His weight slid over me, his legs spreading mine, and I gasped out a few words… we had no protection, we needed to use something… He reassured me with a hoarse murmur, reaching over to the bedside table for his wallet, which I hadn’t even been aware of him setting there. I heard the rip of a plastic packet. Momentarily distracted, I wondered when that had happened, how he had managed —

My thoughts imploded as I felt the pressure of him working slowly, circling intimately. He entered me in a low, thick slide, sensation blooming within sensation, hot and sweet and maddening. A cry stirred in my throat.

Joe nuzzled at my ear. “Shhhh…” He slid an arm beneath my hips, pulling them high. Every thrust was a full-bodied caress, the hair on his chest teasing my breasts. I’d never felt so much at once, raw sensation eliding the spaces between every heartbeat and breath until I was blind and silent. The release wrung pleasure from every muscle, tightening until I shuddered in long, liquescent spasms. Joe held me tightly, breathing in rough gasps as he reached the pinnacle. He kissed my neck and shoulders, his hands moving over me gently. His fingers traversed my stomach, down between my legs to the verge of our joined flesh, and I felt him caressing intimately, teasing around the small centered ache. Moaning in astonishment, I sank into an erotic darkness where there was no thought, no past, no future, only pleasure that made me twist in helpless ecstasy.

I awakened alone in the morning, aware of the slight aches left by another body’s intrusion into mine, the faint whisker burns on skin that had been kissed and kissed, the tender pull of inner thighs.

I wasn’t sure what to think about what I’d done.

Joe had said little when he’d left, other than the obligatory, “I’ll call you.” A promise that no one ever kept.

I reminded myself that I had the right to sleep with someone if I wanted to, even a stranger. No judgments were necessary. No one had to feel bad.

Still… I felt as if something had been taken from me, and I didn’t know what it was or how to regain it. I felt as if I would never be the same again.

Letting out a shuddering sigh, I used the bedsheet to blot my eyes as tears threatened to well up.

I pressed hard against my eyes. “You’re okay,” I whispered aloud. “Everything’s okay.”

As I huddled back into the damp pillow, I remembered how, when I was in grade school, we had studied butterflies for a science project. Samples of a butterfly’s wing under a microscope had revealed that it was covered with tiny scales like feathers or roof shingles.

If you touched a butterfly’s wing, the teacher had said, it would knock off some of the scales and they would never grow back. Some butterflies had clear patches on their wings where you could see right through the membrane. But even with some lost scales, a butterfly would still be able to fly after you let it go.

It would get along just fine.

Six

During the long drive home, Sofia and I talked about the wedding and rehashed every detail. I did my best to keep the mood light, forcing myself to laugh from time to time. When Sofia asked casually if anything had happened with Joe Travis, I replied, “No, but I gave him my number. He might call sometime.” I could tell by her quick, speculative glance that she didn’t entirely believe me.

After Sofia plugged her phone into the car audio and started a jaunty Tejano song, I let myself think about the previous night and tried to figure out why I felt so guilty and worried. Probably because having a one-night stand was so unlike me… except that since I’d done it, it was like me.

The new me.

Feeling a stirring of panic, I pushed it back down.

I thought back to when I’d first met Brian, trying to remember how long I’d waited until sleeping with him. Two months, at least. I had been cautious about intimacy, having no desire to careen from one man to the next the way my mother had. Sex would be on my terms, within the margins that I established. Brian had been fine with that, patient, willing to wait until I was ready.

We had been introduced by mutual friends at a cocktail party held in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Met. We had been instantly comfortable with each other, so naturally in tune that our friends had laughingly accused us of already knowing each other. We’d both been twenty-one at the time, full of ambition and energy, both of us having just moved from other places, me from Dallas, Brian from Boston.

It had been the happiest time of my life, that first year in New York, a city that had infused me with the perpetual feeling that something great, or at least interesting, was just around the corner. Having been accustomed to the lazy, sunstruck pace of Texas, where the heat forced everyone to ration their energy, I had been galvanized by Manhattan’s cool autumn vitality. You belong here, the city seemed to say, with the honking of canary-colored taxicabs and the screeching and grinding of construction equipment, the sounds of street musicians and bars and rattling subways… all of it meant that I was in a place where things were happening.

It had been easy to find friends, a group of women who filled their spare time with volunteer work, clubs, lessons in things like foreign languages, dancing, tennis. The Manhattanite’s passion for self-improvement had been contagious – soon I’d found myself signing up for clubs and lessons, trying to make every minute of the day purposeful.

In retrospect, I had to wonder how much of my falling in love with New York had been the adjuvant to falling in love with Brian. Had I met Brian in another place, I wasn’t certain that we would have lasted as long as we had. He had been a good lover, considerate in bed, but his Wall Street job had entailed sixteen-hour workdays and preoccupations with things such as the upcoming nonfarm payroll numbers or what was happening on Bloomberg at one a.m. It had made him perpetually tired and distracted. He had used alcohol to relieve the stress, and that hadn’t exactly helped our love life. But even at the beginning of our relationship, I had never experienced anything with Brian that even remotely resembled what had happened last night.