He kissed me until he found out that I’d spent the entire dinner sitting next to Roger Harrison, aka Fly-fisherman. Then he wanted to hear all about Wyoming and Montana and the Callibaetis Sparkle Dun. Apparently he had spent last summer fly-fishing in Alaska with his dad where, sadly, there were no Sparkle Duns.
Back in my dorm, I had to wonder for a second why I worried about him thinking that I was the geek.
Fortunately for all of us, the school wasn’t the only one that set the social calendar. The Saturday before break, Charlie Hunter was having a party at his parents’ house. Parties here were different: clandestine overnights with keys to the mahogany liquor cabinet, or at least a friendly twenty-one-year-old townie, protected by everything but code words. They still had all the necessary components of your average illicit high school party.
I didn’t know Charlie at all, except that he was the skinny ginger Dev and Alec ended up with in the showers every night and that he had, as a junior, dated and reportedly devirginized two freshmen so far this year. Since he probably didn’t know my name, I had already made plans to order dinner and watch a movie with Amie. I was surprised when Dev asked me behind my dorm Wednesday night if I had plans Saturday.
“I thought you were going to Charlie’s.”
He grinned. “Charlie sad you could come. No adults, empty rooms...”
I had to laugh. You would think I was used to Dev’s relatively one-track mind by now. “I’m free.”
He kissed me hard and I pulled him closer to me. Bushes and weather below freezing weren’t an ideal place to start stripping so we had been reduced to middle school right fielding for almost my entire maybe. Very cold fingers laced through mine, he pulled away slowly. “His mom will sign you out. I’ll take you back before curfew.”
“Okay.” This couldn’t count as being too easy. Why in the world would I say no? I kissed him again, eyes going the other way toward my dorm. “I gotta go...”
“One sec.” His eyes found mine in the dark and all I wanted to say was screw it all, screw curfew and quite possibly screw Dev.
“Dev...” When he looked at me like that it was a guaranteed failure from the start. Some people never outgrew puppy eyes. Of course, it didn’t help that I didn’t actually want to go.
“Bizza, I don’t want you to feel like you have to ’cause you don’t, but...” He smiled sheepishly at me, running a hand down the back of my head, pressing my hair to the curve of my neck and his lips to my forehead. When he started talking again, he was speaking really quickly. “I’m an asshole, but I’m bringing condoms to Charlie’s. It’s up to you completely, I just want there to be the option. If you want. If we want.”
Words had failed me many times in our relationship, even this three-week round, but this time I surprised me. I expected to be singing the Hallelujah chorus. Instead, I just bit my lip. Sex. He was talking about sex, and even though I expected to be cool about that, I wasn’t. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just sex anymore. It was Sex.
“Yeah. Okay.” I smiled up at him, hoping to convey that even though I was having issues with my synapses, Saturday night had gained a new halo of importance. Not that I was going to say that. He had lost his V-card outside during his freshman year. Evidently romance wasn’t exactly a factor. Not that it was for me, it was just that this had a certain feel of good and right and affirmative decision. I wanted this. I think.
But what if I was terrible and it was embarrassing—or worse, I became forever the “the girl who sucks at sex”? What if this was what killed my maybe?
If I didn’t do it, it could kill my maybe.
And he wanted to have Sex.
“You should go in.” He kissed me softly on the lips. “Think about it.”
“Night.” The words crossed the millimeters between our lips before I put meters and a door between our bodies.
“Hey, Bizza.” Cleo was only on the stairs, cheeks stained red with the cold outside. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about this with Cleo yet. “I’m great.” By midnight I had given up keeping it a secret.
“Dev’s bringing condoms to Charlie’s.”
Cleo raised one eyebrow from her sprawl on her bed playing Tetris on her computer. “Saturday?”
“Yeah.” My eyes were fixed on a problem in my math book, reading the same equation over and over again. “You going?”
“Nope. But have fun.” I could hear the click of her keyboard behind me. “The first time is awkward.” She could have been talking about the weather from the inflection in her voice, newscaster smooth. “Not painful. Just awkward.”
I lifted my eyes from the textbook to a crack in the white paint on her wall. “Really?”
She laughed and patted the bed next to her and I gave up pretending to do math.
* * *
Cleo had told me it was dumb to plan this and standing in the middle of the most awkward, tense, weird kiss ever, I realized that maybe, as usual, she was right. Of course, I couldn’t have had this epiphany before Charlie’s mom, her dyed blond hair, her black SUV and her gravity-defying boobs, had picked me up, or even just before Dev had met me and led me up the stairs, past a bunch of guys who snickered and toasted us.
Cue awkward kiss. There was no heat of passion or haze of lust. I was left thinking way too hard about how to best curve my lips around his. You know it’s bad when you’re kissing with your eyes open, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if everyone is listening at the door.
I pulled away, hooking the tip of each of my index fingers through his belt loops and tilting my head back. “Hey, Dev?”
His hands were cold but good and familiar at the small of my back under my uniform button-down. Something told me he was not having the problems I was. “Yeah?”
I bit my lip again, feeling like a fifth grader learning where babies really came from for the first time. Naming It had gone from terrifying to all the rage to no big deal to impossible again. You’d think I’d be more mature than this. Then again, Erin and I had started giggling when anyone said “Wacker Drive” or “Big Willie” on a trip to Chicago. Suddenly, I was seriously losing faith in my alleged maturity and seriously determined to restore that faith.
Where words failed, actions prevailed. With some fumbling because the stupid button was on the wrong side (who came up with that stupid idea and why did I care?), even my shaky fingers could unbutton his jeans as I kissed him again. Either way, he got the point and I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified. But this was a given from the second the door shut and the minute I entered this house and everyone knew it. Worst kept not-secret ever.
He was wearing the same plaid boxers I had been seeing poking above guys’ shorts since the days of middle school sex ed but somehow, this time, as he pulled his jeans off his hips, they looked different. Maybe it was the words “straining erection” crossing my mind which made me feel like I was writing one of Cleo’s mom’s bodice rippers with the synonyms and clichés and awkward descriptions, and his fingers were smoothly sliding up along my skin as he lifted my shirt up and I pulled it off. And then I was kicking my jeans off and suddenly I was just standing there in a bra and a thong and feeling really, really naked. Maybe I was a lights-off person.
Too late.
My eyes traced the sharp line of his hipbones, the smudges of shadow along his ribs, the thin patches of hair under his arms. And then I should have been thinking in fireworks and metaphors and gasping moaning heat, but all I could think was naked. Maybe Kama Sutra or porn or
Cosmo
but somehow I’d forgotten all of that and all I could think of was touch me here and oh my wow and clichés I thought I was above. It felt so much the same and so totally different and I was sweating and I didn’t care. Instead of wet there was slick, hot became nervous sweat, gasping became shaking hands and shaking nerves. His hands at least were steady as the wrapper ripped and he rolled the condom on. I hadn’t expected it to be so slippery, so sticky, so awkward. So dumb looking. So complicated.
I was an idiot.
It was the ultimate cliché: “You okay?” Like anyone would say no at this point. There were a few minutes of fumbling and then damn-it-Cleo-lied. It was a weird pain, like I was stretching, pulling apart, but it was still pain. And I wondered whether it was possible for him to go too far, even though I knew it didn’t work that way from pornos and sex ed and Ask Alice. His eyes were heavy lidded, and I had seen his face like this before but it was different now and my body tried to hold together even though everything in me wanted to let it all go. Breathe in, hold your breath, bite your lip because holding it was a lost cause and I knew my body was shaking and there was sweat and sex and smell and I didn’t even care anymore.
He threw the condom out and I curled up in the sweaty, sexed-up sheets. I almost thought I should feel different, but I didn’t except that my thighs and the muscles behind my stomach hurt.
It was disappointing that this wasn’t life changing and mind altering and I didn’t really feel any more like a natural woman. But I think I was okay with that.
He kissed my forehead firmly and suddenly I was worried that it, that I, wasn’t enough. My neck tilted up and back to look up at him and my hand covered his on my hip, lifting it and playing with his fingers. “Hey.” I felt shyer than I had been that first meeting in the dining hall. Except, I guess, that last time everyone was wearing clothes.
His smile was slow and sleepy and his eyes were still half-closed, now for a different reason. “Hey.” He kissed the top of my head again. “How you doing?”
“’M good.” Naked was still awkward, but I pulled myself closer to his body. There was still some space between our hips. I was okay with that for the moment. Then our lips were touching, just softly because I kept smiling and he kept laughing. It was the same and it was different and it was almost disappointing that pop culture was completely making all that stuff up. Lucky for pop culture, I didn’t want to worry about that anymore.
“You’re what?”
Dev had dropped me off at school at ten fifty-nine last night and I hadn’t slept more than four hours, so I really could not deal with my mother standing in the doorway of my room, unannounced, at noon on what was supposed to be a Sunday filled with nothing but sleep.
”We thought we’d surprise you. Take you out to eat.” My mom had on a genuine smile. “Since we didn’t get you for the long weekend.”
I think, in the end, it was Erin standing behind my mother that saved me from throwing a temper tantrum. That and her enthusiastic hug that set me back a few feet further into my room. She always had an obnoxious tendency to make my anger dissipate as quickly as it came.
“Awesome.” Cheesy smile. After three weeks of all-natural laughter, it felt strange to force the expression. There was a part of me that wanted to care. She was my mom, after all. There was also a part of me that couldn’t.
Then it occurred to me that twelve hours ago, I had lost my virginity and had sex with a guy Mom probably didn’t approve of. And all of a sudden I was too conscious that I had only taken a quick shower last night and, even though the mirrors kept saying the opposite, I was convinced that I had to look different.
Perfect timing.
Her arms surrounded me in an awkward hug of stiff bodies and clumsy arms. “Let me sign you out. Get dressed and I’ll meet you in the hallway.”
She never asked.
Erin stayed with me while I stripped off the big T-shirt I’d been wearing since 11:01 the night before and went looking through my laundry basket for a clean shirt. She was excited to see me, launching into the epic narrative of freshman drama. She had broken up with “awesome guy” from a month ago. Big surprise: relationships were best short and sweet for her. Since then, apparently, a lot had happened: the ex’s best friend and she had totally started liking each other a lot, so she’d broken up with the original guy, but now since her best friend’s naked picture was totally circulating, like, the entire grade via cell phone, because of the best friend who liked her, she definitely couldn’t date him, you know? Thankfully, the captain of the basketball team was totally cute and totally into her.
I couldn’t follow half of the story. Mostly I got the main ideas: don’t date your boyfriend’s best friend and, more importantly, Polaroids are key. Anyway, it was a story I’d heard a hundred times, ninety-nine of them from her, and I knew how to nod and smile and make sympathetic noises in all the right places while I got dressed.
My mom came back as I was pulling my sweater over hair I definitely should have washed before this. Since it was a gray, windy, thirty-degree day, she thought we should walk into town to enjoy the weather. I think even my mom was regretting her idea by the time we made it back to the same semi-nice restaurant. Unlike Parents’ Weekend, it was almost completely empty except for a few guys in T-shirts sitting at the bar, watching a football game.
Erin and I sat on one side of the booth, across from my mom. She sat, one finger pressed to her temple. Her diamond ring flashed in the light, tasteful and austere, sharp and hard. Just like she was sometimes. The two of us ordered Diet Cokes. Mom ordered an Arnold Palmer.
Who was Arnold Palmer anyway?
I knew there was only a small window before she started asking the inevitable, predictable questions.
“How’s Aunt Melinda?” I asked. I already knew the likely answer: busy. Erin’s mom was currently working to get the bid to design advertising for Tide detergent. Last month it had been Camel, last year, Kmart. That was part of why Erin and I had grown up together. She stayed with us until her mom came home at eleven, smelling like Ralph Lauren and a hint of cigar smoke, wearing a tailored suit.
“Working.” My mom didn’t even let Erin speak. “She’s sorry she couldn’t come down to see you, but she sends her love.”
I had heard that one before.
I tried to deflect again by asking Erin another question, but apparently that wasn’t on Mom’s itinerary. She started asking about my classes, my PSATs, my friends, long weekend, the SATs I wouldn’t take for another year. My answers were something like studying hard, bottled water and going to bed at eleven every night we were at Cleo’s. Didn’t even bother answering the last one.