Chapter 57
“Are you having fun?” Nolan asks. We’re at a party at his friend’s parents’ cabin up in Big Lake, complete with beer pong and sweaty, horny teenagers and an Alaskan father whose identity is in conflict, torn between wanting to be a responsible dad and wanting to be a cool one.
A man who sets up a key-check at the front door to ensure that no one drives home drunk…
from the booze he supplied the party with.
“You kids are gonna be drinkin’ anyway so might as well do it somewhere I know you’re gonna be safe!” he shouts, clinking beer bottles with his son.
We’ve been here an hour, and it feels like three.
“We can go if you’re not having fun,” Nolan says.
“No, this is great,” I lie.
“Good,” he says. “Just wanna make sure you’re enjoying yourself.”
I thought it might be nice to be the more wanted one, but it’s uncomfortable. To feel how eager he is to please me, to accommodate me. The unevenness reeks.
I try to make things feel more even between us by responding enthusiastically to his texts, throwing in cheery smiley face emojis I don’t stand behind, asking him questions from an AI-generated list of date conversation sparkers, but I’m starting to think that the air of any given dynamic is impossible to overcome with words exchanged, or gestures, or effort.
That what a dynamic is exists in the inexplicable.
“We could…go upstairs?” I suggest, nodding up to the string of bedrooms, most of them with shut doors.
“Sure. Yes. Definitely.”
Upstairs, we get to it quickly. Our kissing has improved since we’ve gotten acquainted with each other’s noses and mouths and tongues.
We’ve found our hero angles and know how to avoid the clunks and bumps of our bad ones.
Our sex has gotten better too. Nolan has learned the value of foreplay and teasing my vagina before jamming his fingers into it.
I have learned the value of faking it until I make it.
A bit of spit until I’m actually wet, a couple fake moans until a real one pops out, and before I know it, voilà, we’re finished.
Or, rather, he is, and on two occasions (including this one) so am I.
“That was amazing,” he says, still panting as we lie next to each other in bed.
Amazing is an overstatement, but good, yes.
Our bodies are actually compatible and we can fall into a nice groove when he lets my hips take the lead.
And his penis gets very hard. Surprisingly hard.
The hardest penis I’ve felt. It’s a stark, mannish contrast to his boyish body—his rounded shoulders, his gangly limbs, his pokey hips, his soft, smooth skin (except for his back, where he could use a 10% benzoyl peroxide wash, but in the heat of things it’s not noticeable).
I like his body and I like his penis and the technical elements of our sex are all there. So then why am I not?
“Waldo,” he says, perching himself up on his elbow.
I know what he’s about to say. The way he slowly takes in my features, milking the moment, really letting the pause sink in.
Randy Julep’s done it and Paul Bornstein’s done it and now he’s about to do it.
Let me know how beautiful I am…to him. To him.
Always to him. Not realizing that this isn’t actually a compliment to me, but a way of showing that he’s the judge, the one with the eyes that discern the beautiful from the ugly, the one able to grant beauty where he sees fit.
And I’m just the one lucky enough to have been granted it.
Every time it reminds me of that scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when Jim Carrey’s character kisses Kate Winslet’s character all over in that urgent, rescuing way after she makes some self-conscious comment about her appearance.
He begs to keep that one memory. Just this one, he says, please just let me keep this one.
Of course that’s the one he wants to keep, the one where the woman is insecure and he gets to be her savior.
“You’re so beautiful,” Nolan says.
And I wait for the “to me” to come. But it doesn’t. I appreciate this about him, or at least that he doesn’t say it out loud, but I still see a glint of a “to me” in his eyes and it annoys me.
Or maybe I’m making up the glint. Putting something on Nolan that isn’t there. Something that I secretly want to be there because it would make it easier for me to write him off. To feel okay about stringing him along. About using another person feeling good about me to feel better about myself.
There probably was no glint. Because Nolan is great. Not perfect, but great, which is better. More trustable.
I thank him and there’s a knock at the door from the next set of teenagers, so we throw on our clothes and we head downstairs, where Cool Dad smokes from a bong with his kid’s friends.