Human Sister

then, accompanied by a brief sharp pain, opened, a border no longer, and he slipped in all the way and smiled; and I moaned with a new kind of pleasure.
    He bent over and gently kissed me. I gazed up into his eager, intense eyes, which gazed into me. I felt myself opening to him like a poppy to the sun.
    “Is this okay?” he whispered.
    “Oh, yes.”
    He raised himself up, looking down into me, and as he moved in and out, in and out, my mind and senses flowed over him, enthralled by his beauty and by the feeling that I was blossoming beneath him.
    “Look into my eyes,” he said, pumping faster, faster. “Look into my eyes when it happens.”
    I looked, and during the rising frequency of his insistent pulses, I was astonished—“Elio! Elio!!”—by the overwhelming bliss of union.

    The morning after we first made love, I woke as Elio was kissing me. He smiled, but there was concern in his face.
    “Is something wrong?” I asked.
    “We can’t say anything about this to Ma. She’s hyper about anything that might take me back to America—like my loving you. That was the trouble last summer: We fought about you before you arrived. She wanted me to treat you like a sister, you know. She said she’d never let you visit again if she found out I thought of you otherwise. That’s why I was so upset. She’ll try anything to keep us apart, but we can’t let her. You make me happier than I ever thought I could be. I want us to be together, always.” Tears welled in his eyes.
    “I want us to be together always, too,” I said, overjoyed at hearing that he was thinking of coming to live with me.
    “And there’s something else,” he said. “I don’t want us to keep secrets from each other any longer.”
    A spark of panic flashed through me. What about my secret, my hidden love? How could I tell Elio about Michael? Grandpa had repeatedly warned me about artificial insects and birds and other sophisticated monitoring devices. I’d grown up used to the idea that, outside the security of Michael’s rooms, even in our own kitchen, each gesture I made and each word I spoke might be transmitted beyond the intended recipient.
    “I should have told you,” Elio continued, “about my friends and me a long time ago.”
    I wouldn’t have asked him about his past sexual experiences, preferring, as I did, the soft light and shadows of early morning and late afternoon to the harsh brightness of the midday sun, but I didn’t interrupt his story. I wasn’t prepared yet to tell my own.
    He told me how he and Luuk had goofed around as kids, seeing whose penis was longer or thicker, or how many words they could write in the snow in one pee. Later, they’d snuck into virtual-sex cubicles near Centraal Station and had gone through a period of experimenting with each other, doing things they saw and experienced in the cubicles. “It was fun,” Elio said, “as though we were playing a game—like football.”
    He also told me about his sexual relationships with several other classmates, about how he’d picked up guys and even a girl now and then at clubs like the Red Dog and, finally, about how, enduring threats from his mother, he’d struggled against his growing affection for me. He’d promised her after his return from Brussels the previous summer that he’d put his sexual feelings for me out of his mind forever.
    “The strange thing is,” he said, “I really believed I could do that. I believed it right up to when I saw you at the airport a week ago and you came running to me and hugged me.”
    “But I’ve told you many times that I always wanted to be with you.”
    “I know,” he said, wiping at his teary eyes. “But we didn’t know then everything those words meant. Now, I know they mean I want to live with you. I want to care for you. I want it to be as if we’re married.”
    “I do, too.”
    He excitedly kissed me, then said, “Remember last winter when I got my SAT and Advanced Placement scores? Well, your grandpa called to congratulate me. He said I undoubtedly could get into any university I wanted. We talked then about Cambridge in England, and Harvard.”
    He took a deep breath. “But I want to go to Berkeley, so I can live with you. I’ll commute back and forth. And I don’t want to wait another year to graduate. I want to go right away this fall. What do you think about that?”
    “That would be wonderful!” But immediately Aunt Lynh and Michael forced their way into my consciousness.