You Can't Do It The Same Way Twice - Bonnie Smetts

And that’s how it happened with Roy. I’d taken to meeting him at the river on Sundays before he’d have to go off to work. Seems he never noticed my being younger than him, seems that he didn’t mind how much I didn’t know.

And the first time we did it, he’d been so gentle with me. He’d taken my arms like we were about to dance. And then he laid me down gently in the grass, he’d come with a blanket that time. And so in the heat of that summer, in the sweet green of the grass, we did it. Him untying the strings of my top and letting it drop so he could see me. That’s what he said. “I want to see you. Don’t move, I just want to look,” he’d said. And then he pulled my jeans down bit by bitty bit until my stomach lay flat and shiny in the sun. The sun came through his hair and his eyelashes, like they were filled with light from inside. The kisses came, wet and as soft as anything I’d ever felt in all my life. Down my nose and around my neck.

And that’s when I pulled him to me, skinny me pulling this great big man. And we rolled back and forth and then I was ripping and pulling wanting to get his jeans off too. I don’t know where it all came from that first time, like we’d never had to figure it out, even though it was my first time. We rolled and rocked and I lost any sense of the river or the grass or the blanket. Just Roy and me. Roy and Roy and Roy. And then I came like some kind of crashing, but crashing in the good way, like a wave, and I’d never felt something so sweet and big and crazy and I didn’t care that we were screaming out and rolling around out in the woods.

And that time we lay there until the sun went down. Until we had to pull the blanket up over us, it was turning cool and the mosquitoes had time to come out. We never did it quite that way again. But we did it, and I couldn’t think of anything else and I didn’t want to think of anything else until it was time to meet up with Roy again. That was all that filled up my days, thinking of Roy, and his bed, and we did try once more at the river.

“It’s never as good as the first time,” Roy said a few months in. I wanted to cry, I didn’t want to believe that I’d already had the very best and now it’d be over, never better than what we already had. But looking back, telling you my story, you know Roy was right. And I had to look straight at that. We’d had it as good as it was ever gonna get.