Chapter 24
Not long after our inaugural inebriation, Eleanor invited me to her house by myself.
I rode over on my bike. I didn’t want to have to be dropped off by my mother at an appointment to hook up with my girlfriend.
In my head I kept saying the word girlfriend.
I was someone’s girlfriend. I’d never been one before, not really, and the thought of being one now made me giddy, aroused, also slightly terrified.
I had no idea what being Eleanor’s girlfriend entailed.
Would she invite me over by myself like this a lot?
Would she want to hang out with me alone as much as we hung out together with Margaret?
Would I need to spend less time overall with Margaret in order to spend more time with Eleanor because there was a limit to the amount of my life my mom would allow me to allocate to people who weren’t my family?
A block from Eleanor’s house, I took off my helmet, shook out my hair, tried to peel my shorts from where they’d stuck to my thighs, and exhaled a few times.
When I arrived, we struggled to make conversation.
The emotion and spectacle of our last exchange seemed impossible to resume.
What could follow? I cringed from every idea.
Those girls in the garden that night didn’t seem like they could have been us, not Eleanor, walking up the stairs to her bedroom almost on her tiptoes, not me either, walking one pace behind her, gangly and silent, my gaze down, watching her white ankle socks rise step by step.
Eleanor opened her bedroom door and closed it behind me.
This action alone was enough to embarrass us both intensely.
Eleanor’s skin turned pink. The pale hair on her arms looked slightly raised.
I avoided eye contact, just followed as she marched to the far side of her bed and sat down on the ground.
I realized, from the position she’d chosen, that we wouldn’t be visible right away to anyone who unexpectedly opened the bedroom door, which meant she’d been thinking about how to do this. She’d made a plan.
My bare legs sank into the plush carpet.
The half-inch inner seam of my denim shorts—hard, overlapping fabric—drove an upward vector between my thighs.
I shifted, not to relieve the position, but to more exactly align the seam against myself.
Now that we’d arrived here, at her chosen location, I saw that Eleanor didn’t know what to do next.
She could initiate no further under these circumstances, not face-to-face in daylight with no obvious means of curtailment or escape.
She didn’t know how to tolerate vulnerability as a continuous state.
Even though we’d just sat down, she looked like she was about to find a reason to get up again.
Her thighs were pressed together, and she pushed her hands down the crevice between them, palm to palm, rather than sit still.
I could feel her over there itching to either make out with me or ruin our relationship.
I knew she must have had all the same questions I did and less patience for them.
I needed to reassure her that we could forgo any acknowledgment of our own past behavior, before I became yet another threatening Sim she decided was easier to drown in the pool than play with.
“Hi,” I said, to start a new moment. Searching for what to say next, I wondered if you were supposed to warn a person who might be about to touch your boobs when one of them was bigger than the other one.
Then I realized I didn’t have to tell Eleanor, because she was my best friend and already knew.
The resulting wave of relief made me brave, so I kissed her, at first awkwardly, with my mouth open, but then passionately, as she met my gestures with just as much eagerness.
She licked my tongue with her tongue to tell me don’t stop, don’t be discouraged by how strange this is—because of how wonderful the strangeness was, a strangeness that was both of our faults and therefore neither’s.
We shone with our mutual intention to please each other.
I felt Eleanor’s determination, the same as mine, to put away shyness after having made it so far.
Perhaps we were also afraid of what would follow stopping, of what would come next when we had no idea.
Instead, we found each other as we went, as we kissed and kissed.
Eleanor at first firmly held my hands by my sides, like she wanted to be sure of what I was doing with them.
I remained still, and she gained confidence.
She slid a hand into my underwear and began to stroke me.
I couldn’t instruct her aloud in what would feel good, and I felt alone in the performance of being touched.
So I did what she had done and slid my hand beneath her dress.
That way at least we were equally in the unknown.
I found her soft and wet. I did to her what I thought I might like her to do to me.
Our heads drooped against each other, her hot cheek against my chest, my face against her shoulder.
Every so often one of us would nod slightly, either to tell the other they’d done right or because we couldn’t help it.
We continued until we stopped. We didn’t know how to arrive at the place where our bodies were urgently directing us to go.
Still, it felt like a revelation to place my hand assuredly on the soft inner bend of her waist and know that I could keep it there.
When we were finished kissing, we lay on the floor facing each other.
Eleanor wrapped a strand of hair around her index finger, then unfurled it.
Only in retrospect would I understand the fear and discomfort that held Eleanor back that summer.
Desire is an impingement on interior life, and Eleanor held her interior life sacred.
Intimacy requires or else produces true presence within yourself in front of another person, and Eleanor preferred to occupy herself in private.
She liked to know herself ahead of being known by other people, and there I was, loving her well enough to watch in real time the cursor of her personality blink against its blank page, to watch the next line in the code of herself as it was being written.
There I was, catching her in the present act of being herself. But she had less complicated fears too.
“Why didn’t you tell Margaret about us kissing?” she asked.
I felt awash in the possibilities implied by the question. I took her right hand in my left.
“Were you sad I didn’t?”
“Well, I thought you would,” she said, looking down at our hands, allowing them to remain where they were, not trying to part them. An interpretation of my behavior that had never occurred to me before occurred to me then.
“You mean you thought—so this girl can send me a million text messages, but she won’t tell her best friend we kissed?”
Eleanor shrugged, visibly embarrassed but also inching closer toward me, like I was protection from my past self. “Yeah, kinda.”
I shifted closer too, so our feet touched through our socks.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a soft and dear voice.
I felt honored by this new confidence, this requesting of an apology.
I felt moved that she would acknowledge I had hurt her for the sake of allowing me to wash it away.
I explained how sincerely I’d thought she would want me to treat the kiss as a secret and then how later I’d feared she might wish it had never happened, but I acknowledged that these weren’t the only reasons.
“The truth is,” I said, “I don’t know why completely.
I’ve been trying to understand myself. I think I didn’t want to hear what she thought.
I didn’t want her to have a response to it.
I felt possessive about the memory. I thought she’d be like, But we’ve kissed before, and we don’t want to hook up.
I thought she might make me feel like what happened between us wasn’t real, and I was the only one who thought it was. ”
“That’s what you worried?”
“That’s one of the things I worried.”
Eleanor nodded. “I can tell you she didn’t respond that way. She gave me a hug and asked if you were a good kisser.”
I felt proud of Margaret for having this response to Eleanor’s disclosure and ashamed of myself for being too afraid to receive the same, but I also knew that Eleanor wasn’t me, and Margaret wouldn’t say the same things to Eleanor that she’d be willing to say to me. “How did you reply?”
“I said I was better.”
“Rude!” I said, and kissed her again.
Eleanor changed into a pair of soft shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt and no bra beneath instead of putting back on her dress.
“Won’t that be like a little conspicuous?” I asked, sitting up.
She needed a moment to understand what I meant. “Oh, no one notices anything around here,” she said.
As we walked down the stairs, I felt the old distance between us returning. Our good faith lingered, but the transparency between us couldn’t. Eleanor’s goodbye was oddly formal.
“Thank you for having me over,” I replied in kind, stupidly, but I also touched her arm in reassurance. We’d done well, I wanted her to know. We didn’t have to do everything at once. We’d used up our courage and were tired and needed to recover by ourselves before we could start again.