Chapter 2

“No, I am not gay!“ I yelped, jerking my hand out of hers. “I am not gay!” I repeated.

“Oh. Okay. That’s good, I guess.”

“Good you guess?“ I squealed.

Now she was the one calming me down. She patted my knee. and muttered that everything was okay.

“Why do you think I’m gay?” I asked.

“Because you don’t act like other guys,” she said. “Like a regular guy,” she added, as if that would make more sense.

“Well, you don’t act like other girls. Are you a lesbian?” I croaked.

She laughed. She actually laughed. Then she calmed down.

“No. I’m not interested in girls that way.”

“Well, I am,” I said. “I’m definitely interested in girls that way. I’m not gay.”

“I know that now,” she said. “Calm down.”

“Gay!” I muttered. “I go through all this just to be near you and you think I’m gay.”

“All what?” she asked.

“I’d been in college for two whole weeks when you called me a masher. You were disgusted with me. I couldn’t stand the thought of the girl I was all gaga for being disgusted with me. And I also couldn’t stand the thought of not being around you. I needed to see you every day. I needed to hear your voice. It was an addiction. I was a junkie and you were my heroin. But I didn’t want to kick the habit, and I didn’t want you to kick the habit for me, either. So I just tried to be non-disgusting and happy with what I could get.”

I slumped. I’d tossed my verbal cookies again. This girl was punching every button I had.

“So, all this time, you never made a move on me because you thought I’d be disgusted?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “I mean every time I even offered to buy you a cup of coffee you acted like I was talking about going out and finding a puppy to kick.”

She covered her eyes with one hand.

“Shit,” she said, softly. I’d never heard her even say “darn” before, much less something hard.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’ve just been really stupid, that’s all,” she sighed.

“You’re the smartest girl I know,” I said.

“Not when it comes to men,” she said.

“Well, you’re obviously a virgin,” I said. “Why would you expect to know all about men?”

I winced. I needed to just sew my mouth closed.

She didn’t yell at me, though.

“I’m not a virgin by choice,” she said. “Not exactly. I’m a virgin because I’m terrified of sex.”

“Everybody’s nervous about it in the beginning,” I said.

“I’m not nervous. I’m terrified. Sex ruined my mother’s life.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but it was obvious. She never had a boyfriend after she had me. She never even went on a date. She absolutely refused to talk about my father, except to say he was a deadbeat who used her. She showed no interest in men whatsoever. What was I supposed to think?”

“So you were terrified to go out with me because of my terrible masher ways,” I said.

“No.”

“No?”

“I liked you. I’ve always liked you.”

“They why wouldn’t you go out with me?”

She put her hand over her eyes again.

“Do you remember Marsha, my roommate that first semester?”

“No.”

“Well, she met this guy the first day she was here. She said he kept pestering her to go out with him, but promised nothing would happen. It turned out he was gay. He wanted her to be his beard. Have you ever heard of that?”

“Beard?”

“It makes people think he’s straight because he’s going out with a woman. But it’s just camouflage.”

“Why didn’t he just come out?” I asked.

“Who knows? Embarrassment, maybe. Or maybe his parents didn’t know and he couldn’t tell them.”

“And you thought I wanted you to be my beard?”

“Something like that.”

“I looked gay to you?” I asked, getting upset.

“Bob, no,” she said, reaching to touch my knee again. “I didn’t know anything. I was afraid of everything. She was all excited about what this guy wanted her to do. Marsha was a real save-the-whales type. I turned you down that first time because of my mom. But then, later, when I only saw you hanging out with guys at the Union, I started to think you might be gay. I mean you never went out with any girls.”

“And you never went out with any guys,” I pointed out.

“I was just used to living like that,” she said. “It was no big deal.”

“It was a big deal. It made us both believe things that turned out to be wrong,” I said.

“I guess that’s true. Anyway, I didn’t want to be some gay boy’s beard, even if I thought the boy was sweet. So that’s why I wouldn’t go have coffee with you.”

“Man,” I said. I’m sure I sounded disgusted.

“It’s also why I agreed to be your study partner after first semester was over. I thought if you were gay, I was safe being around you.”

“You were safe being around me,” I growled. “I’m not a caveman.”

“I know that now,” she moaned. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

I blinked.

“You didn’t waste my time,” I said.

“I didn’t?”

“I got my fix on a regular basis. Granted, I’d have acted a lot more masher-like if I’d known you thought I was gay.” I frowned. That hadn’t come out quite right. “I mean I’d have acted more masher-like if I’d known you weren’t a lesbian.” That wasn’t right, either.

She laughed and her hand squeezed my knee.

“Can I do something I’ve wanted to do a long time?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, happy that I didn’t have to talk.

That’s when she leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

You know those supercars that can go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 2.3 seconds? I never thought about that much, probably because I’ll never be able to afford one and nobody’s going to just let me try that for fun. And where could you drive one like that anyway?

But think about it. Close your eyes, seeing the world as it is, static and unmoving, and then mutter, “one thousand one, one thousand two, one-” and imagine when you open your eyes the world is flashing past you at sixty MPH. Oh, and the G forces involved make it impossible to lean forward while you count. Even a little bit!

That kiss was like that. One second I was with Valerie, my study partner and sometimes jerk-off fantasy, and two point three seconds later I was in the middle of a hurricane. Maybe it was a blizzard, because I was frozen so solid I couldn’t even purse my lips to return the kiss. But only for 2.3 seconds. Then I could move again. Nature can be as fast as a super car, and I kissed her back.

This was no friendly, gee-I-guess-I-never-kissed-you-so-maybe-I-should-try-that kiss. This kiss communicated hunger on a level I’d never experienced before. I’d made out with girls plenty of times, and some of those kisses had gotten steamy as hell, but they paled to the level of “Night-night, sleep tight” things, when compared to kissing Valerie.

And, in this world of 80 MPH Interstates (or hundred MPH autobahns) you might tend to think that’s not all that fast. But that’s because you’re used to looking in front of the car, where parallax or some other scientific word allows your eyes to compensate for the movement and make sense of things. But turn your head sometime (when you’re a passenger, please) and look at the ground beside the car you’re riding in. When you do that, ten MPH is dizzying. At sixty, you can’t distinguish anything at all.

Have I conveyed the degree to which this kiss disoriented, even devastated me? I was completely helpless to engage the world in any meaningful way. The only thing I could concentrate on was the feel of those hungry lips. She might have been a virgin, but she’d kissed lots of relatives. Of course it wasn’t in a sexual way, but even when Uncle Joe kisses you on the cheek or forehead, you can tell the difference between a perfunctory peck and warm, soft lips saying “I like you a lot.”

So she knew that she wanted this kiss to be done with warm, loose lips. I’m pretty sure she didn’t intend it to become French, but when it did, she adapted faster than I did.

She broke the kiss and pulled back lopng enough to say, “Thank you. I was curious. That wasn’t at all what I expected.” It was the eye of the storm. Then she leaned in and pressed her lipsa against mine and it started all over again.

I have no idea how long that second kiss went on. At one point, though, I heard her moan, a simple little whimper of need, and suddenly both her hands and mine were raising the hem of her T shirt up, exposing her trim, smooth belly, and then her utilitarian white, cotton bra. We had to break the kiss to get the material past our lips, and I remember both of us gasping, drawing in huge breaths into our oxygen-starved lungs. Our eyes met for less than a second, and we were kissing again.

One of her hands went to the back of my head, her fingers entwined in my hair, and the other snaked behind her back and undid her bra in that magical way women can do that. She shrugged out of one side of it and whimpered again as she pressed one naked breast against my shirt.

That second moan unfroze my brain, and I looked ahead of the car again, able to see what was (or might be) down the road. I pulled back from those luscious lips and said, “Val...”

“Shut up,” she gasped. “Please, just shut up.”

And then she commenced to make herself naked. She got there before I did, both because she was ahead at the start, and because I wanted to watch her more than I wanted to pay attention to undoing my own buttons and belt. My shoes didn’t even get untied. I just heeled them off and kicked. One of them flew ten feet, into the living room.

The second I stood up from pushing my jeans down, now dressed only in socks, she was there, in front of me, too close to gaze at. Her arms went around me and flesh that felt like it must be three hundred degrees scorched my chest. Her lips came up for another kiss and we sort of writhed against each other as that kiss went on and on.

Valerie would always love kissing me, and I think that’s because those initial kisses, each one maybe five minutes long, so captured her that she wasn’t willing to stop them to do anything else unless it was absolutely required by the laws of physics. Like when we had to get her shirt past our heads. She’d had all the normal hormones in her body, growing up. She’d heard other girls talk about kissing ... and other things. She’d felt the same things that other girls called “horny”. But she had never acted on any of those urges because she was afraid. Like people are warned not to try crack cocaine, even once, because it will ruin your life, she had abstained from anything sexual with a boy.