She pulled at the down on her arm. “I know that intellectually.”
He laughed and her face held fixed. Then his smile faded. “But there’s still a small part of you, on account of Sundays at Our Lady of Guilt, that makes you sometimes believe you’re gnawing on the actual body of Christ, and that a series of record-smashing orgasms might serve as a catalyst for a natural disaster.”
“It sounds dumb when you say it out loud.”
“Yes it does.”
“But the volcano, it erupted before we talked about it, you know? Before our dinner. When I was just holding it in, to myself? The secret. Everything that happened.”
“But there was nothing to feel guilty about! There was nothing to be tied to it even in the most theoretical sense. The sex was the point! Fucking strangers was the point!”
“Look,” she said, closing her eyes again, “my body did something it hasn’t done before.”
“We don’t have to relitigate this.”
“But I’m sounding crazy without you understanding what I’m trying to say.”
“You’re right.”
“At one point, though—”
“Really, please, we did this already.”
“—it wasn’t that different from any other time, I just…felt something happening. Something from a different place in my body. I don’t—”
“Like what?”
“It was like…I came, but, you know.”
“I don’t know. Either explain it or don’t.”
“It was…it’s never gone that way before. And it happened three or four times in a row. And then not again.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying you squirted?”
“Oh God, it’s so gross!” She buried her face in her hands. “It’s so, so gross! It’s so embarrassing. Don’t say the word.”
“I didn’t know that was something you wanted.”
“It’s not about wanting. I didn’t know my body could—”
“And you’re saying it’s better, it feels better, and that’s why the whole thing made you feel worse about it.”
“It’s not even better. It’s just different. It’s just a different spot or something. It’s so embarrassing. It’s just…it was intense. I don’t know, but that’s not—”
“I know some women squirt, I just didn’t know it happened with you.”
“Please don’t say the word. It’s so gross.”
“A new record. And a whole new way of coming. This is kind of important. I take it back—the case apparently isn’t closed after all. What else did you leave out?”
“Stop it,” she said, swallowing heavy. “It was something I was embarrassed by. I wasn’t happy about it. I just wanted you to understand where my mind was at. The connections it was making.”
He was hot in the cheeks. He’d forgotten how they even got on the topic. And then his mouth opened wide.
“Ohhh,” he said. “I get it now. What you’re saying is you…erupted…and that caused the volcano to—”
“Will! Don’t be a dick about this. I shouldn’t have fucking said anything. You’re right, my brain is mush. And I don’t even know what I’m—”
“But isn’t that your point? And because it was so impossibly pleasurable, you’re being punished by the universe? By the volcanoes of Iceland? Everything’s sending a sign to you and to me, an imperative: You two need to talk about this…”
“I never should’ve said it. We should’ve gone home and gone back to sleep, and started today all over again.”
“…because for the first time in your life your body let down your ultimate barriers of inhibition and you gave yourself over to someone completely? Finally, so deeply, so un-Catholically, over to Sin, that you feel like your feet are being held to the fire for it?”
She sat there silent, her arms folded across her chest. She pressed her eyes shut again, and she licked her lower lip with a ticking compulsion.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said. “Just please stop hitting me for it. I’m exhausted, and the whole thing obviously makes no sense. It just gives me a pit in my stomach when I play back what happened, that the whole thing happened in the first place, that it wasn’t with you, that you were off doing the same thing with…It makes me fucking want to throw up. And then we get trapped here after I didn’t come fully clean the other night…that I didn’t mention this particular detail, I mean—”
“Consider yourself absolved,” Will said, cutting her off and making the sign of the benediction. “And know, please know, deep in your soul, that you, Whitney, did not cause the volcano.” He watched the lines in her forehead smooth over as she released all the tension she’d been holding in. “That your squirting did not cause—”
She threw herself at him across the bench and clapped her palm over his mouth. He made the muffled sounds of a bound hostage. He raised his arms in surrender. She wouldn’t let go of his mouth. He pulled her hands from his face, finger by finger, until he could finally speak again. He opened his mouth wide and worked out his jaw with a heavy click. She waited for him to harangue her again. But all he said was: “Let’s go eat. I’m starved. Let’s go back to the Boqueria.”
They stood and he shook out his body like a dog, snapping himself back into the logic of reality. He kissed the top of her head and they walked the crown of the mountain, through the parks and past the other Olympic venues. They took the tiled steps beneath the plane trees—the “Europe trees,”
