Anonymous Sex by Hillary Jordan & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Author:Hillary Jordan & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When I was a kid, whenever it was time to pray my mother told me to close my eyes and press my palms together, but never said why. I figured maybe it was a symbol for those who were to be counted by the Lord in case he returned during eleven o’clock service. I also figured it was so I could imagine God, tiny and trapped between my hands. This way I could hold him close enough to hear me. Sometimes it made me feel like I was doing something. Most times it made me feel silly. But at this altar—the altar of Misha Ferndale—though my body was folded, nothing about me was meant to be closed in such a moment of reverence. There was nothing small to be captured in this hallowed space. Prayer was happening to me. Happening in me, around me. Prayer was standing in front of me, in panties.

Misha put her fingers in my hair, let them tangle in the thick of it, the perfume from earlier still on her wrists, wafting rose all around us. My hands on the backs of her knees, on the backs of her thighs, on her ass. My face resting on her stomach.

“Salvation?” I murmured while brushing my bottom lip across the skin just below her navel. It seemed like a random utterance, but it was an answer to a question she’d asked on the walk home. A question I was sure she’d forgotten.

To my surprise, she replied. “Maybe.”

Misha gently pressed on the crown of my head, asking me without asking me to lower myself.

I ran my nose along the lace elastic, dipping it down into the cotton, the only partition left dividing us. It was then and there I felt overcome with confession. Where I wanted to admit how I’ve never believed. How perhaps there is a penance for this. Atonement. I pulled her closer and pushed my face into the fabric, breathing into the soft tuft protecting the small space the same size my hands used to make when I tried praying as a child. I was now certain God was there. Certain God was close enough to hear me.

“Sanctuary?” I asked, trying again.

“Maybe.” She gasped, squirmed in her skin, slipped her thumbs into the waistband of her panties, and tried to push them down. But I stopped her. Moved her hands because it wasn’t time. Not yet. I glanced up and was stunned by the streak of light across her breasts, another across her clavicle, another across her mouth. I wondered if I looked as beautiful to her. I wondered what it was like to see me halved and still whole.

“How about ceremony?” I asked between kissing her creases and corners, stroking the hinges of her.

She couldn’t get the answer out before it became air. She tried to say it again but it caught in her throat. Her hands returned to my head, as did her weight. She wanted me to submerge, knowing our prayer contained baptism, patient steeping.

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