Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Just … do you like my bra?” I waved my hands in a flourish, as if to model it. “It traveled a long way.”

“I’m glad it found its way here,” he said, and reached over and touched his finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone, but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he ran his finger slowly along the upper edge of my bra in front and then traced it all the way down around the bottom. I watched his face while he did this. It seemed more intimate than kissing him had. By the time he’d finished outlining the whole thing, he’d barely touched me and yet I was so wet I could hardly stand up.

“Come here,” I said, pulling him to me and then down onto his bed, kicking off my sandals as we went. We were still in our jeans, but he whipped his shirt off and I undid my bra and tossed it into the corner of the tent and we kissed and rolled on top of each other at a feverish pitch until we grew languid and lay side by side kissing some more. His hands traveled all this while from my hair to my breasts to my waist and finally to unbutton the top button of my jeans, which is when I remembered about my hideous patches on my hips and rolled away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you—”

“It isn’t that. It’s … There’s something I should tell you first.”

“You’re married?”

“No,” I said, though it took me a moment to realize I was telling the truth. Paul flashed into my mind. Paul. And suddenly, I sat up. “Are you married?” I asked, turning back to Jonathan, lying on the bed behind me.

“Not married. No kids,” he replied.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-four.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

We sat contemplating this. It seemed exotic and perfect to me that he was thirty-four. Like in spite of the fact that he’d failed to ask me anything about myself, at least I was in bed with a man who wasn’t a boy anymore.

“What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and placed his hand on my naked back. When he did, I became aware that I was trembling. I wondered if he could feel that too.

“It’s something I feel self-conscious about. The skin on my hips … it’s kind of … Well, you know how last night I told you that I’m in the middle of hiking this trail called the PCT? So I have to wear my backpack all the time and where the hip belt of my pack rubs against my skin, it’s become”—I searched for a way to explain it that avoided the phrases tree bark and plucked dead chicken flesh —“roughened up. Sort of calloused from so much hiking. I just don’t want you to be shocked if …”

I trailed off, out of breath, my words absorbed entirely in the immaculate pleasure of his lips on the small of my back while his hands reached around the front to finish the task of unbuttoning my jeans. He sat up, his naked chest against me, pushing my hair aside to kiss my neck and shoulders until I turned and pulled him down onto me as I wriggled out of my pants while he kissed his way down my body from my ear to my throat to my collarbone to my breasts to my navel to the lace of my underwear, which he nudged down as he worked his way to the patches over my hip bones that I hoped he would never touch.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered, his mouth so soft against the roughest part of me. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

It was fun. It was more than fun. It was like a festival in that tent. We fell asleep at six and woke two hours later, exhausted, but awake, our bodies too out of whack to sleep any more.

“It’s my day off,” said Jonathan, sitting up. “You wanna go to the beach?”

I consented without knowing where exactly the beach might be. It was my day off too, my last one. Tomorrow I’d be back on the trail, headed for Crater Lake. We dressed and drove on a long arcing road that took us a couple of hours through the forest and up over the coastal mountains. We drank coffee and ate scones and listened to music as we drove, sticking to the same narrow conversation we’d had the night before: music, it seemed, was the one thing we had to discuss. By the time we pulled into the coastal town of Brookings, I half regretted agreeing to come and not only because my interest in Jonathan was waning, but because we’d been driving three hours. It seemed odd to be so far from the PCT, as if I were betraying it in a way.

The magnificence of the beach muted that feeling. As I walked along the ocean beside Jonathan, I realized that I’d been at this very beach before, with Paul. We’d camped in the nearby state park campground when we’d been on our long post-NYC road trip — the one on which we’d gone to the Grand Canyon and Vegas, Big Sur and San Francisco, and that had ultimately taken us to Portland. We’d stopped to camp at this beach along the way. We’d made a fire, cooked dinner, and played cards at a picnic table, then crawled into the back of my truck to make love on the futon that was there. I could feel the memory of it like a cloak on my skin. Who I’d been when I’d been here with Paul and what I’d thought would happen and what did and who I was now and how everything had changed.

Jonathan didn’t ask what I was thinking about, though I’d gone quiet. We only walked silently together, passing few people, though it was a Sunday afternoon, walking and walking until there was no one but us.

“How about here?” Jonathan asked when we came to a spot that was backed by a cove of dark boulders. I watched as he laid out a blanket, set the bag of lunch things he’d bought at Safeway on top of it, and sat down.

“I want to walk a bit farther, if you don’t mind,” I said, leaving my sandals near the blanket. It felt good to be alone, the wind in my hair, the sand soothing my feet. As I walked, I collected pretty rocks that I wouldn’t be able to take with me. When I’d gone so far that I couldn’t make out Jonathan in the distance, I bent and wrote Paul’s name in the sand.

I’d done that so many times before. I’d done it for years — every time I visited a beach after I fell in love with Paul when I was nineteen, whether we were together or not. But as I wrote his name now, I knew I was doing it for the last time. I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him. What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

“Do you want these?” I asked Jonathan when I returned to him, holding out the rocks I’d collected.

He smiled, shook his head, and watched as I let them fall back onto the sand.

I sat down beside him on the blanket, and he pulled things from the Safeway bag — bagels and cheese, a little plastic bear of honey, bananas and oranges, which he peeled for us. I ate them until he reached over with his finger full of honey, spread it on my lips, and kissed it off, biting me ever so gently at the end.

And so began a seaside honey fantasia. Him, me, the honey with some inevitable sand mixed in. My mouth, his mouth, and all the way up the tender side of my arm to my breasts. Across the broad plain of his bare shoulders and down to his nipples and navel and along the top edge of his shorts, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore.