“What are you doing?”
She answered by pulling him into her, feeling his smile against her lips.
“Here?” he asked.
Regan, always dressed appropriately for every occasion, slid his hand silently under her dress, feeling him shiver.
“Ah,” he said, dazed, and kissed her firmly, getting that sleepy look of acquiescence. It was the one that meant he wasn’t going to say no （the one that meant he didn’t want to say no, and therefore wouldn’t）， and she thought to herself: This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.
How many ways were there to feel sex, to suffer it, to describe it? She thought of the note in her phone filled with little glimpses of eroticism and laughed. How sad she had been, that Regan. How pathetic, thinking she could simply look at a gallery of intimacy and then approximate it for arousal in her head. Funny how desire had blended with closeness in her mind; how she’d confused pure physicality for the sensation of being whole. How positively laughable it was, now that she’d come this far.
She didn’t feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself. Like she and eternity and omnipotence were the same, or like omniscience could be equated to the sound of his ragged breath in her ear. She wanted him to mess her up, deplete her, to deliver her to something lesser, something baser. Something less inclined to rational thought, and instead diminished only to sensations.
She thought of the last time she’d been sitting like this on the bathroom sink, one leg hiked up and breathing so fast her lungs had surely believed it was murder. She had thought: I wonder if I will ever feel anything again, and look at her now—now she was feeling everything. Was that growth? Of course it was growth, she was uncontainable now. She’d outgrown her container and yes, she still inhabited her body, and temporarily so did he, but they were more than that. This was vastness—and was it him? Was it her? Was it them? Maybe it was all of it, maybe it was everything, maybe he and she were a little speck of everything when they were touching like this, bound to tiny particles in the air. To things that science had yet to find or name or see.
She was colossal like this, the enormity of what she was now steadily irrepressible, ebullient for being in his arms; Kiss me again, please, don’t stop, oh god don’t stop. He would never, he wouldn’t, but still, please don’t, we’ll shrink down to human-sized when we’re done but for now, stay like this with me; see the magnitude of being, see existence through my eyes; don’t blink or you might miss it. I am dwarfed, Aldo, by the happiness in that room, it’s overwhelmed me. It has made me feel so infinitesimally small; I need you to help me remember what it feels like to be vast again.
Eventually he zipped his trousers, she fixed her hair, he kissed the back of her neck and slipped out after she wiped her lipstick from his cheek and said: See you soon.
She watched him go, then returned her attention to vanity, to her reflection above the bathroom sink. She stared at herself in the mirror and thought: My eyes are too big, everyone will know I’ve seen everything, they’ll know I saw the universe itself. They will look at me and they’ll think: This poor girl, she knows too much, she can’t go back.
“I can’t go back,” she whispered to herself, refreshing a curl with a twist around her finger.
Okay, her wide eyes said, okay, fine.
Then get ready to move forward.
* * *
“RINALDO,” MASSO SAID, half-smiling as Aldo wandered towards him. “And where have you been?”
Dad, you couldn’t possibly imagine. I have been everywhere and everything, inside of her, out of body, finally understanding what it’s like to exist outside of my own head.
“Bathroom,” Aldo said, adjusting his tie, and Masso’s smile faltered slightly, his fingers tightening around his glass as if whatever had tickled him just a moment earlier had sobered him now, slipping like a cloak from his shoulders.
“Rinaldo.” Masso turned away, glancing out the window, and Aldo could see the silver in his father’s hair. Tommaso Damiani was in his mid-fifties now, and he was aging well, like a fine wine. It was a joke Aldo had written into every birthday card, but it was true. Masso was well preserved, finely distilled. Masso Damiani was a rare vintage, one that Aldo had always admired, and it was for that reason that Aldo’s chest tightened when his father said, “Are you sure?”