First Man Page 3

  Her bedroom was the same riot of color as the rest of the house, but my tunnel vision had narrowed down to the bed. A fluffy white comforter covered the king sized bed, the absence of color making it almost glow in the dim room.

  The last few articles of clothing we were both wearing were left like a breadcrumb trail in the last few steps to the bed. Her boldness continued to surprise me. Her hands and lips were everywhere, and, though this was far from being new, she left me breathless.

  I was not a man inclined to lay back and let someone else have all the fun though. In one quick motion, I pinned Lily beneath me, reversing our positions. “Not fair,” she purred.

  “I don’t expect you’ll be complaining much soon.” My words came out as a barely audible murmur against her neck as I kissed my way down her body. I paused at her breasts, lavishing those creamy globes with lips and tongue until her nipples stood up in hard peaks.

  Lily moaned, and I wanted to hear her make that sound again and again. I wanted to reduce her to a shaking, sighing creature who knew no other sensation but pleasure. I wanted her to come undone and lose herself the way I had lost myself in her.

  I moved lower, to the apex of her parted thighs. My tongue had barely touched her aching flesh when her hips arched up off the bed. Her fingers tangled in my dark hair, yanking on the strands in a way that would have been painful in any other instance. In that moment though, it just made me want her more.

  Lily gasped as I delved deeper, tasting her essence as it poured over my tongue and revealing in the litany of pleasure-fueled noises that I doubted she realized she was making.

  I could have stayed there forever, drawing her closer and closer to her peak, but backing off, learning the topography of her body like an ancient mapmaker. Lily was definitely right in her assessment of me. I was, without a doubt, a nerd.

  Lily’s grip on my hair tightened, and the pitch of her voice grew higher, a keen of pleasure that rose and rose until snapping with a cry of “Adam!” as her release rolled over her.

  I kissed my way back up her body, prepared to claim her as I’d wanted to since that first afternoon in Park Hall. Lily had other ideas. With a satisfied smile still painted across her face, she pushed me onto my back and settled above me.

  “You’re used to being the one in control, aren’t you Adam?” she asked. Desperately aroused and wanting nothing more that to bury myself in her heat and never leave, I would have agreed to anything, but her words gave me pause. Behind the teasing words was a woman calling me out.

  As she hovered above me, I knew that the world-weary traveller act wasn’t going to hold out under her scrutiny. She expected me to be a person and not just a collection of cynical one-liners.

  I didn’t know how to answer the question in her eyes. I’d been alone inside myself for so long, I didn’t even know how to unlock that door. Instead, I closed my eyes and pulled her into a deep kiss that broke off with a gasp as I breached the wet inferno of her core.

  Her eyes met mine, and I felt exposed and naked in a way that had nothing to do with nudity. She rocked on top of me, taking me into her body with a rhythm as old as humanity.

  “Adam,” she moaned, and I stared at her face with those unguarded grey eyes, her cheeks flushed from exertion. Her hair was a tangled halo of golden blonde that tickled my face when I pulled her closer. Her lips traveled across the curve of my jaw, and I felt the warm, wet pressure of her tongue against my pulse. “Adam,” she whispered again. I felt her lips take the shape of my name against my throat.

  Her breathing grew ragged, and I could feel her tighten around me. “Lily,” I gasped, breaking the silence for the first time. I had a thousand words I wanted to say, but they caught in my throat. The only word that could escape was her name, “Lily Lily Lily” whispered like a mantra. My words cut off into a choked cry as we both found our peaks.

  I’d like to say that rush of words flowed out of me, but I’d be lying. I’d like to say that I told her I was falling in love with her. I didn’t. I tugged her down against me and buried my face in her hair as the last throes of passion were wrung out of both of us.

  I woke to bright sunlight peeking through the horizontal slashes of her blinds. A painting of a tiger lily hung on the wall opposite the bed. The artist had used a metallic paint that sparkled in the morning light. Tangled in soft white sheets with Lily pressed against my back, I had stared at the sun creeping across the painting. I hadn’t even noticed it the night before.

  In those quiet, early morning hours, I felt the first tendrils of roots.

  LOST

  “Adam, tell me about Paris.”

  Sprawled across my lap was Lily, looking at me like I held the secrets to the stars. We’d been entangled in each other for close to three months, and she had already become my longest relationship to date. I had neglected to share that fact with her, somehow knowing that fact would just make her sad for my lonely, barren past.

  Her words, not mine.

  Sometimes I forgot how close we really were in age. I was five months shy of twenty-eight and beginning to feel it. Some days, the six year gap between the two of us seemed more like a chasm.

  The wide world was far from perfect. I’d seen enough of it to embitter myself, and I was starting to fear that I was poisoning her. Lily called my accent “nondescript British nomad,” but whatever the accent, I had perfected cynicism to a fine art.

  “Paris is too much of a tourist trap. Even the French hate Paris.”

  Some of the spark drained out of her grey eyes, but she refused to be daunted. “London?”

  “Terrible weather and too much traffic.”

  “Tokyo?”

  “New York with shitty hotels.”

  Lily crawled out of my bed, suddenly very concerned with finding where she had abandoned her clothes last night. I watched appreciatively as she leaned over to retrieve her blue lace bra that had somehow ended up on my desk looking ridiculously out of place amid the photocopies of parchments and piles of notes.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She ignored me as she slithered into the tight jeans I had peeled off her slender hips only a few hours ago. She had given up looking for her shirt, counting it as lost within the Bermuda Triangle of dusty books that covered every flat surface and had instead grabbed mine from the floor. Her fingers were steady as she fastened the buttons.

  “Lily-”

  “Why do you have to be like this, Adam?” Her voice was quiet but I heard the resolution in it. “Why do you have to be so cynical all the time? You’ve been everywhere, you’ve seen everything. I get it. I haven’t. I don’t want to know that Venice smells like a sewer or that London has too much traffic!” I closed the distance between us and tucked a strand of her pale hair behind her ear, ignoring the tangles and the smeared mascara and seeing the unvoiced question in her eyes and choosing to ignore it.

  “I liked Egypt,” I whispered after the door shut behind her.

  Taped to the door of Apartment 309 was an envelope made of thick, off-white paper.

  Lily,

  I care a great deal about you, but I can’t be who you want me to be. You knew what I was when you met me, and I’ve tried to never lie to you. You knew this would happen one day. It was time to move on.

  Adam

  Written below the scrawled signature and smudged into near illegibility were the words I’m sorry.

  I went to Charleston.

  I stayed there for two weeks, living out of a bare-bones hotel room and trying to understand why I was there instead of the place I was rapidly beginning to think of as home.

  I had admired my father. I had sat at his knee, worshipping his intelligence and his dedication, never giving myself leave to be angry at the man who had driven his wife away with his relentless obsession. I was far too old to be blaming the man for my own failings, but I’d been adrift in the world since childhood.

  I grabbed the half-empty glass of watery Scotch on the bedside table a
nd drank it down without tasting it, hating myself. Somehow I’d managed to embrace the worst personality traits in both of my parents. I had my father’s ability to wear blinders and ignore everything but my current obsession, and my mother’s habit of running away when anything got too rough.

  Sitting on an ugly floral bedspread in an anonymous room, I picked up the receiver of the beige hotel phone, running my fingers over the smooth plastic, not knowing if I wanted to call Lily to beg forgiveness or Edwin to beg for understanding.

  At this point, I doubted if I would get either.

  I drove back to Atlanta early on a Sunday morning with the few possessions I had bothered to bring to Charleston rattling around the trunk of my car. I didn’t show up at her apartment at five in the morning clutching a bouquet of flowers and a tear-soaked apology. Instead, I waited. When the afternoon came around, I was sitting on one of the stone benches just inside the gate of the botanical gardens.

  She didn’t come. I stayed until the sun set and the garden was closing. I trudged into the parking lot, head hung, feeling like a fool.

  Lily was sitting on the hood of my car.

  “I saw your car,” she said simply.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are.” She slid off the car and stood beside me. She reached up and brushed my cheek with her fingertips. “You’ve never come back before, have you?”

  I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

  “That means something. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to kill you for what you put me through. . . what I had to go through without you, but it’s something.” She allowed me to pull her into my arms, standing stiffly at first, but relaxing into my embrace after a few long moments.

  “This doesn’t mean I forgive you yet,” she said, her voice muffled by my shirt.

  “I don’t deserve it yet.”

  Months had passed, and the roots grew deeper. Lily had finally questioned me about how, despite my fascination with all things Greco-Roman, my deepest passion was Egypt.

  The familiar inquisitive look had returned to her face. “Why Egypt?”

  “Everything feels. . . timeless there. Tourists go to the pyramids, but I went into the tombs. You had to have the right credentials, and my degrees and the papers I’d authored were good enough. I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s like being so deep underground.” I paused, almost able to taste the dampness that had thickened the air inside the tombs. “I remember running my fingers over one of the walls. There was nothing special about it, no decorations, just raw stone, but I could feel the age of the tomb. I remember feeling like an intruder and not caring because it was so beautiful.”

  Half of being a successful historian was being a good storyteller, and one didn’t get to be, as Edwin put it, “a ruddy rock star” by being anything but masterful, but I wanted this to be more than just another story to her. She had drawn her arms around my waist, grounding me as I wandered the Egyptian sands in my mind, and I pulled out of her embrace and walked across the room. I dropped to my knees beneath the one window in my bedroom. With the reverence of a supplicant, I pushed aside a stack of enlargements of the Books of the Dead and unlocked the small scratched and dented metal trunk.

  “Can I see?” Lily’s voice was uncharacteristically timid.

  “Of course,” I replied. Before the words had fully left my mouth, Lily was kneeling beside me. I pulled out a bottle wrapped in a length of gold silk and set it aside. The only other contents of the box were a thick book with a red leather cover and another bottle wrapped in black silk. I handed Lily the book and closed the box.

  What’s in the other bottle?”

  “Myrrh,” I answered quickly, watching with mild amusement as Lily finally opened the book. After scanning the first page for a few seconds she closed it and punched me in the arm. “What was that for?” I asked, not bothering to hide my laughter.

  “You wrote your diary in Ancient Greek?”

  I took the book out of her hands, relishing briefly in the familiarity of the worn cover before replying. “I started it in my last year at Eton. I wrote it in Greek because it was the hardest language I was studying, and I wanted the extra practice. I swear, it’s not as pretentious as it sounds.” I set the book aside and grabbed the bottle.

  I rose to my feet and grabbed a stone bowl off of my desk. I emptied the keys, change, and other detritus of life that had accumulated into the small bowl onto the desktop, not caring where anything landed. Slowly, I uncoiled the silk from the bottle. Lily had followed me and stood watching as I placed the bowl on the nightstand and uncorked the bottle, pouring a generous amount into it.

  The smell of spices filled the air.

  “Olibanum,” I whispered.

  “Olibanum?” she stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar native word.

  “Frankincense.” I guided her hand to the bowl’s rim, releasing her as her fingers skimmed the surface of the thick amber fluid. “Frankincense,” I repeated. “Cassia. Sandalwood.” Capturing her hand again, I curled my long fingers around hers, the oil pooling briefly in our palms before dripping down our wrists. “Spirit. Heart. Body.”

  “What about the Myrrh?”

  I tensed. Thinking of the bottle wrapped in black locked safely away, I forced my voice to be light. “You wouldn’t like Myrrh. Nasty stuff. Smells like dirt.” I dipped my free hand into the bowl and traced it across her cheek before trailing my oil-coated fingers across her neck.

  “In the old days, the women of the desert tribes would do this for a girl on her wedding night. They would paint her hands and feet with henna and anoint her with Frankincense oil.” I unbuttoned her shirt, the oil darkening the white fabric. “You should wear your hair this way more often,” I said, running my fingers through the blonde waves she usually flattened into submission.

  “You should drop the world-weary act more often.”

  I didn’t reply.

  The words, It’s not an act echoed in my head, but I pushed them aside as I pushed her shirt off her shoulders. With methodical slowness, I traced the contours of her body with my oil-slicked hands. I felt her heartbeat quicken as my hands grazed the swell of her breasts.

  Her bra went next, tossed to the ground next to her oil-stained shirt, and my fingers delicately circled her nipples which pebbled into hard peaks under my touch. The warm, spiced scent of the oil surrounded us in a heady cloud.

  “Turn over,” I said, keeping my voice low to avoid breaking the spell. Lily rolled over on her stomach, and I was left with the bare expanse of her back. I pressed my hands against the base of her spine and slowly moved upwards, my fingers tracing each vertebra.

  Lily’s breath deepened as my hands relaxed her taut muscles. Lily wasn’t normally a tense person, but her muscles were coiled tight today. Inch by inch, I coaxed her body into relaxation. Small moans of pleasure escaped her mouth, adding fuel to the fire that had been simmering in me since I touched her.

  I tugged down the zipper on her skirt, adding that and the small scrap of blue lace she wore underneath it to the pile of abandoned clothing on the floor. Before I could turn my attention back to worshipping her body, Lily rolled over and sat up.

  “My turn,” she said, and Lily’s patience with the impeding clothing was much shorter than mine. Shirt, jeans and boxers were removed in quick succession before I laid down on the bed below her like a supplicant.

  More of the oil was pooled in her palms, thickening the scent in the air, and her hands were on me. Small and fragile, they followed the lines of my ribs before moving upwards, brushing over my nipples before reaching my shoulders.

  Straddling my waist, Lily could feel the evidence of my desire for her pressing against her thigh. I could feel her own heat anointing me as her hands followed their meandering path across my body.

  Almost of their own volition, my hands went to her hips. One hand slipped between us and then I was within her, buried in warmth and softness.

  And love.

  Ri
tual forgotten, I sat up and wrapped my arms around Lily, pulling her closer to me as I murmured the words I’d never said to another person into the curve of her neck. “I’ll never leave again. I love you. I’ll never leave.”

  In those golden moments, I believed it.

  EGYPT

  Months slipped away like days, and, before I really comprehended it, I had been in Atlanta for a year. The wanderlust had never entirely faded, but somehow Lily had kept me grounded enough that the idea of leaving slipped to the back of my mind.

  Our lives were comfortable. Lily had gotten a job with the classics department at the University assisting one of the professors with translating a newly discovered ancient Greek novel. She spent her days lost in the complex language and her nights lost in me.

  I set myself the task of finally finishing a few academic papers of my own that had been relegated to the backburner for far too long. I’d largely ignored my own work for the past few years, choosing instead to focus on finishing the papers that had become my father’s legacy. I had enjoyed piecing together the puzzles he had left behind and turning the endless fragments of notes into something cohesive, but that time had passed.

  After all these years, the echo of my father’s typewriter had finally been silenced.

  One year after that chance meeting in Park Hall, I surprised Lily with plane tickets to Egypt. Cairo was everything I had remembered, and through Lily’s eyes, the ancient city was young again.

  In those first blissful days, I blamed the dark circles surrounding Lily’s eyes on the whirlwind schedule of activity she insisted on. She forced me out of bed when the sun had scarcely risen, begging me to show her every corner of the city from the pyramids choked with tourists to the tiny shops only locals knew existed.