Sing You Home

That was as far as I got before Zoe launched herself at me. Her kiss was blistering. “God, yes,” she breathed against my lips, when we broke apart. “That’s exactly how I remembered it.” Then she looked up at me, her eyes bright. “Is it always like this?”

How was I supposed to answer that? The first time I’d kissed a woman, I felt like I had been shot into space. It was unfamiliar and exciting and felt so incredibly right that I couldn’t believe I’d never done it before. There was an evenness of the playing field that was different from the kisses I’d shared with guys-and yet somehow it wasn’t soft and delicate. It was surround-sound, earthshaking, intense.

But that said, it wasn’t always like this.

I wanted to tell Zoe that, yes, the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing a woman. But more than that, I wanted to tell Zoe that the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing me.

So I didn’t actually answer. I just reached for her, cradled her head in my hands, and kissed her again.

In the three days since then, we have spent hours in her car, on my couch, and in the supply room at the hospital making out like we are teenagers. I know every inch of her mouth. I know what spot on her jaw, when brushed, makes her shudder. I know that the hollow behind her ear smells of lemons and that she has a birthmark shaped like Massachusetts at the nape of her neck.

Last night when we stopped, flushed and breathing hard, Zoe said, “What happens next?”

Which is how I’ve ended up where I am right now: lying on my bed, fully clothed, with the curtain of Zoe’s hair covering my face as she kisses me. With her hands moving tentatively over the terrain of my body.

I think we both knew tonight would end up like this-in spite of its humble beginnings of an Italian dinner and a bad movie. How does sex ever happen between couples, except as an electrical storm that’s been gathering in the space between the two people, which finally combusts?

But this is different. Because even though it’s Zoe’s first time, I’m the one who has everything to lose if it’s not perfect. Namely, Zoe.

So I tell myself that I’m going to let her go at her own pace, which means the most incredible torture, as her hands move from my shoulders to my ribs to my waist. But then she stops. “What’s the matter?” I whisper, imagining the worst: she is disgusted by this; she is feeling nothing; she knows she has made a mistake.

“I think I’m scared,” Zoe confesses.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I say.

“I want to. I’m just afraid I’m going to do it wrong.”

“Zoe,” I tell her, “there is no wrong.”

I slip her hands beneath the hem of my shirt. Her palms brand my stomach; I am sure I will wake up with her initials seared into my skin. Slowly, her hands inch up, until they are touching the lace of my bra.

Here is the thing about lesbian sex: it doesn’t matter if your body isn’t perfect, because your partner feels the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never touched a woman, because you are one, and you already know what you like. When Zoe finally takes off my blouse, I think I cry out, because she covers my mouth with hers and swallows the sound. And then her shirt comes off, too, and the rest. We are a tangle of smooth legs and peaks and valleys, of sighs and pleas. She grabs for me, and I try to slow us down, and somehow we meet in the glorious middle.

Afterward, we curl together on top of the covers. I can smell her skin and her sweat and her hair, and I love the thought that, even when she is gone, my sheets will still retain that memory. But things that are this perfect don’t last very long. I have been down this path before with a straight woman, so I know that having a fantasy come true doesn’t always mean it will be permanent. I can believe Zoe wanted this to happen between us. I just can’t believe she’ll want it to continue.

She shifts in her sleep and rolls over, so that she is facing me. Her leg slides between mine. I pull her closer, and wonder when the novelty of me will wear off.

Two weeks later, I am still waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop. Zoe and I have spent every night together-it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even ask if she wants to come over after work, because I know she’ll already be there waiting with Chinese takeout or a DVD we had been talking about watching or a fresh-baked pie she insists she can’t eat by herself.

There are moments I cannot believe how happy I am. But there are just as many moments when I remember that, to Zoe, this is still just the bright, shiny new toy. In private, Zoe is so, so gay. She reads all my back issues of Curve. She calls her cable company and gets Logo. She starts talking to me about Provincetown: if I’ve ever been, if I’d ever go again. She acts the way I did when I first embraced who I really was- like I’d been let out of my cage for the first time in twenty years. However, she’s never told anyone-not even me- that she’s fallen for a woman. She’s never been in a relationship before that causes people on the street to whisper when she walks by. She’s never been called a dyke. This isn’t real yet, for her. And when it is, she will come back to me and tell me it’s all been a wonderful, fun mistake.

And yet… I’m too weak to turn her away now, when she wants me. When it just feels so damn good to be with her.

Which is why, when she asks me to observe her second session with Lucy, I immediately agree. I had asked to be there last time, but now I wonder if that was only so that I’d get to see Zoe working, and not because I was thinking of Lucy’s welfare. Zoe had refused anyway, and she was right-but she’s changed her tune this week, after Lucy’s abandonment. I think, frankly, she wants me there to bar the door if Lucy tries to run again.

Today I help her lug in a bunch of instruments from her car. “Lucy plays this?” I ask, as I set down a small marimba.

“No. She doesn’t play any musical instruments. But the thing about the ones I’ve brought today is that you don’t have to play an instrument to sound good. They’re all tuned to the pentatonic scale.”

“What’s that?”

“A scale with five pitches. It’s different from a heptatonic scale, which is seven notes, like the major scale- do re mi fa so la ti. You find them all over the world-in jazz, blues, Celtic folk music, Japanese folk music. The thing about it is that you just can’t play a wrong note-whatever key you hit, it’s going to sound good.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You know the song ‘My Girl’? By the Temptations?”

“Yeah.”

Zoe lifts the lap harp she’s holding and plays the instrumental intro, those six familiar rising notes that repeat. “That’s a pentatonic scale. So is the melody that the aliens understood in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And a blues scale is based on a minor pentatonic scale.” She puts down the harp and hands me a mallet. “Try it.”

“Thanks but no thanks. My last experience with an instrument was violin, when I was eight. The neighbors called the fire department because they thought an animal was dying inside my house.”

“Just try it.”

I take a mallet and tentatively strike a bar. And another. And a third. Then I hit the same pattern. Before I know it I’m striking different bars, making up a song as I go. “That,” I say, “is pretty cool.”

“I know, right? It takes all the stress out of music.”

Imagine if there was a pentatonic scale for life: if no matter what step you took, you could not strike a wrong note.

I hand her back the mallet just as Lucy sulks through the door. That’s really the only way to describe it-she takes a look at Zoe and then glances at me and realizes she is not going to escape as easily this time around. She throws herself into a chair and starts gnawing on her thumbnail.

“Hi, Lucy,” Zoe says. “It’s good to see you again.”

Lucy snaps her gum. I stand up, grab the trash can, and hold it under her jaw until she spits it out. Then I close the door of the special needs room, so that the noise in the hall doesn’t interrupt Zoe’s session.

“So, you can see that Ms. Shaw is with us today. That’s because we want to make sure you haven’t got a pressing appointment somewhere else again,” Zoe tells her.

“You mean you don’t want me to ditch,” Lucy says.

“That too,” I agree.

“I was thinking, Lucy, that maybe you could tell me one thing you liked about our last session, so that I could