He lifted his head. He stared into my eyes. “Seriously, Molly. I don’t want you to feel like there’s any kind of pressure here. If you don’t want to do this—”
“I want to.” I touched his chest. His muscles were taut and lean against my fingertips.
He closed his eyes. “If some part of you thinks that maybe it would be a bad idea, we should stop. I don’t want you to regret this later.”
I thrust my hand inside his pants. “I don’t want to stop.”
He moaned. “Good. Me either.”
* * *
But several eternities later, after we were both completely naked, Wyatt had yet to achieve an erection.
We lay sprawled on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
We weren’t touching.
“Motherfucker,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s the fucking E,” he said. “I heard that sometimes it can make it so you can’t get it up. But I never tried to, you know, do it while I was rolling.”
“It’s okay.” I rolled onto my side. I put a hand on his chest reassuringly. “You said you just wanted to be close. To be naked together. Well, we are.”
He rolled onto his side too. Now our bodies were pressed together.
“You sure?” he asked. “You’re not disappointed?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I can get disappointed right now.”
He kissed my forehead.
“Are you disappointed?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. His arms went tight around me, and he rolled me under him. Now he was on top of me, and my body was trapped beneath his. I could feel his warm, bare skin pressing into my bare skin. It was heaven. “I’d like to make love to you.”
“We don’t need to,” I said. “This is already more intimate and more intense than any sex I’ve ever had.” I felt like I’d been wrapped up in joy, like my nerve endings were exploding intense exultation over my entire body. The places that our skin touched were alive and pulsing out rapture.
Before this, I’d only ever been with Duncan, and our sex had always been sort of fumbling and awkward. I’d often been a little bored, lying under him as he pounded away at me.
This was completely different.
I knew it was because of the pill I’d taken. I knew enough about ecstasy to know that it did something to make your body release a whole bunch of serotonin, and that what I was feeling was chemical in nature.
But it didn’t feel that way. It felt so real. It felt so good.
He kissed me again, and I lost myself in his kisses, his caresses.
I touched him, and he touched me, and it felt like my soul was bursting because everything was so wonderful.
He whispered in my ear. “I feel like we’re melting into each other.”
I sighed. “Yes. I feel that too.” I did. “Like there’s no barriers.”
“Between anything,” he said. “Between you and me. Between the bedsheets and us. Between the air and our skin.”
I let out an audible sigh, running my fingers over his bare back, reaching down to cup his ass.
“You know, it’s true,” he said. “We are all just open space.”
“What?” I said.
In the background, the music was deep, pulsing bass beneath a delicious melody that spoke of softness and sweetness. His words fit into the places where the music was empty, filling it up, as if his words were meant to be part of it all, as if the music had been recorded just for him to speak.
“Molecules,” he said. “All of us are made up of molecules and atoms, and inside them are only tiny particles clinging to each other. Electrons, spinning in a mad cloud around nuclei. And when we touch, it feels like we’re solid, but we’re not. It’s only that particles are pushing against each other, creating the illusion of something solid. It’s all just charges—attraction and repulsion. If you get close enough with a microscope, everything is swimming into each other.”
I shut my eyes, listening to his voice, feeling his fingers and his mouth on me.
“We’re all made of the same things,” he breathed. “Everything here on earth. It’s leftover from exploding stars. All the pieces of us are the same things that you can find anywhere in the universe. Anywhere. Everywhere. So, in some ways, we really are the same. We really are connected. Not just to each other. And not just to all the people at the party who were rolling with us. Not just to the things we touch in this room. But to all the people on the entire planet. To the trees. And the animals. The birds and the flowers. The lightning and the rain. To the sun itself. And the moon. And the stars that are out there, far, far away. To the whole universe. We’re part of it. It’s part of us.”