Seventeen
T hings are different the next day. And I don’t think it’s just embarrassment at what he accidentally did that makes them so. No, I think my reaction is the thing affecting him. It’s me, and my horny moan. Me, and my horny everything, most likely. He’s starting to buckle under the weight of everything he’s not used to, and all the stuff I instinctively want to do.
And it’s taking a toll, to the point where it’s seriously noticeable.
He comes down for breakfast with odd socks on. I have to tell him, as he goes to grab the cereal. But all it does is make him more nervous, more flustered – he backs into me, realizes his body is too close to mine, then jumps forward as if I pricked him in the butt with a fork.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he says, and I can’t even tell him it’s okay.
My heart is hammering, just over the idea that he almost touched me. I feel scalded by the air between us. Then I make the mistake of turning away from the toaster I was just fussing with, and looking at him fully.
And oh man, oh man, oh man.
His hair is all mussed and messy. It’s sliding out of that side parting, and spilling over his forehead and over his ears and forming these little sexy curls that frame his face. And said face is just so flushed, so sheened with perspiration. He looks like he just got finished fucking someone, and still can’t believe how good it was. He’s dazed from sex he hasn’t actually had.
Even worse.
He hasn’t shaved.
Like he didn’t trust his hand to be steady with a razor. Which is bad enough on its own, it really is. God, just the thought of him trembling is enough to make me wild. But then on top of that, I have to reckon with what not shaving does to him. Because, Christ alive, does it make him look hot. It gives him this feral, desperate air, for some reason. Like someone who’s been living in the mountains for a million years, and has never known the touch of a woman.
Tammy even says, ‘Oh, you look cool this morning, Beck,’ as she somehow manages to dart through the soupy tension between us to snag a cereal bar.
Though I know it’s not the coolness I’m responding to.
It’s that contrast again. The slight edge and the soft sweetness. It drives me out of my mind. I have to drill it into my brain that this is all evidence of how much this is unsettling him, just to stop myself dealing him even more psychic damage. He’s falling apart, look at him , I yell at myself. All he did was accidentally see and feel some boob he didn’t intend to see and feel, and he’s a wreck.
Though of course now I’m thinking of how that looked and felt to me.
Which means I have to get out of there, immediately. I tell him I gotta go, even though he knows I don’t at all. Then I head to the first activity of the day – Better Brainstorming, with some dude who has a podcast about that very thing – a whole hour early. I get to the spot by the lake where we’re supposed to meet, and nobody is around.
It’s just me and the scenery.
And Mabel, texting to see how things are going.
Have things settled down, I read, and have to take a second before answering.
If I don’t, I’m going to write back that he touched my breast in the night, and it was one of the most arousing things I’ve ever experienced, and that even after he panicked over it I couldn’t stop thinking about him doing it again. Instead of the more sensible thing I eventually go with.
It’s not the situation, I type. It’s him.
Then I hit send, before I can chicken out of confessing.
The first step toward breaking an addiction is admitting you have a problem , I think, and find myself laughing mirthlessly. Then screaming silently, briefly, into my hands. About ten seconds before there’s a ping.
And you think he doesn’t feel the same, she’s put.
Most likely while laughing and shaking her head, I know.
But she just doesn’t get it, she doesn’t understand what this is like.
He literally told me he wasn’t at all. And he hasn’t said anything has changed, I try, and the reply comes fast, and thick with the kind of deadpan I usually aim at her.
So you think Henry
Samuel Beckett, a man
who apologizes if his
finger touches yours while
handing you a cup of
coffee, would directly tell
you that he wants to bang
your brains out?
And I let out the same frustrated noise she lets out for me when I try to set her mad worries to rights. Well, maybe not like that. But somehow, I send to her. Only she doesn’t let up.
A note in your lunchbox
then. Will you go out with
me?
I know you’re being silly,
but yes. Yes, he would
actually do something like
that. Because he’s shy
about these things, but
he’s also honest. He’s the
most honest person in the
world, telling me would
practically be a physical
need.
And you can’t think of
anything that would
outweigh this, in his mind?
Mabel, I have zero
experience of men like
this. Everything he does
completely throws me.
I spend half my time
wondering if he’s for real.
But somehow, you think
I should be able to grasp
the complexities of his
innermost mind.
She takes a long time to respond to that. So long that other people start turning up. Meera sits on the grass next to me, and wants to know if I’m excited to do some brainstorming. And a guy whose name I think is Josh gets out a cushion and plops himself onto that, some distance from us.
He waves, just as my phone pings.
So I’m in the middle of waving back when I get this doozy:
None of this is complex.
He just thinks you’re too
fabulous to want him.
And I snort loudly enough that Meera asks me who’s pissing me off. My best friend is , I think, as I furiously type back.
My brand of fabulous is
not the brand of fabulous
he’s into. He wants a
kindly wife... Not some
love-them-and-leave-them
fun-loving flake.
Though I know what’s coming after that.
And sure enough, a second later:
Lovey, I think you have
to ask yourself if fun is
actually what you’re having
with the men you’ve dated.
And also take a long think
about WHY you leave.
Because you’re not a flake
in the slightest, so it has to
be something else.
To which I sigh, and type: If you say I’m scared of commitment, I swear to god. So of course after that I get another long pause. People are starting to turn up en masse by the time she replies. I almost put my phone away, and at the last second she slips in with another killer blow.
You’re not scared of commitment, Haze. You just haven’t had anything worth committing to, are the words that pop up on my phone. And she’s right, of course I know she’s right. But still. I can’t help being mad about it. Not to mention trying to get out of it.
In fact, it’s only as I’m headed back to the lodge that I realize something else, with a start violent enough that it makes me stop walking: she called me Haze. She used my real name. The one I always told myself I didn’t want.
But now apparently ache to hear, from everyone who says it aloud.