There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at. The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic. “I have an Augustus Waters fetish,” I explained. “I’m starting to think you have an amputee fetish,” he answered, still kissing me.
“You’re so hot,” I said, my hand still on his leg. He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. We were lying on our backs next to each other, everything hidden by the covers, and after a second I reached over for his thigh and let my hand trail downward to the stump, the thick scarred skin. I crawled under the covers and kicked out of my jeans and socks and then watched the comforter dance as beneath it, Augustus removed first his jeans and then his leg. Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear didn’t match my purple bra, as if boys even notice such things.
“How do you do this every day?” he asked as I disentangled my shirt from the tubes. He reached down and tried to pull my shirt off, but it got tangled in the tube.
We crawled into the bed, my freedom circumscribed some by the oxygen, but even so I could get on top of him and take his shirt off and taste the sweat on the skin below his collarbone as I whispered into his skin, “I love you, Augustus Waters,” his body relaxing beneath mine as he heard me say it. I kissed him, hard, pressing him against the wall, and I kept kissing him as he fumbled for the room key. “Oh, get over yourself,” I said, and took the two steps I needed to get to him. “Just so you’re prepared in case, I mean, in case you see it or what-” There’s a nasty scar, but it just looks like-” And then, after forever, he said, “It’s above my knee and it just tapers a little and then it’s just skin. We were just standing there in the hallway, and he wasn’t leading the way to his room or anything, and I didn’t know where his room was, and as the stalemate continued, I became convinced he was trying to figure out a way not to hook up with me, that I never should have suggested the idea in the first place, that it was unladylike and therefore had disgusted Augustus Waters, who was standing there looking at me unblinking, trying to think of a way to extricate himself from the situation politely. He let me walk out first, of course, but then I didn’t know which direction to walk down the hallway, and so I just stood there outside the elevator and he stood there, too, his face still contorted, and I said again, “Okay?”
When it was half open, he winced in pain and lost his grip on the door for a second.Īfter a second, he said, “Yeah, yeah, door’s just heavy, I guess.” He pushed again and got it open. Finally the elevator lurched to a halt, and he pushed the mirrored door open. “What an assclown,” Augustus said, and it took all that time and more just to get us to the second floor. “Some infinities are larger than other infinities,” I drawled, mimicking Van Houten. I was tired and sweaty and worried that I generally looked and smelled gross, but even so I kissed him in that elevator, and then he pulled away and pointed at the mirror and said, “Look, infinite Hazels.” We had to pull the door to shut ourselves in and then the old thing creaked slowly up to the second floor. Every surface, including the floor, was mirrored. We squeezed into the tiny elevator together.