“Let me be clear about something,” my best friend said over the phone. “If you’re not going to sleep with this guy, you absolutely cannot invite him to your house.”
“Yup, got it,” I said, knowing she was right. But it was too late; I had already invited him to my house.
It had been four years since I had been touched. Four years since I had let anyone see me, really. Not just without clothes, but also naked emotionally, unguarded, hopeful.
At 44, I was newly divorced with two small children, living once again in the Southern California beach town where I had grown up. The split had cost me nearly everything: my home, my savings, most of the furniture. I found myself blinking and bewildered in a barren apartment without even a spatula, consumed by the work of setting up a home and navigating a new co-parenting arrangement. There was no time for desire in this new chapter. And there wouldn’t be for many years.
Laid off from my corporate advertising job with a severance package that gave me a few months to figure things out, I turned toward the only thing that still made sense: writing. I threw myself into a novel largely out of escapism.
I envisioned an addictive novel set in the early 2000s rock scene, soaked in nightlife and sex. I made up a heroine who was bold and reckless, with an adventurousness churning through her — because I had been her. I didn’t dare to think I could write literature, but I aspired to create a dizzying beach read, something I thought I did know. I wanted it to be cinematic, seductive, alive. Because I wasn’t.
In those early post-divorce years, I would drop my children off with their father on his days and flee to the cafe to write. No hesitation, lest I have a moment to absorb just how much I had lost. To go from a house filled with the laughter and ephemera of children to silence — maddening silence — cut deep in my psyche as “something is wrong.”
And plenty was wrong. But I would write. And for a long time, as the pleasures of the story took shape, the book was missing a vital piece — explicit sexuality. The book was like a Barbie doll with its genitals erased, smoothed over. I had literally scrawled “sex scene here” as a place holder.
I built a man for my heroine to fall in love with, a mythic antihero in boots and leather. The outsider. The rebel. But also, the channel: the wounded creator who leads with swagger and hides his tenderness. I wanted their love scenes to be both wild and devotional. But I couldn’t see it yet.
Maybe I wrote him into being. Because not long after, on Bumble, I met him.
He looked like an archetype I had always been attracted to, an impulse I tried to suppress. He was a construction worker who had his own lost dreams after an injury derailed a potential professional skateboarding career. Tall and broad, he had the face of a Golden-era movie star. He dressed in elegantly paired indigos, his arms inked in odd, incomprehensible tattoos — angels and demons, crude scribbles, a banana.
He was 30, 14 years younger than I was. Still, something about him reached deep inside of me and loosened a lock I wasn’t sure I had ever wanted to open again.
On the blustery winter night that he came over, I cleaned the house with intention. I minimized the evidence of children. I lit a candle called Night of Joy and started a fire. I brewed spicy tea I had brought back from Paris and arranged vintage skate magazines on the coffee table like some unconscious offering.
I remembered the girl I used to be in Brooklyn when I was a music journalist — always the one making plans, the one digging up the next undiscovered hole-in-a-wall. And how I had curated nights like this: the music, the smells, the lingerie. A room, warm and ready.
He arrived and made a beeline for the magazines. He explained the skateboarding heavyweights to me while I pointed out the artists, and the conversation turned to fear and freedom, risk and rebellion. He told me about how dropping into a halfpipe mimics life: the angel on your shoulder tells you to go for it, and the devil tells you to walk away.
He didn’t touch me at first, not when he sat beside me, not even after two hot toddies. His restraint made my heart pound.
I studied his face, the broken blood vessel in his eye from jiu jitsu, the beautiful curve of his lips. My heart raced but I was suddenly bold enough to hold his gaze longer than necessary, an invitation. Finally, his hand grazed mine. Then, the lightest kiss, barely there, soft as a spider web.
It was excruciatingly slow, delivered with an almost tantric patience that I didn’t know a man so young could possess. His kiss was not greedy or strategic. It was tender. It asked all the questions with no rush or desire for answers. My body softened.
He pulled me into his lap, and I knew I had to speak.
“I just want to be clear,” I said. “Because I invited you over. I’d like to kiss and get to know each other. But I’m not ready to have sex.”
His response was simple, airy: “OK.”
And that simplicity, totally unbothered, was a revelation. Because in my earlier life, long before marriage or motherhood, this moment would have likely been met with pressure, coercion. And as we kissed like teenagers, I felt an essence of myself rushing back.
It felt like the universe cracked open and handed me this small, impossible gift: a beautiful man who respected my “No” while showing us a path to “Yes.” His mouth moved from my lips to my neck. His hands remained gentle, exploratory. I could feel the excitement beneath his jeans, but he never pressed. I touched the tattoos on his arms and asked about one that looked like a banana.
He laughed. “I got that at a party,” he said. “We all pulled designs out of a hat.”
It was a seductive combination, the dirtbag exterior with the softness beneath, so similar to the male love interest I was writing about.
At one point, he leaned over me and, unbeknown to him, managed to press me against the arm of the couch. For a moment, I couldn’t move. I flashed on a similar pressure I’d felt before, a memory that reverberates. My breath stopped.
He noticed and met my gaze.
“Are you OK?” he asked. “Do you feel comfortable?”
After his pause and gentle questioning, I wasn’t sure I had ever felt more comfortable.
We didn’t have sex that night, or the next. What we did share was something far more intimate than I had experienced in years: presence. I was present in my body and present in the desire. A reminder. I am her.
The next morning, still smelling his soap-and-water scent in my hair, I sat down at a cafe and finally wrote an erotic scene for my novel. It poured out of me, a passionate scene of urgent sex in a public bathroom with rock ‘n’ roll blaring just outside the door. The scene felt vivid, alive, unapologetic. I read it back, my heart racing, and felt a flush rise in my chest.
What kind of mother writes something like this?
I told myself I could cut it from the book. No one had to see it. But I knew I wouldn’t cut it. I couldn’t.
The words had activated something I hadn’t felt since before marriage, before the ruptures and repair. It wasn’t just a kiss. It wasn’t even just sex. It was the return of my own aliveness. I had written myself back to life.
That, it turns out, is the real love story.
Angela Cravens, a writer in Carlsbad, Calif., has recently completed a novel about love and music in the early 2000s.
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