He shook his head. Pulled up his boxers. Stabbed by a thousand imaginary knives, I still yearned for his body as it disappeared beneath his clothes. His smooth, round thighs, the softness of his belly, those curling black hairs…
“That was my first time,” I said loudly. “Did you know that? You didn’t even ask. You just took my virginity. I hope you appreciate that.”
He puffed out his cheeks. Looked at me beseechingly. Oh. He thought I’d be easy. He thought I’d be chill.
“You’re a hypocrite,” I announced.
He finished lacing up his shoes. “So are you going to give me a ride, or what?”
* * *
—
So it came to be that an hour after I had lost my virginity to the boy I had loved for over five years we were back in my mom’s minivan trawling the empty streets for Lacie.
A fire began in me. Leo, languid in the passenger seat, was slumped and satiated, ready to be returned to Lacie. I had been had. It felt unbearable, this rage; it would consume me unless I gave it some out.
The stop sign came out of nowhere. I slammed the brakes, and we both jerked forward, then back. He looked at me, amazed. “This is stupid,” I told him.
“What’s stupid? Going to find my girlfriend?”
“She’s not your girlfriend.”
He gave me a little scoff of disbelief. “Yeah, she’s my girlfriend. When are you going to finally accept that?”
I had made a fatal miscalculation. I had pushed too hard, overplayed my hand, and thus the only thing to do was to double down on the strategy proven ineffective. “When you stop having a crush on me.”
When he didn’t answer right away, I plunged off a thousand-foot cliff into a sea of fangy monsters who tore at my flesh with tiny pointed teeth. “You like me,” I said. “You’re always flirting with me. Always.”
“You seduced me.” He sounded petulant.
“What?” I shrieked, and the car jerked dangerously. “I seduced you? You seduced me.” It was like learning pronouns in Spanish, hysterically.
“Oh, come on. You’ve wanted to fuck me since, like, Peter Pan. Everyone knows it.”
A white sheet of rage dropped over my mind. An incredible tightness came over my skin, and my head burned, and the knives were still stabbing, the sea monsters were still feeding. Blue-hot electricity zapped up my cells. Everything in me radiant with pain. I was screaming but my mouth was closed. I was breathing but no oxygen was getting in. And then we came upon Yale Avenue.
Yale: a wide curve left, a sharp jag right, the long graceful fishhook that connected Swarthmore and Wallingford. Carved from rock, it was a joy to take fast, but tricky, especially if you were a new driver, and angry, and distracted.
“What am I supposed to do? Just because you have a crush on me doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
The fog coming off the pavement grew thick at the bend, and his laugh distorted horribly in my ears. “You know that everyone knows, right? You’re, like, completely obvious. You stare at me all the time.”
Again and again the cops would ask me: Are you sure there wasn’t another car? A deer? There are deer in the woods right there. Maybe in the corner of your eye? But the truth is that I turned the wheel. I had to stop the words coming out of his mouth.
* * *
—
There was a moment when I thought, I’m going to crash, and then I was crashing, juddering along the granite face of the rock, jut, jut, jut, and the pop! of the passenger-side airbag, and the horrible scrape of metal against rock, and then nothing. Silence. Leo lay bloodied up against me, a hot, heavy weight.
“Leo. Leo.” He didn’t move. He was punishing me. “Leo.”
When I finally understood that he wouldn’t answer, I opened my door and ran.
After dropping my bag on the table in the front hall, beside Lacie’s piles of mail—she never seemed to go through it—and last week’s paper—why she bothered to subscribe I could not understand—I stood dumbly in the dark, letting Cat spine against my shins. My head was paper-stuffed, my limbs noodly. I was strung-out, half-mad, and exhausted, and when I took off my jacket I could smell the sex and sweat beneath the leather.
Then Lacie came barreling from the bedroom in a flannel and black jeans, barefoot, with a fleck of Crest by her lip. When she saw me she slyly smiled: “Someone didn’t come home last night.”
Her trust enraged me. “Yep.” I tugged on yesterday’s stupid sweater dress.
“Was it fun?” she called from the kitchen.
There had been a frost that morning, the season’s first. Leaving Ian’s place, we had walked into a world of silver, every blade of grass etched. The sunshine dazzled, the sky was a fierce blue, and the wind whipped: weather that required an energetic response. At the subway, Ian had pressed my body to his and hugged me hard, his belly pushing into mine.
“Thanks, I guess,” I had mumbled. I hadn’t felt up to the weather. I might puddle out in a million directions; my insides might come up. I was weak, in danger of dissolving.
He had pressed me to him more gently. I kept waiting for him to issue some kind of verdict on the night before, but all he did was kiss my forehead and squeeze my hand.
“It was okay,” I said now. “I’m so hungover, though.”
“Oh, boo.” Her head appeared around the wall. “That sucks. Want me to make you some toast or something?”
Suddenly I wanted to cry. “Just go,” I said. “You’ll be late.”
* * *
—
When she had finally gone, in a flurry of tote bags and Please, please promise you’ll text if you need anything AT ALLs, I collapsed on the daybed. Lacie had left her whiskey glass from last night, and a fruit fly hovered by its sticky lip. I knocked it away, and it buzzed back and settled on the sticky mess, rubbing its front legs together. Disgusting how its thorax heaved.
I lay back and let my thoughts swirl, giving myself over to doing nothing while my stomach clenched. Okay, I thought. This thing I’ve done, it’s not great. It’s not awesome. It might even, in its resemblance to a certain act of long ago, be called perverse. But it’s not—it’s not—gradually my skin shrank, tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter. When I stood up I found my insides had jellied. Rather than a midsection of muscle, I now had a tumbler of queasy grease sliding around.
Gingerly I moved from the daybed to the floor, from the floor to the chair, trying not to upset my quivery organs quaking over what I had swilled the night before. My insides were holding me hostage, slithering evilly around. But, I begged. It’s not about Lacie. It’s about him. For so long, this thing between us. Last night proves it. He feels it too.