“We don’t have to have sex,” he said.
“I’m just not ready.”
He walked me out to my car and held me underneath the navy sky.
“I’m not up for having sex with someone who isn’t in love with me. I’m not interested in that.” My beautiful clear voice.
“I do love you, you know,” he whispered in my ear.
“What?”
He looked me in the eye and said it again.
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.”
“We’ve only been dating three weeks.”
“So I’ve known for three-ish weeks.”
We eventually progressed to spending the night at each other’s house and stayed up talking and doing “everything but” until morning’s first light bled through the curtains. Whenever we got to the part of the night where either we were or weren’t going to have sex, I pulled away. “I’m still not ready,” I would say, unable to explain why. He was infinitely more suitable for me than any of the men I’d ever slept with or groped in a suburban mall parking lot, but I couldn’t move forward sexually.
“Why are you torturing him and yourself?” Max said. “I feel so sorry for him.”
“What are you afraid of?” Everyone wanted to know, including me.
Dr. Rosen pointed out this was the healthy relationship I’d been waiting to find myself in. I was using my voice, setting boundaries, and staying in my body when I was with him. He thought I was scared of sex because it would bring me and John even closer. For once, I fully agreed with him, but I still wanted to know: “Why can’t I just have sex with him already?”
“Mamaleh, you will when you’re ready.”
And then one spring night, I no longer needed to keep John at a distance. Our bodies fit together. The physical part of our relationship was an extension of all the things we were already doing—talking, eating, laughing, kissing, touching, and sleeping. For the first time, I understood that sex was a big deal for me not because it involved private parts or because the nuns told me it was one of God’s major preoccupations or because my mother told me I’d wind up in hell if I did it before marriage. It was a big deal because with sex, I gave John my body in a singular way, and he gave me his. Together, we shared the pleasure of that exchange. And even though he was kind, committed, and loving, it was super hot.
39
When my thirty-fourth birthday rolled around, John and I had been dating for only four months. I hoped for a dinner that required a reservation and some heartfelt words on card stock, signed Love, John. Dr. Rosen hinted I might get an engagement ring, but I cut him off. The last thing I needed was the weight of expectations on my four-month-old relationship. The joke was on Dr. Rosen when John gave me a Sonicare electric toothbrush and a homemade wooden picture frame. Lovely, but not gemstones that announced “lifetime commitment.”
Several months after my birthday John and I took a two-week trip to India with his high school friends. Nothing like a trip to a third-world country where you can’t always control your bowels to solidify a relationship. John held my hand during Diwali fireworks, helped me find tampons in a Goa supermarket, and carried the souvenirs for all my group members in his carry-on, including a brass Hindu symbol that represented luck and fortune, which happened to look like a backward swastika. That was for Dr. Rosen.
In December, John and I spent our first Christmas-Hanukkah in Los Angeles with his family. During his family’s epic thirty-person Hanukkah gift exchange, his mother gave me a Victoria’s Secret gift certificate, and his grandmother gifted me a white marble box with intricate tile from her long-ago trip to India. John’s cousins taught me how to make latkes, and his brother showed me old family pictures of their Russian forebears—stern men with long beards and black hats and women in black dresses with high collars. When John set the camera on the tripod for a group photo, I stood next to him, and he put his arm around me. I folded into the welcoming arms of his family.
We stole away from the official celebration one afternoon for a quiet walk on the beach in Orange County. The brilliant California sunshine on the hot white sand almost hurt my eyes—it was the same ocean that Brandon and I had walked along just a year before, the same water that stole David’s life. It was comforting to see it still churning toward the shore. I rolled up my jeans and slipped off my boots so I could feel the sand, warm and gritty between my toes. We stopped at a rocky ledge to watch the ocean. There, underneath a surreal blue sky, I scanned the beach for celebrities and their dogs. John was quiet, until we headed back to the car.
“I want to move forward. With you.” He said words I’d never heard a man say to me: engaged and certain and together and future. I held my hand over my galloping heart.
On a Monday morning in March, I walked into group a few minutes late and sat in the empty seat to the right of Dr. Rosen. I sat quietly, not overly gesticulating or calling attention to my left hand.
“I’m sorry, I’m almost blinded by the ring on Christie’s finger,” Dr. Rosen said when he’d waited long enough for me to speak up. Laughing, I jumped out of my chair and spun around the room sticking my hand in everyone’s face.
“Not too big, not too small,” Max said approvingly.
Patrice held my hand up to the window to see it in the sunlight.
Grandma Maggie beamed. “I knew it, kiddo.”
I’d never cared about jewels,
