For weeks, she made me feel like someone – validating me with every kiss, every cuddle, every sly look. We shared food together, and dreamed up plans for the summer, from exploring the caves at Lake Simcoe to driving to the Maritimes. To Marie, I was a world traveler, confident, aggressive. But in reality, I was passive, inexperienced, and a virgin. I feared being intimate with Marie. Completely naked and vulnerable, she would come to realize that, as Iago would say, I am not what I am.
Marie was in the laundry room. I heard the tumbling of clothes in the dryer. I sat on the edge of her folded futon, waiting for her, both my knees bouncing up and down nervously. The sunlight radiated through the basement windows where the wall met the ceiling. Marie pranced out of the laundry room carrying a plastic laundry basket of colored cottons.
"Scoot over," she said. I slid over to the end of the futon. She poured out the warm clothes beside me and the smell of fabric softener struck me. Marie's legs were white and smooth in her shorts.
She plopped herself into the pile of clothes and laughed. She sighed playfully. "You should try it, it's so warm," she looked at me.
I floundered and rubbed the back of my neck with my palm.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Nothing," I shook my head.
"Come," she gripped both my hands and pulled me on top of her. She giggled and wrapped her arms around me. The warmth of the dryer fresh clothes cradled us.
Suddenly, before I could think, her hand slipped into my pants. I wavered. Her eyes spaced out, and my worries – my insecurities – began to melt into nothingness. Sunrays flowed onto us through the silhouettes of long thin leaves by the window, and I looked at her face in the light, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a radiance of its own.
"Take off everything," she whispered, and I hastily undressed. I was a hurried mess, in relation to her slow, deliberate movements.
Then we were both naked, and I felt nothing else but her legs wrapping around me and the warm laundry embracing the both of us, and I was more alive than ever.
YOU ARE READING
The Online Profile of a Serial Killer
Mystery / ThrillerThis is the rule. Whenever you read that a story is true, it is always and inevitably untrue. But in this case, however, everything you read here is true. The burnt remains for Rachel Amina Darwish were discovered in Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canad...
