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Sex—and I am quite possibly the only person, living or dead, to have made this particular comparison—was a lot like noted Dutch asshole Peter Van Houten. In a word, disappointing. Van Houten disappointed me by writing my favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction, and then turning into a bitter, mean shell of his former self. Sex disappointed me by happening once and then waking up all these crap hormones that didn't realize I'd probably bite it before I ever got a chance to do it again. Somehow, in loving and in once hooking up with Augustus Waters, my already cancer-filled body had found one more way to betray me.
In the weeks after our trip to Amsterdam, when Augustus was dying, I'd thought about sex all the time.
This was our once: He kissed me standing against the door to his hotel room in Amsterdam, and just when I was about to break away to tell him I had to sit down, he broke away first. “Hazel Grace,” he said, “I would very much like to continue this, but my leg has requested that we move to the bed.”
“My lungs second the motion,” I replied, feeling good-dizzy and painful-dizzy all at once.
We kissed some more on his bed, him with his back against the headboard, me over and against him, Philip beside us on the floor by the bed. I tried not to be too self-conscious about my cannula, which I could feel bobbing against our lips. It wasn't actually any weirder than his leg-stump, or, for that matter, than the pokey bit between his leg-stump and his other leg that was starting to make itself obvious.
I pulled away to look at him. There was something even sexier than kissing in just looking.
“Okay?” I said, feeling something hot and sparky in the air between us.
“Okay,” he answered. He was breathing hard too.
“What now?”
“My leg was wondering if you'd like to remove your shirt.”
“My lungs believe in equality,” I answered. “They insist that if I remove my shirt, you remove yours. Also our pants.” I glanced pointedly at the pokey bit.
Augustus's eyes widened. “Seriously, Hazel Grace?”
I almost said, when else will we get the chance? I didn't even know yet that Gus's time was even shorter than mine, but that's the thing about dying. Any opportunity you pass up, you might not get again. Gus looked at me, and for the first time that afternoon, something sad and ugly was in the air. I did my best to ignore it. “I have a condom,” I said.
Augustus said, “Me too.”
“Well,” I said, and began the process of getting naked.
Something was different, then, like we'd stopped kissing because we wanted to and started doing it because we might never get to again. We did the right motions: our bodies dropped and lifted, heaved and strained, and ultimately fell limp. I heard and felt Augustus finish, if you will, in a short and mildly alarming series of gasps and shudders. There was this moment where I thought I might finish too, but then it seemed at once like too much work and too sad. As if it would somehow make this trip, this perfect day, be over once and for all.
I finished the job myself a week later in my bedroom, thinking about death and disappointment and the pencil marks on the wall at the Anne Frank House. None of which were very sexy thoughts, but bodies will do what bodies will do, and if you rub the nice parts long enough, it doesn't matter if you're thinking about your dying boyfriend gazing up from underneath you or the jowly, belligerent face of Peter Van Houten.
It was my first orgasm, and I was kind of awed by its intensity. My body wasn't much in the habit of making me feel good. It made me want to try it again, and often, though I was too tired or too in pain to bother more often than not.
I tried not to think about Augustus, not that way. His body was doing so much just keeping him alive. But he brought it up one night on the phone. “I'll never even get to get you off,” he said. It came amidst a litany of things he'd never do, and at first I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. We'd never talked about the details of that afternoon in Amsterdam, and I wasn't even certain he'd noticed.
“I wanted to,” he added, after a slightly odd silence.
“Oh,” I said, quite matter-of-factly. “Well, I can take care of that myself.”
Gus made an almost-snorting sound, like he was breathing out through his nose. “Is that right, Hazel Grace?”
“It's kind of a new thing,” I added, feeling shy as I said it.
“How new?”
“It's kind of a since-Amsterdam thing.”
“Hazel Grace,” Augustus breathed, his voice cracking slightly. “That is almost shockingly hot.”
“Yeah,” I said, and then another silence stretched out between us. It occurred to me to offer to do it right then, touch myself and listen to Gus listening to me. Maybe he was thinking the same thing. But somehow, even after what happened in the Hotel Filosoof, it felt too private. He didn't ask, and I didn't offer, and the moment, like every moment, slipped away.
What would it have been like, I wondered later, after the funeral, after the letter. It seemed unfair that no one could tell me, and doubly unfair that now, when Augustus was gone, I finally felt ready. But I imagined it one night, alone in my bed, remembering that phone-space that was neither in my room nor his.
“I could do it now,” I'd tell him. “If you want.”
“Hazel Grace,” he'd answer, “I want nothing more than to witness this act.”
“Good,” I'd say. “I want nothing more than to do it.”
Augustus would laugh then. “Do you think Heroic Cancer Kids ever have this much fun?”
“What are you calling fun? I'm grieving.”
“Can you do it and grieve at the same time?”
“Emphatically, yes.” Grief was always there in the background, like the water in my lungs and the green of hospital walls.
Maybe it was good we never tried it on the actual phone. How do you have phone sex loud enough for the person on the other side to hear but quietly enough that your parents don't think you're crying for help and come running? When I imagined it, though, Gus—and only Gus—could hear everything.
“Jesus, Hazel Grace,” he'd say after a minute or two, as awed as I'd been that first time on my own.
“Okay?” I'd ask.
“Okay. God. The world isn't all bad if it's got exquisite pleasures like this one.”
“Okay here too,” I'd say, that still-new sensation in my body building. “It's nice... talking to you.”
“You too,” he'd answer, and I'd remember the way he looked at me in Amsterdam, just before we kissed.
“Gus?” I'd say, as the tension grew almost unbearable. “I might, um?”
“You might come, Hazel Grace?” And in his voice, that voice that spoke in wry declarations and grand symbols, that one Saxon syllable would be devastating.
“Yeah.”
“Please do.”
“Okay,” I'd answer, feeling safe and held. “Okayokayokayokayo—”
Afterwards, the room seemed extra dark. I caught my breath as well as I could ever catch it and hooked myself up to the BiPAP. As I got used to the air pumping in and out, I thought, as always, about Augustus, wondering if his memory's being partially responsible for a dying teenage girl's imagined orgasms was anything like the mark he wanted to leave in the world. Even if not, maybe sex wasn't so disappointing after all. Maybe disappointment was just one more side effect of dying.
Augustus Waters once said you get some say in who hurts you. I like to think we get some say too in whose memory brings us pleasure. I choose Augustus. And maybe, weirdly, I also choose me.