Stars, New Love, Maybes

I think I’m in love with you. 

The wind whips our skin chilly here on our hill under the stars, but your promises are warm and I am here with you—that’s enough, isn’t it? I don’t need anything else. But. The night is so rich, the air so restless; doesn’t it always make one say things that can only be said in the dark? The words pull themselves away from me, and I don’t have the will to stop them—

“I’m afraid.”

“What?” you say. Your teeth are so white in the dark. 

I pull you closer; I put my lips against your ear so I don’t need to shout. “Afraid. I’m afraid.”

You laugh. “Why? What for? What for?”

I try to think of something short and sweet to say. Something to pull us away from the big hole I’m ripping into this moment, this memory. The wind is pushing into my bones, I’m weightless, I’m groundless, this exhilarating plummet; I breathe a little harder, I can barely think of what to say at all. 

You roll over in the grass. You’re looking down at me but I don’t know what your face is saying because it’s dark—are there ants out here, crawling into our ears?—but I see your teeth, your smiling teeth. 

“Are you cold?” you ask. 

Cold? Cold? Here, with you, with your hands on my waist under my shirt, burning your fingerprints into my hips and burning your white, white teeth into the blackness of the sky above?

“I wish we didn’t live in the city,” I say. 

You roll over me, your arms on either side of me. “Why?”

“The stars, the stars.” I point up, but you aren’t looking that way. “There’s so few… Out in the country without the light pollution there’s so many stars, the whole sky like—like diamonds—” and we’re kissing again, too fast, too warm. Your arms around me are a trap; you want to fuck me; I want to love you. I think maybe I do love you; it isn’t the sex that brings me back to you. 

Then I’m not there with you anymore. You’re in the grass on our hill under our stars, and you’re touching me and I’m kissing you, hard, because that’s what you want, isn’t it? But I’m not there. I’m in another place with another boy who told me another promise, except that time it was my first time hearing a boy make a promise like that to me, and I wanted to believe him because I wanted to love him. He always kissed my sternum before he kissed my breasts (like he was kissing my heart first), and he smelled like vanilla, and he liked to dance to cheesy ballads with me, but he was a liar about the things that mattered, and he didn’t take no for an answer.

I don’t love him anymore; he was a thief. He stole things from me I’ll maybe never get back. I don’t want to think you’re like him. I don’t want to keep my heart locked away. But Jesus Christ I am terrified of who you’ll become if I say no to you. 

You’ve stopped kissing me. 

“Hey…” you say, and your hands cup my face close to yours. My heart is rocking back and forth in my chest. Can you feel it? “Are—are you crying?” 

Something glass breaks in my chest. This isn’t your fault, this isn’t your burden—but your hands feel like his. You’re hungry.

“I’m sorry—” I try to say, “I’m sorry—”

“Hey, hey. It’s okay. Sorry, that got a little… heated.”

God, you don’t know what to say. I don’t either—what the fuck? What the fuck? What do I say—

“Let’s just take a minute.” You roll to my side and take my hand. The stars are shaking. “I don’t know what it is…” you say, “About the night. It’s so big and empty, like anything could happen. It’s so—” you pause and grasp at the air with your other hand, like you can pluck the right word from the sky, “—free.”

You turn to look at me, or maybe the shape of me, in the dark. It’s quiet for a while. We listen to the wind in the trees. I don’t look at you. 

You bring my hand up to your mouth and kiss my knuckles. You mumble into them, slowly, “What are you afraid of?” 

I keep my eyes fixed on the brightest star. I won’t look at you—I can’t, tonight. 

You prod me gently in the side. Not a touch like lovers do, but like children in a classroom. I can’t help it, I smile a little.

“Stop,” I say. You do. 

“You can tell me anything, you know.” 

“I know,” I say, but I don’t.

“Please, so that I can make it better, tell me what it is that you’re afraid of.” 

The night is the time for truths, for freedom. You said so yourself. I hope you meant it. I think again of the big hole, which changes everything, or maybe nothing at all, when it gets ripped open.

“I’m… I’m afraid of what you may do to me.” You shift a little, but you don’t say anything. “Physically… emotionally. I’m afraid you’ll really see me and it’ll make all this fall apart. I am afraid to give you my trust, but you already have parts of me I can’t take back. It scares me.”

You’re quiet for a long, long time—too long. I feel that vile sinking feeling in my belly, a deep weight in my pit. Christ, I’ve ruined it—

And then you say, with my hand still against your lips, “I feel that, too. I’m afraid to give you all of myself... I don’t know that we’ll be—safe for each other.”

I don’t say anything. 

“I can’t always tell what you’re looking for. Sometimes you smile like you’re in love with me, but then you shut me out and I don’t know what to think.” You shake your head like you’re clearing out thoughts drawn on an Etch A Sketch. “I think maybe we should... talk about it.”

I feel trapped again. Oh, to be anywhere else, under any other sky. 

“I think,” you say awkwardly, “I’m a little in love with you. Maybe more than a little. And if this is just a sex thing, maybe we should... I don’t know.”

What did you say? You said, I’m a little in love with you. I look at you, surprised, stunned, and pull my hand away. “You don’t love me,” I say, because you don’t.

“What?” You smile. Such white teeth. “How do you know?”

“Well—because—” I stutter, “—because you want to fuck me, don’t you?”

You laugh and pull me close to you. “I can’t love you and be attracted to you at the same time?”

“Boys don’t want to love girls. They want to fuck girls and say they love them so they can fuck them.”

You don’t say anything. 

I knew it—I’ve called you out on your lies—and I start to really feel the cold and the wind—I pull away from you, scared of what you’ll do next. 

“Did someone tell you that?” you ask.

“No, someone showed me that.” 

You sigh. “...I’m sorry. I’m sorry someone did that to you.”

“That’s just what love is.”

“No,” you say, sitting up, “No, it isn’t. Love isn’t sex. Love isn’t damaging one another, or using each other, or being afraid of telling each other the truth.”

“How do you know?”

“I—I don’t! But I refuse to call that love. I think love is just... trust. Total, honest trust. Nobody should settle for less than that and call it love.”

“I wish that were true.”

“Why can’t it be?”

I’ve wondered that a lot.

You kneel down to look at me, head over mine, knees planted in the dirt. “Do you love me? Just a little bit?”

I can’t look at you. I look at the stars. Why is this so hard? You’re right, it should be about trust. “I don’t want to.” That’s the truth.

You laugh. How do you do that? This is not funny. I watch your smile in the sky above me. “But, do you?” 

I look at you. “A little.” A lot.

Your white smile grows, and you lean down to kiss me. I kiss you back. It’s not heated like before; it’s something new. You don’t lean back up, away. You say, against my cheek, “Let’s try it. Okay? Trust. Honesty. Transparency. Love, maybe.”

I whisper, because you’re right there, “What if we hurt each other?” 

“Maybe we will,” you whisper back, “But we’ll try not to.” 

That makes me laugh. It feels good to laugh with you. “Okay.”

You lie back down next to me on our hill under our stars, and pull my hand back into yours. We watch the sky like before, but now everything has changed. Yes, yes, I think maybe I’m in love with you.