess--" I force myself to push on. "I was in an awful state of mind when I first moved into Bedford. And no one looked at me--I mean, no friends. The boys did. They looked at me, and I was flattered, because I guess all my life it was always Arden who got looked at, and me pushed behind her."

I know I'm not making any sense, but when I look at Cate her face has not changed. She listens to me intently, with no comment. 

"There was this girl at school. She graduated the year I was supposed to graduate...before you came. Kristina. I guess you could call her the queen bee. She hated me, you know, just the usual high school crap." I laugh a bit. "Well, her boyfriend and I--you know. And that was my first time. I didn't like it." 

I immediately wish I hadn't said the last sentence, because it sounded petulant and defensive. I knew there was nothing that justified what I did. And somehow I feel like it was a betrayal to Cate. I shrug, trying to make the gesture a sort of deletion of my actions. But it's like I've been completely stripped of all my secrets before Cate's gaze. 

"We all do things we regret, don't we?" Cate says softly. "Unless you don't regret it."

"Cate, of course I regret it!" I say, louder than I meant to. "God, back then--back then I was just starved for attention. A slut."

And the tears come, suddenly and uninvited, so that my body trembles from trying to fight them. A million images flash between the darkness of my tearful eyes, flowing free from an overflowing vessel I'd kept locked all this time. The image of Kristina's boyfriend--his name was Michael--hovering above me in his bedroom, the image of my sister Arden, hazy from half erased memories, the image of my faceless parents, the image of my New York City apartment, the image of the friends I once had who are now as far away as the dead. 

"I'll never cry again," I say fiercely as the memories crowd over me, wrapping me in a gruesome blanket and trying to force me away from this world with Cate.

"Yes, you will," she says calmly, and I feel  her hand squeeze my shoulder. 

"In a way, you're still my first," I say, as I calm down, and my demons are beaten back again with recoiling hisses. 

She smiles at me. "I know."