Nothing but Your Skin - Cathy Ytak [8]
“We have to go back.” I was shaking, and so were you. It was the cold, right? Or maybe it was something else. Yes, I want to. Do you? I don’t know who said it first. Me, you. We both wanted to, and you would be my first. Those days, I felt like I was keeping a little bit of skin inside me, a piece of childhood that wanted to be erased.
We talked and talked about what we should do, and at night I replayed our words over and over in my head.
What about your place? Could we go to your place? No, we can’t go to my place, Matt, because of the dogs. They’ll smell you, they’ll get all worked up. My parents will know that someone else was there. They’ll ask questions, they’ll accuse me, they’ll look for traces, and they’ll spy on me. All because of the dogs. I don’t like the dogs, Matt, they’ll give us away. What about at your uncle’s? It’s too far, Lou, we’ll never have enough time. We have no car, no place to go…in the spring, in the forest, we can go anywhere… But spring is far away, and it’s especially far away here. Matt, do you remember the year it snowed in May? Yes, I remember. Everywhere else it was almost summer, and here it was still winter. We live in a funny place, Lou. Yes, but it’s ours and I love it and I love winter, too, even though it makes things complicated. And in the spring, you and I won’t see things the same color anymore. Then we’ll find a place for the two of us, where no one will find us, where there won’t be a dog or a human, nothing but us, and our love, and your body and mine and my hands, and no more words… Nothing but your skin, nothing but mine. You know, Lou, the words to talk about love are really disgusting.
I know. One day at school, a boy obsessed with sex listed them off: masturbation, intercourse, testicles, vagina… I don’t know why, maybe it excited him. I thought those words were so ugly. But the slang words aren’t much better. I know a few: screwing, dick, balls…that makes you laugh! We need other words…we need words for the two of us, Matt, that aren’t ugly or cold. Words that are like your skin and mine, words like our hands. Words full of sure colors. Words of love that we’ll both see the same way.
One Saturday, I asked my mom to drive me into town to buy a new bra. She said yes, sighing. She hates going shopping with me because I don’t know how to choose. But that time, I knew what I wanted and I showed it to her: “That one, there.” It closed in front with a hook, and I thought it would be easier to undo if we ever went back to the hunters’ cabin. My mom said okay and then begged me not to take three hours to decide on the color. There was white, beige, burgundy, and black. I picked the beige right away, and my mom looked stunned. That night, she told my dad that my obsession with colors was passing. He didn’t understand what she said because he was watching TV, and my mom repeated, louder, “I think Louella’s not obsessed with colors anymore.” My dad probably shrugged his shoulders to say he didn’t care; anyway, he didn’t answer. I was washing the dishes and I didn’t see them, and I pretended not to hear them either. I thought my beige bra was beautiful, Matt, because you’d see that color the same as me.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. When we went back to the hunters’ cabin, just that once, you passed your hand under my bra, without unhooking it or looking at the color, and that was fine, too. You have a nice voice, Matt, and I liked listening to you talk. You said, “Soon the lake will freeze over, did you see? For a few days now, there’s been ice on the surface. If the cold keeps up, the lake will freeze, and when the ice is thick enough, we can skate on it. Hand in hand. Body to body.”
“Matt! Are you serious?”
I remember the night you first talked to me about the frozen lake. And about your two big sleeping bags for sleeping in the cold that your father had brought back from a camping trip in the mountains. “You can sleep in the snow, and you’re