Page 28 of All the Way to the River

I t feels weird now, and somehow clinical, to call it “sex”—what Rayya and I did, that first night we were alone together in bed.

But lovemaking is such an annoying and cloying word, so I won’t use that, either.

I also can’t say, in the biblical sense, that we came to “know” each other for the first time, because we already knew each other so well. I had never known anyone better, in fact—and nobody has ever known me better—than Rayya and I knew each other, long before we shared a bed.

I knew everything about Rayya—physically, mentally, emotionally.

I had already seen her body a thousand times, and she had seen mine.

We had seen each other in dressing rooms, at beaches, in doctors’ offices, in saunas and swimming pools and hotel rooms. How many times had one of us turned around and said to the other one, “Does my butt look weird in these jeans?” We had already seen each other’s pimples and boils and sunburns and sags and cellulite.

We had already danced together, more times than I could count.

We had already cried in each other’s arms, so many times.

Comforted and supported each other. Held hands through the scary parts.

Lain with our heads in each other’s laps.

I knew the multitude of scars on Rayya’s body the way I knew my way around my kitchen.

Life had been hard on her, and I knew all her wounds.

I knew the scars from her abdominal surgeries, her knee surgeries, her breast reduction.

I knew the track marks on her arms, the tattoos she’d gotten to cover them up.

I knew that huge divot of a scar on the bottom of her foot, from a melanoma a doctor had carved out of her.

(I was the one who had first noticed the big, brown, oddly shaped mark on her foot a few years earlier, one afternoon at the beach.

At first, I’d thought it was a leaf or a smudge of mud, and I tried to wipe it off.

When the mark didn’t come off, I said, “Babe, you gotta get this thing checked out immediately.” A week later, when the doctor removed the growth, he told Rayya, “Your friend just saved your life.”)

I knew the purple hash of bruises and scars on her shin from that epic beating by drug dealers on East Ninth Street—a beating that had left her also with the thin white scar on her forehead and the lump on her lip.

I knew she had a tiny and even delicate waist but never let anyone see it.

I knew she hated her hips and thighs—but I didn’t.

I already knew the topography of her cheekbones and the gorgeous strength of her nose.

I already knew the chestnut luster of her hair.

I already knew the broad, lush sweep of her eyebrows.

(“Hey, what part of the Middle East did those eyebrows come from?” an Egyptian woman once asked Rayya randomly on the streets of New York. “Are you one of my people?”)

She was my people.

She had been my people for so many years already.

I knew that Rayya hated it when girls kissed her too softly and “weakly,” but she also hated it when anyone other than her took charge in bed.

So I was more than happy to kiss her strongly, and to let her take charge of everything else.

We were calm, familiar, and beautiful together.

Inevitable and unhurried. And just for that night, nobody was trying to impress anyone.

Nobody performed . For long stretches of time, in fact, we did nothing but look at each other in amazement.

“It’s you,” she kept saying.

“It’s you,” I would reply.

“It always had to be you,” she said. “It couldn’t be anyone but you. It was always gonna be you or nobody.”

In the end, it is not so much about what we did that night in bed but what we became .

Maybe the best way I can describe it is to say that Rayya and I became a completed story that night—a story that finally made sense.

I fell asleep just before the sun came up, but Rayya didn’t end up sleeping at all.

She told me later that she’d been overcome by such a wild energy—an energy so ferocious and specific and primal —that she couldn’t possibly rest. She thought she would explode, she said, if she tried to lie still beside me.

“So what did you do instead?” I asked.

“I got up and paced around the room, circling the bed,” she reported.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to protect you. I wanted to draw, like, a barrier around you with my energy. I wanted to create a force field that would protect you forever—long after I’m gone. Because I never want anything or anybody dangerous getting close enough to you to harm you.”

While she did this—while she patrolled the bedroom like a wolf—I slept in peace, unaware of her movements but safer in my slumber than I had ever been in my entire life.