THE CHANGE - CHAPTER TWENTY

PART SIX - CHARLIE'S OLDEST FORGOTTEN FRIEND / THE LION AND THE LAMB

PART SIX

CHARLIE’S OLDEST FORGOTTEN FRIEND

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18TH

LOS ANGELES, CA

TWENTY

Skin on skin, warm and happy, in an utterly benevolent dark. The sheets were damp with sex and sweat, the tiniest whisper of late-menstrual blood.

We were smelling each other all over each other, and totally happy to do so at length. Loving animals, draped in connection. Without a problem in the world.

Mmmmmmmm, I said. She echoed the sound. Our limbs were tenderly entwined, torsos warm and flush together. Our fingertips gently but firmly explored each other’s favorite territories: not fervently, for the moment – we’d just freshly exploded – but with a hyper-keen awareness of what we knew might feel good.

If there was one thing I knew, it was how to make her feel good. It was the one art at which I excelled. I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t draw more than flies; but I could play her nerve endings like Jimi Hendrix. That was music enough for me.

And she was Segovia, Paganini, Coltrane, you name a virtuoso and she was that thing. She elicited sensations from me so illicit, so perfect, that drugs and booze were a distraction at best.

Beneath her touch, I felt healed, and more: I felt like I was never broken. Like I had no scars. Like my past was golden. No loss. No shame. No one to blame.

When I touched her, there was nothing wrong with me.

Can you feel it? she asked, and I said yes.

This is how it should be all the time, she said, and I agreed.

This is what life wants. This is what God wants.

I was tempted, as always, to say what God? But I didn’t want to shatter the moment.

Instead, I tried to imagine the world she was implying. The world she’d described to me, many times over. It was the Garden of Eden, in modern-day terms. Not the mythic past, but the blossoming future_.