When she turned toward the street, she saw Callie, Dylan, and Davey were there on the sidewalk, waiting for her.
“We thought we’d pick you up from work, ’cause the party got boring,” Callie said. “Want to go back to Dylan and Davey’s and smoke a bowl and watch dating shows?”
She wanted nothing more. But when she tried to catch Dylan’s eye she found that whatever had passed between them last night was gone, or at least submerged under some resentment or confusion.
“Who was that?” he asked, in a slightly accusatory tone of voice, like he thought she shouldn’t have let Stefan cheek-kiss her. That was annoying.
“Ugh, that’s my new boss. He’s like that with everyone.” She stopped just short of actually apologizing.
But then his hand brushed hers, and she forgot to be annoyed immediately. For an awkward, heartbeat-skipping moment she thought he might hold hands with her. Even though he didn’t grab her hand it seemed possible that he could, or that he wanted to.
When they got back to Dylan and Davey’s apartment everyone smoked weed laced with opium in front of the TV and slumped onto one another in a puppy pile, Callie’s legs on Laura’s and Laura leaning into Dylan’s shoulder. Eventually everyone but Laura fell asleep. Even anesthetized by drugs and exhaustion she was alert to each of Dylan’s breaths as he slept and how close she was to him, close enough to hear his heartbeat. She imagined kissing him and felt almost queasy with desire. But after maybe twenty minutes it became clear that he wasn’t about to wake up again and she finally passed out, letting her body relax tentatively into the side of his. She had fitful, flashing dreams.
She woke up as it began to get light out, and as she realized where she was and whose flannel shirt she was smelling because it was right up against her nose, her whole body went into a kind of flu-like feverish shock. She had to exert an enormous effort to stay where she was, not wake everyone by suddenly bolting off the couch.
Her breath, though, and her fast heartbeat were outside her control, and Dylan rustled awake. He kept one eye scrunched closed and looked up at her, then reached out an arm and pulled her up off the couch. Callie grunted something disapproving as her legs got rearranged but then rolled over in the empty space and went right back to sleep. Dylan pulled Laura along the hall to his bedroom.
He had a loft bed made out of raw, splintery two-by-fours, with piles of clothes and cables and synths littering the floor underneath. The mattress was so near the ceiling that Laura couldn’t help but think about how the only kind of sex they would be able to have would be close together, with nobody sitting up. She was desperate to have sex with Dylan, but she was also nervous. There were so many variables when you hooked up with someone for the first time; would he, after everything she’d imagined, be rushed or lazy or inconsiderate or just not really there? She had already experienced more than her share of dull, grabby hands and slimy lolling-open mouths and mistaken ideas from porn.
He saw her staring at the makeshift bed and caught her eye and smiled. “I know, it sucks,” he said. “I’ll get a real bed one of these days, I promise.” She felt a rush of joy at the suggestion that she was going to be around to witness his future bed.
The difference in their heights was thrilling but inconvenient; she had to crane her neck up a lot to reach his mouth. They clambered awkwardly up into the tiny bed and stretched out against each other. He ran his fingertips lightly around the edges of her still-clothed body. She was wearing her unfashionable jeans. There was no graceful way for him to remove them because neither of them could sit up all the way, so he said, “Let’s just take off our own clothes,” and they each hurriedly did, then lay down next to each other again. He was thin and pale, with only a few wisps of chest hair right in the center and a constellation of freckles in a semicircle near his navel. He’d kept his boxers on—a nice touch, to have taken them off would have been practical but still somehow presumptuous—and his dick strained against the fabric impressively. Without any of the delicacy and finesse he’d displayed in the way he touched her, she reached out and grabbed it. It felt almost improbably thick, and it pulsed in her hand. He made a little involuntary grunting sound as he pushed his waistband down to give her better access, and even though they were still kissing she managed to glance down to assess what she was holding.
Dylan had the most beautiful dick in the world. It was perfectly symmetrical, long, thick, and uncircumcised, and it was even a nice color—not purple or red at all, but the same pale white as the rest of his skin.
She wondered, in the tiny part of her mind that could still think, whether Dylan knew, whether his perfect dick had informed the direction of his life. Probably? If you came to New York with some musical talent and a perfect dick, why wouldn’t you take for granted that your band would soon be recording and touring, that you would be able to get by without a day job, that you would be able to get girls to come home with you by, essentially, existing in their presence? But the tiny pang of jealousy that Laura felt in that moment was soon eclipsed by what was happening in front of her. Dylan crouched awkwardly and somewhat perfunctorily between her legs for a moment, then put on a condom and gently, slowly, shoved about a third of his perfect dick in.
He made eye contact with Laura and said, “Is it okay?”
Clearly, this was a thing that he knew he had to do, which should have mildly grossed Laura out, but she was no longer processing this experience from a critical remove. She said, “Unf,” in a way that she hoped expressed okayness, so he continued.
It wasn’t ultimately satisfying, exactly; Laura was too excited and nervous to let go all the way, and she kept hearing the sounds she was making and getting thrown out of the moment by worrying about the people sleeping in the other room. But she thought that even so, something about this particular morning would end up staying with her, returning to her occasionally over the years in dreams or fantasies or even during sex with other people. There was just something pure about it, something fun and happy that made her feel like anything might be possible. The unavoidable metaphor was that it was her first hit of a drug, and she imagined that she might spend the rest of her life chasing this high and never quite replicating it.
* * *
A few hours later Laura slipped out of Dylan’s apartment into the quiet of what passed for early morning in her neighborhood. The people who had daytime jobs in other parts of the city had left hours earlier, but the people who had nighttime jobs and other kinds of work were still in their apartments, taking long showers, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, lighting incense, and reading their tarot card of the day. She splurged on croissants and non-bodega coffee from a bakery on First Avenue, taking a circuitous route toward the shop where Callie worked on Seventh Street. The sign on the door still read Closed, but the door was unlocked and Callie was inside, zipping up a dress that Laura recognized from the window display. It looked even better on Callie than it did on the headless, white-limbed mannequin.
“Oooh,” she said when she saw Laura. “So?”
Laura was grinning. “I don’t want to diminish the experience by analyzing it or giving you a play-by-play.”
“How selfish! Come on, just one detail. Please? I haven’t even opened the shop yet and I’m already bored.”