Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

Which is to say, also, that it was the beginning of my death.

When my twenty minutes were up, I made my way down the hall, passing family photographs I did not linger over. My mind was focused and relaxed, but I locked the front door just in case.

When I reached the door at the end of the hall I saw the orange flicker of light. Candles. I should tell you now, in case you're wondering what was so special about this night, that though we had made love and the other kind, that fast, quickie sex perhaps two or three hundred times, we had never made love in the light. Whatever position we found ourselves entangled in, however raw our hunger was expressed, as dirty as we spoke to each other (we had covered a lot of ground, as I said before), it had always taken place under cover of darkness. As a child of divorce and possibly some madness on her mother's side, Holly had suffered from anorexia before she came to our junior high school. I was told, though she didn't like to speak of it, that she had to be institutionalized for a period of four months. Since the first day I saw her in the halls when we were fourteen, she always had the body of a young woman: curves, breasts, thighs a bit chunky, though she would slap me to hear that now. Her butt was what you would call a bubble butt and the rest of her had a perfectly healthy weight and shape. I don't know if she ever accepted this new version of herself, but I know she trusted me when I told her I liked her body this way better than the other way, the one I could only imagine. If she still heard the voice in her mind that said, You're too fat, lose some weight, because no one, especially Daddy, will love you this way until they are afraid of you , she was not listening to that voice now, tonight, as I entered the bedroom.

I understood immediately that she had not been preparing herself with lotions, creams and lingerie for the past twenty minutes. Nor had she showered or primped. It was the candles, dozens of them or perhaps a hundred that had taken her twenty minutes to light. Had she delivered them earlier or found some stash in the house? I do not know. They were on the night tables, the headboard, the dressers, the leather trunk at the foot of the bed, the window sills. I say that like I was studying the decor, but that is absurd - my eyes went the only place they could go, directly to her.

She had stripped the bed and remade it with only one layer, a fresh fitted sheet of sky-blue Egyptian cotton, five-hundred-thread count. I know this because for months after I searched for the exact texture and weight of that sheet. She had two pillows behind her head, and all was bare.

She was stretched across it diagonally, so that she faced me upon entering, the tips of her toes pointing at me like two hands in prayer. She smiled at me with a slow, involuntary widening at the corners of her mouth, her lips spaced just so. One arm was up under her head, her hand buried somewhere in the thick fan of her hair, which hung loosely and combed out over her shoulders to the tops of her breasts. Her other arm was at her side, her hand resting flat on her belly somewhere between navel and the lowest rung of her ribcage. She was the color of honey. Her eyes, normally wide with daring, were now low and glistening like an addict's, so that she was looking down at me even though it was I who stood above her, moving closer to the foot of the bed as I removed my zippered sweatshirt, the tee shirt under, and kicked off my jeans.

Now is where you will ask me to skip ahead to the outcome, but I'm afraid I cannot do that. What seems like sparing you the details is to rob myself of the better understanding that comes with telling the thing the way it happened, and some details matter more than others. So cover your ears if you don't appreciate what I am about to say, but understand that to me, to the seventeen-year-old me and the man I have become, these seemingly tawdry details matter. They matter very much.

My Holy Girl, she let me look at her.

She consented to my inspection, so I stood there, now in my loose boxer shorts, the pink Oxford ones she had stolen for me at the outlet mall, and I studied her. It was not so easy as head to toe or toe to head or anything like that. I would watch her chest for signs of heartbeat until I saw it, the skin over her breastbone literally pulsing, perspiring. I remember sitting beside her looking down and noticing for the first time her tiny purple dots where the hair follicles on her calves had been traumatized from her last shave. I saw the curve of her toes, thick and characterless. The balls of muscle on the inside of her knees were shiny in the firelight of the room.

No doubt I said things that were juvenile and ill equipped. 'I can't believe how beautiful you are' and 'you're a goddess sent here for me' and 'don't move, just wait, I want to memorize you for all time' and all those things you will laugh at now, but I meant them, and they were true. When I said she was a goddess, I understood that she held a power over my soul, and that if she were to command me to end my life with her at that moment, I surely would have. I believed in her the way one comes to believe in any other god, a work of genius, a fact of life, that song. The horizons revolved around her soul and her soul was the sun. Holly Bauerman was love incarnate.

Her heart was strong and rapid, so different from her expression, which remained languid like her pose. I traced her breasts with the speed of a tortoise traversing a desert, I marveled at the pebbled brownness of areoles, the network of veins, the fine blonde hairs sprouting around them. I'd looked at them a hundred times before, but I had never seen them. At my touch she tensed and told me my fingers burned. As I traced her belly and hips I let my fingers rest on the stretch marks, those clues to her history like white tiger stripes in miniature.

I suppose this watching went on for hours, but it could have been minutes. Each moment was condensed and stretched out like a rubber band as time elasticized. When at last I could not resist I drew my two middle fingers from her calf behind her knee and up her thigh in a slow arc until they brushed against the lips of her sex (she called it her chi-chi, which at the time sounded to me like a toy poodle but now recalls something more accurate, the chi , or life force, in Eastern philosophy) and they came away instantly wet in a way that shocked me. She had remained so calm, I did not realize what had been going on inside of her. I looked down, of course I did, and watched my fingers exploring her, trying not to gasp as I saw not only the color and quantity of her desire but the markings we were making on the sheet. I confess that my adolescent mind did not understand fully what was happening at first. I worried for a moment she had lost control and truly wet the bed. She reacted to my touch by reaching out for me - Enough is enough , she said without so many words. Come to me now .

But I could not, yet. I needed to understand, to create, to wallow. I let my fingers roam back to that spot and around and inside and over her hips and thighs and back inside until she was covered in her own salty sweetness and on the verge of her first of this night's orgasms, and only then did I lose all thought and sit upright to allow her to pull my shorts off.

I felt clumsy on top of her and we slid against each other, searching for the right angles. The prospect of feeling all of her made it like the first time again. The heat of her soft belly flesh pressed against me as her hand encircled me and slid down, and in the confusion I assumed I was inside.

She was staring at me, wide-eyed with desperation and patience. That she had planned this and wanted me without protection, that when she said she loved me like no one else and would always love me, filled me with the power and purpose of a righteous man.