Letter 04 — The Feast

Dear Lilith,

I need to tell you about the night I stopped lying with my body, because I don't think I understood, until it happened, how long I had been doing it.

I was on the island for the summer, hired to clean four hundred years of candle soot off a chapel ceiling no tourist would ever see, and I liked the work the way I like most restoration: slow, exacting, invisible when it's done right. I did not go there looking for a man. I went there for scaffolding and solvent and the particular quiet of working alone above an altar. Markos built the scaffolding. He came back three days later to fix a joint that hadn't needed fixing, and I watched him test the same plank twice with his flat palm before he'd let me climb it, and the tired, administrative part of me that manages men filed him before I could stop it: he's going to be careful. I didn't know yet what careful would cost me.

We were together for six weeks before anything happened between us, which for me is a kind of record. He'd bring me peaches from his aunt's tree, hand me one without a word and go back to sanding a hull, and I'd eat it standing in the chapel doorway watching his forearms move, and think about nothing useful at all. He never asked me anything that wanted a performance in return. He asked what pigment I was matching, whether the plaster under the soot was original, whether I'd eaten. He never once asked if I was having a good time, which I would come to understand was the whole of it.

You should know the shape of me before Markos, Lilith, because the shape matters. I have been with good men. Attentive men, men who read the right things and asked the right questions and wanted, sincerely, to make me finish. And every one of them got what he wanted, because I gave it to him. I learned early that the sigh, the tightening, the particular catch in the breath, cost me nothing and spared us both an awkward half hour of him trying and me lying there doing math about how much longer it was reasonable to let this go on. I got so good at it I stopped being able to tell, in the moment, whether I was performing or not. It felt almost the same from the inside. Almost.

The night it happened, we'd eaten late on the terrace of the house I was renting, the cicadas so loud they were less a sound than a pressure against the ears, and Markos had brought a wooden crate of figs so ripe they'd split their own skins in the heat. He opened one with his thumb, right down the center, and held it out to me across the table instead of eating it himself, and I remember thinking, with the specific clarity of a woman who has decided something without admitting it to herself yet: I am going to let this man see all of me tonight. Not the performance. The rest of it, whatever it turns out to be.

"You're somewhere else," he said, watching me hold the fig without eating it.

"I'm right here," I said, which was the first lie of the night and also, somehow, felt true the moment I said it.

He came around the table instead of answering, took the fig out of my hand, and set it back on the plate. His fingers, when they touched my jaw, smelled like resin and salt and the sweetness he'd just handled. He didn't kiss me right away. He looked at me for long enough that I had to stop myself from filling the silence, from saying something clever to manage the moment along, and when I finally let the silence sit there unmanaged, he kissed me like he had all night to do it and no reason to hurry through to whatever came next.

He carried the honey in from the kitchen himself, a little clay jar with a wooden dipper, and I laughed, actually laughed, at the theater of it, a Greek man walking toward my bedroom with honey like some myth I hadn't been told the ending of. He laughed too, low, unbothered by being caught at his own romance.

"For later," he said. "Not yet."

The shutters were open to the water and the room was thick with the day's heat still trapped in the stone walls, and the linen under me was already damp before he'd done anything but lay me back on it. He undressed me slowly enough that I felt every centimeter of fabric leave my skin as its own separate event, and when I reached for his shirt he caught my wrist, gently, and moved my hand back to the sheet.

"Not you tonight," he said. "Just lie there and let me look at you."

Honestly, Lilith, this frightened me more than anything a man had ever done to me in bed, and men have done a great deal. Looking asks nothing back. Looking has no rhythm I can match or exceed. I didn't know what to do with my hands, my breath, my face, if none of it was in service of getting him where he needed to go.

He kissed down my throat, unhurried, pausing at the pulse there like he was reading something written in it. He took his time at my breasts, his mouth patient the way a man is patient with bread that needs its full rise, no checking to see if I was impressed. When his hand finally slid between my thighs I was already slick, humiliatingly so, before he'd asked anything of me at all, and a low, satisfied noise moved through his chest, like a man confirming something he'd already suspected.

"Good," he said, mostly to himself. "That's honest, at least."

I didn't understand yet what he meant by honest. I would.

He kissed his way down my stomach with the unbothered thoroughness of a man with nowhere else to be that night, and when he settled between my thighs and I felt the first slow drag of his tongue, I did what I always did. I let my hips lift, timed my breath to catch the way it was supposed to catch, made the small appreciative sound that tells a man he's doing well. It is, I promise you, an old and reliable choreography.

He stopped.

Not abruptly, not with any accusation in it. He simply lifted his head, rested his cheek against my inner thigh, and looked up the length of my body at my face until I had to look back at him.

"You don't have to do that with me," he said.

Heat climbed my throat — the kind no sea air off that terrace could explain. "Do what."

"The show." He said it without unkindness, the way you'd name weather. "I've watched you eat a peach like it was the only thing happening in your world. I know what you actually sound like when something surprises you. That wasn't it."

I lay there with my thighs still open and my whole body suddenly loud with the wrongness of having been caught, and some old reflex reached for a joke, a deflection, anything to move us past the moment. Nothing came. I had no script for this. No one had ever refused the performance before; they'd taken it gratefully and gone home satisfied, and I had gone on managing my own pleasure like a chore I did alone, later, honestly, when it wasn't a courtesy owed to anyone.

"I don't know how not to," I said, and it came out smaller than I meant it to.

"I know," he said. "We have all night."

Those four words did more to me, Lilith, than anything his mouth had done up to that point. We have all night. Not tonight I'm going to make you come. Not a challenge, not a project. Just time, offered without condition, like the peach in the doorway.

He went back to work, if you can call it work, with a slowness that felt at first almost unbearable, because unbearable was the only frame I had for a pleasure that wasn't racing toward its own end. His tongue moved in long, unhurried passes, avoiding the place I expected him to go, tracing instead along the crease where thigh met hip, tasting the salt there, coming back to my clit only briefly, almost carelessly, before drifting away again. I realized, somewhere in the second slow circuit of this, that my hips had stopped performing lift and had simply started moving, on their own, toward whatever he was doing, seeking rather than presenting.

"There," he murmured against me, feeling it too. "That's yours. Keep doing that."

The honey came out sometime later, though I lost the shape of time almost entirely once his mouth was the only geography I had left. He drizzled it slow and warm over me and I felt the absurd sweetness of it before his tongue followed, cleaning it away with the same unhurried thoroughness, and I laughed again, helplessly this time, at how ridiculous and how devastating it was to be tended to like something worth the trouble, and the laugh dissolved into a moan halfway through because his mouth had settled directly over my clit and stayed there, steady, patient, building a pressure I couldn't outrun with performance because I had stopped trying to run at all.

I don't know how long it went on. The cicadas outside had gone quiet at some point, the moon had moved far enough to lay a new stripe of light across the floor, and my thighs were trembling around his head in a way I could not have manufactured if I'd wanted to, my hands fisted in the damp sheet, sounds coming out of me that had no audience in mind, no one to please, sounds that embarrassed me even as I couldn't stop making them. He held my hips down when they tried to buck away from a pleasure too sharp to hold still for, his fingers pressing bruises I'd find gratefully the next morning, and every time I got close to the place where I usually performed my way out of the last stretch, he seemed to know, and slowed, and waited, and let me climb back down into wanting it instead of faking it.

"Markos," I said, and it wasn't a request or a warning, it was just his name, the only word I had left that meant everything at once.

"I've got you," he said against me, and went back in.

When it finally happened, it happened without my permission, which is the only way I can describe it. My body simply took the choice away from me. I felt it build somewhere far lower and stranger than the place I usually pretended it built, a pressure I hadn't built for anyone's benefit, that gathered and gathered until there was no more room for it to gather and it broke instead, and what came out of me was raw and unguarded, a noise I didn't recognize as my own voice at all, and my whole body arched off that damp linen with a violence I had never once faked in my life because I had never once believed my body was capable of it. It went on in waves, each one catching me before I'd finished with the last, his mouth gentling but not stopping, riding it out with me until I had to reach down and hold his head still because it had become almost too much to bear.

I lay there afterward shaking, actually shaking, my thighs trembling against his shoulders, tears standing embarrassingly at the corners of my eyes for reasons I couldn't name yet, and he came up the length of my body slowly, kissing my stomach, my ribs, the underside of my breast, until his face was level with mine, his mouth wet and his eyes very calm.

"There she is," he said quietly.

"How did you know," I managed. "That it was different."

He brushed the hair off my damp forehead with a tenderness that reached somewhere the last hour hadn't touched, quiet as salt finding a cut I didn't know I had. "Your feet," he said. "You always keep your feet still when you're performing. You point your toes like it's a dance. Tonight your feet didn't know what they were doing. Neither did you. That's how I knew."

I laughed and cried at the same time, an ugly, honest sound I would have died before making in front of anyone else, and he just held me through it, unbothered, like it was one more thing worth his patience.

I didn't reach for him that night, and he didn't ask me to. He'd made it clear, without saying so directly, that the evening had one agenda and it had been fulfilled, and somewhere around three in the morning I understood that this, too, was a kind of gift I didn't have a script for: a man whose own pleasure that night had apparently lived entirely inside the fact of mine, who fell asleep with his hand resting flat on my stomach like he was keeping something warm.

I finished the ceiling three weeks later. I go back to Rome in September, and I don't know yet what Markos and I will be to each other once the light changes and the tourists leave and I'm not a woman eating a peach in a chapel doorway anymore. But I know what my own body sounds like now when nobody's managing it. I know what my feet do when I stop performing. And I know, in a way I didn't before that night, that I am allowed to take that long, that I owe no one the courtesy of arriving on schedule, that wanting something and receiving it are not favors I have to repay in kind by the same evening.

I still think about the honey some nights, alone, and find I don't need to fake anything for that, either.

With gratitude for the woman who walked out first, so the rest of us could learn to stay and be honest,

Fina