“And I still love you. So that’s the end of it.”
Harry smiled, relieved. “OK,” he said. “It’s me and you.”
“Me and you, true blue.”
Harry walked out of the apartment, and I watched him go down the street and get into his car. Then I turned around and rested my back against the door.
I was going to lose everything I had built my life on.
Everything except the money.
I still had the money.
And that was something.
And then I realized there was something else waiting for me, something I wanted that I was free to have.
It was there, with my back against the door of her apartment, on the brink of my divorce from the most popular man in Hollywood, that I realized that lying to myself about what I wanted took far more energy than I had.
So instead of wondering what it meant and what it made me, I stood up and walked into Celia’s room.
She was in her robe still, drying her hair in front of her vanity.
I walked up to her and looked into her gorgeous blue eyes, and I said, “I think that I love you.”
And then I took the tie of her robe and pulled it open.
I did it slowly. I did it so slowly that she could have stopped me a million times before it broke free. But she didn’t.
Instead, she sat up straighter, looked at me more boldly, and put her hand on my waist as I did it.
The sides of the robe broke free of each other the moment the tension slacked, and then there she was, naked and sitting in front of me.
Her skin was creamy and pale. Her breasts were fuller than I’d anticipated, her nipples pink. Her flat stomach rounded just the littlest bit underneath her belly button.
And when my eyes moved down to her legs, she parted them just the littlest bit.
Instinctively, I kissed her. I put my hands on her breasts, touching them the way I wanted to and then the way I liked my own to be touched.
When she moaned, I throbbed.
She kissed my neck and the top of my chest.
She pulled my shirt off over the top of my head.
She looked at me, my breasts exposed.
“You’re gorgeous,” she said. “Even more gorgeous than I imagined.”
I blushed and put my head in my hands, embarrassed by how out of control I felt, how out of my league it all was.
She took my hands off my face and looked at me.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I do.”
That night, Celia and I slept nude, holding each other. We no longer pretended to touch by accident. And when I woke up in the morning with her hair in my face, I inhaled, loudly and proudly.
