The Nix by Nathan Hill

Author:Nathan Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

And so you finally kiss her, and when you do you feel a great cascade of relief deep inside break through, and all your obsessing and pining and worrying and regret, and all the ways you’ve been haunted by this woman, and all the torture and self-loathing that you had failed to make her love you, they all seem to shatter on the ground. It feels like you’ve been holding up a wall of glass all this time and only now you realize it’s okay to let it fall. And fall it does, and it’s almost percussive the way it tumbles and breaks around you—you try not to flinch as Bethany kisses you, as she pulls at you with her hands and you have this powerful sense memory of kissing her when you were a child, how you were surprised that her lips were dry, that you didn’t know what to do except smash your face into hers, back when kissing was not a signpost along the way but rather the destination itself. But now you are both older and you’ve had all the relevant experiences and each of you knows exactly what to do with another body—which is to say you know that kissing is a kind of communication sometimes, and what you’re telling each other right now is that you both very much want more. And so you press into her and slide your hands around her waist and curl your fingers into the slight fabric of her dress and she tugs you closer by the collar and still you’re kissing—deeply, wildly, devouring each other—and you’re aware of your awareness of this, how you seem able to concentrate on everything and feel everything all at once: Your hands and her skin and your mouth and her mouth and her fingers and her breathing and the way her body responds to yours—these things don’t feel like separate sensations but rather like layers of a single greater sensation, that drift of consciousness that can happen when you’re entwined with another and it’s all going very well and it’s almost as if you know exactly what the other person wants and can feel her emotions as they shudder through her body as if they’re shuddering through your own, like your bodies have momentarily ceased to have edges and have become things without boundaries.

This is how it feels, this expansiveness, which is why it’s such a shock when Bethany jolts up and away from you and grabs your hands to stop their progress and says, “Wait.”

“What?” you say. “What’s wrong?”

“Just…I’m sorry.” And she pulls away from you and fully disengages and curls up on the other side of the couch.

“What is it?” you say.

Bethany shakes her head and looks at you with these sad, terrible eyes.

“I can’t,” she says, and inside you feel something you might call a plummeting.

“We could go slower,” you say. “We can just slow down a little. It’s okay.”

“This isn’t fair to you,” she says.

“I don’t mind,” you

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