First Language

The first time I touched their chest, I didn't know what I was doing. That's not quite right—I knew what my hands were doing. I didn't know what it meant.

We were in the Jeep, right after that first kiss. A kiss that undid me completely. A kiss that took me by surprise since we started by just talking the way we always talked, sentences that started one place and ended somewhere neither of us expected. It had been an icy cold January day and we were enjoying what felt like quiet even though the brewery was busy with families and beer and dogs and that post-holiday need for people to find something to do that was not Christmas and was not preparing for the holidays to end. Suddenly, we were looking at each other the way you look at someone when the conversation has moved into a register that doesn't need words anymore.

Before I could ask, "Can I?" They told me, "I want you to touch my chest."

I nodded.

I slid my hand under their shirt. Their skin was warm. The scars ran horizontal, a thin silvered line on each side, and I traced them with my fingertips the way you might read something in a language you're just learning. They watched my face while I did it. I wasn't performing wonder—I just felt it rising through my chest, something I didn't have a word for. The flatness of them, the particular warmth, the realness of it. A body made into what it needed to be. My fingers moved and they exhaled.

"That okay?" I said.

"Yeah," they said. "Really okay."

That was the beginning of learning how to ask.

We had been dancing around this for weeks, really. They were patient in a way that was unraveling—not passive, not withholding, just careful. They told me things directly, in words, which I wasn't used to. I like this. I don't like that. When you do that I want to— And then they'd show me, which was even better. I was used to guessing, to reading absence, to the kind of sex that happened in silence because silence was safer than saying the wrong thing. With them there was no silence. There was talking, sometimes a little breathless, sometimes plain and instructional, sometimes sliding into something dirtier that surprised me every time—the contrast of their ordinary voice saying something that made my face heat.

They taught me to do the same. To say what I wanted instead of hoping it would be inferred. At first I felt clumsy at it, formal, like I was giving a presentation about my own desire. They laughed with me, not at me. You'll get more comfortable, they said, it just takes practice. Then they kissed me in a way that made me forget I'd been embarrassed.

The first time I touched them the way they'd shown me—my hand following their instructions, learning by feel—I understood something about attention. How paying attention to someone's body is a form of speech. Their breath changed under my fingers and I felt like I was being let into something.

"Like that?" I said.

"Exactly like that," they said. "Don't stop."

I didn't stop. They made a sound I felt in my sternum and I thought: this is what it's like to actually know what you're doing to someone.

Another night I'm trying to hold onto: stolen time, breathless, their hands on me.

They had pulled my shirt over my head and was looking at me the way they sometimes looked, like I was something worth looking at, like this was not an obligation or a preamble but the thing itself. My bra joined the shirt on the floor.

Their hands, when they moved to my breasts, were slow. Not tentative—deliberate. They cupped them, tested the weight of them, and I felt the warmth of their palms like I was being mapped. Then their thumb and forefinger found my nipple and rolled it, just enough pressure, and the sensation went straight down through me.

"You like this," they said. Not a question.

"Yes," I said.

They did it again, watching me. I liked being watched by them. It didn't make me self-conscious the way it had with other people; it made me feel seen, which is different. When they bent their head and took my nipple into their mouth I stopped thinking in sentences. Just sensation: the wet heat of them, the suction, and then the edge of teeth, soft and then a little less soft, and I made a sound that came from somewhere I didn't supervise.

They looked up at me from where they were.

"There," they said, quietly. Like they'd found something.

Later, after more of that—more talking, more learning, more of their hands moving over me until I was past thinking clearly—they shifted and their hand came to my throat. Not hard. Just present. Their fingers loose around the curve of it, a suggestion of pressure rather than pressure itself.

My whole body went still.

"Is this okay?" they asked.

The words were careful but their voice was something else. Lower. That register they went to sometimes that sent heat through my stomach.

"Yes," I said.

Their hand tightened just slightly and I felt my pulse against their fingers and something in me gave way. They kissed me and I couldn't think of anything outside the circle of what was happening—their hand at my throat, their weight above me, the complete fact of them.

When they pinned my hands to the bed—one gesture, easy, like they'd been waiting to—I didn't feel trapped. I felt held. There's a difference I couldn't have explained before them.

"Stay," they said.

I stayed. I wasn't going anywhere.

When I came it was with their eyes on my face.

I wasn't expecting it—the looking. Most people looked somewhere else or closed their own eyes. They didn't. They watched me come apart and something in me that had been held carefully for a long time cracked open like a window in a room that hadn't had air in it for years. I felt everything. I felt too much. I made sounds I'd never heard from myself.

Afterward I turned my face to the side, not from shame, just from the need for a second to re-enter myself.

They let me. Waited. Then:

"You okay?"

"Yes," I said. "Really, really okay."

They laughed a little. I laughed a little. The lamp was still on and outside there was the ordinary sound of the nearby highway and we were on the floor for some reason, a reason that had made sense an hour ago, and I thought: this is what it was supposed to feel like. This is what it is when you don't have to guess.

They had told me once, early on, that communication was the least sexy thing everyone thought it was and the most sexy thing it actually turned out to be. I hadn't fully believed them. I believed them now.

Not because we talked during sex—though we did, and I've learned to love it, the way a word or a sentence could change everything, the way is that good could become that is very good could become something that didn't need to be transcribed. But because of what talking had built underneath the sex. The architecture of it. We knew each other's edges. We knew what we were asking for and what we were giving and neither of us had to wonder if the other one was actually there.

They were always there. Looking at me. Present.

It undoes me, every time.

This is a love story. I know that's not what erotica is supposed to be, but I can't separate them. The first time I touched their chest I felt something shift in me, a door I didn't know was closed, and everything that came after—their hands, their voice, their eyes on my face at the moments when I was most unguarded—was part of the same opening.

I used to think desire was something you kept quiet. That the wanting would be your business and the other person's body was their business and somewhere in the middle you met without quite saying so.

They taught me that desire was a conversation. That you could say here, like this and I want you to and does that feel good and it didn't break the spell—it was the spell. Every question asked and answered was another layer of something real being built.

I am a woman who had never been with anyone like them. I didn't know what I didn't know. Now I know what it feels like to be touched by someone who tells me what they want, and shows me, and asks about me in return, and watches my face when I stop being able to hold myself together.

Now I know that nothing is silent.

The silence, it turns out, was always the thing I was supposed to lose.

-Ellis Ash

Ellis Ash is a musician and music educator in Connecticut, where she teaches in public schools and universities, and performs with regional theater and performance ensembles. Her creative work explores the intersections of music, poetry, and philosophical themes of gender and relationality.