Teddy Wayne - Loner

I closed my eyes and, impelled more by fear than desire, made the trust fall forward. Our lips touched and soon yielded to tongues, which grappled like junior-varsity wrestlers trying to impress the coach with their hustle. I was too conscious that I was having a legitimate sexual experience to bask mindlessly in the sensory pleasures. Nonetheless, I achieved an erection that was deftly hidden by 101 Idealistic Jobs That Actually Exist .

Bizarre verb, achieved , as if to remind you of the possibility of failure and all its attendant disgrace.

And so began a courtship. Since parties weren’t Sara’s thing, we gorged on the menu of on-campus activities: film screenings, plays, world-music concerts, and guest speakers. Afterward she was raring to discuss whatever we’d seen. I tried to engage for her sake, but if I wasn’t being tested on the subject matter, it was hard for me to care. During our study dates in Lamont Library, she read every word assigned to her, meticulously underlined and highlighted and marginalia’d, sought out competing perspectives, researched auxiliary material. An academic mule, if one motivated by genuine curiosity.

All our rendezvous were in public. Whenever I suggested doing something that would get me into Sara’s room, I was frustrated by her goaltender’s knack for deflecting me. “I’m kind of burned out on the library,” I texted one night. “I’d say we could study here but Steven has been popping out to practice magic tricks on me all day. Maybe your room?” (A lie; Steven was a reactor core of interpersonal fuel, joining a raft of clubs, picking up new friends like a lint roller, and entering into a relationship with Ivana that entailed incessant fondling and pet names. Stevie-bean spent most nights in Ivana-suck-your-blood’s room, so I couldn’t really complain, though he indulged in one instance of grating boastfulness, requesting that a picture of himself and his parents reside on my bookcase, not his. “Why?” I asked. “It’s weird to feel like they’re staring at me when Ivana’s in there,” he said with put-on embarrassment. “You know how it is.”)

“Let’s go to Starbucks!” Sara replied.

Our physical contact was restricted to PG make-out sessions by the lawsuit tree near Matthews, an awkward location, since we couldn’t part immediately after kissing. Instead, we had to walk another few dozen paces to our dorm, go upstairs together, and, at the fourth floor, she would wave like a friendly neighbor before continuing her ascent to your castle in the faraway kingdom of 505, where you remained out of my sight — though very much on my mind.

Location was also a problem the next two Prufrock classes, when you snuck in late and chose seats out of my field of vision. You were the whole reason I was taking the class — and dating your roommate — but we might as well have been at different schools.

One evening Sara and I attended a lecture by a visiting economist with the elaborate title “Antisocial Mobility: The Impossible Transcendence of Previously Permeable Socioeconomic Borders.” I daydreamed about you through the whole talk, but snapped to attention when, as we shambled out of the auditorium, Sara at last asked if I wanted to study in her room.

On the way back to Matthews, the excitement leavening my step had little to do with the sexual promise of what lay in store. In fact, while I wasn’t about to reject the leap forward we were about to take — maybe even hurdling over all the preliminary obstacles straight to the final one — I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that Sara might be my first.

“Those stats he brought up were scary, about how the situation you’re born into more than ever determines your economic fate,” Sara said as we walked back.

“Mmm,” I said.

“I was getting really depressed listening to him, but at the end, in a weird way, I started thinking all his pessimism about America is actually almost optimistic, because he’s also basically saying, ‘If we made this, it means we can unmake it.’ And the real travesty isn’t what’s already happened, but continuing to let it happen and resigning ourselves to it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good point.”

Your door was closed. Sara’s room was neat, contrary to her previous claims, and modestly appointed. Around her desk were framed photographs of her family: the diffident younger sister who closely resembled her; the gregarious older brother who was a blunt-featured male version; the jolly, ursine father whose genes had been lost in transmission; the graying, bifocaled mother into whom Sara would someday evolve.

Sara sat on her bed, knees propping up Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America . I stationed myself at her desk and began reading The Scarlet Letter .

“You can sit here, you know,” she told me a few minutes later, patting the mattress. I moved over, leaving enough space for a phantom body between the two of us and resting against the cool wall that separated her room from yours.

“At least she’s quiet,” I whispered, pointing toward your door. “Nothing worse than a noisy roommate.”

“I doubt she’s home,” Sara said. As she read, her forehead squinched around a central point and the tip of her tongue explored the corner of her mouth, an expression of concentration I would come to know well. After a while she announced she was tired and asked if I wanted to go to bed.

“Okay,” I said, unsure if this was an invitation or a tactful request to leave.

“I’ll go brush my teeth and change,” she said.

She left for the bathroom, carrying her toiletries kit, a pair of gray athletic shorts, and an oversized shirt that said RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW!I stayed put, alone in the room, desperately waiting for your entrance.

A few minutes later I heard a key in the door. Too nervous to look up, I kept my eyes on the book, pretending to read, but then the door opened and Sara’s voice was muttering, “People waste so much water here.” I waited for her to extinguish the light before removing my jeans. My shirt I kept on; if she was going to remain clothed, so was I. My physique, I knew, wasn’t much to look at, but as a purely tactile experience in the dark, it would be unobjectionable.

I climbed in under the pink flannel sheets, a reprieve from my own scratchy, cotton/poly-blend bedding (which, if I ever got you into it, I would claim was my backup, and then blow my entire semester’s petty cash on a high-thread-count upgrade). Sara turned on a white-noise machine. “You mind?” she asked. “It’s kind of loud, but I need it to fall asleep.”

We lay on our backs on the narrow mattress, our shoulders but nothing else touching, her body an environmentally friendly space heater. The white-noise machine was, indeed, loud; I would never hear anything in your room over it. As it thrummed, our stomachs produced gurgly video game sounds. Neither of us was making a move, two disoriented and jet-lagged travelers stepping off a plane in a foreign country, unsure if we had to go first to customs or the baggage claim.

Then, imagining the warmth next to me was radiating from you, I grew hard and found myself, almost without any conscious self-direction, turning to kiss Sara. We continued for several minutes in an uncomfortable, torqued position until I rotated on top of her, hoping you’d come in, inconsiderately flip the switch, and view me in a newly sexual light.

I reached for the hem of her shirt. (Oh, Ohio’s minimum-wage movement, if only you knew how your lofty ideals would someday be corrupted.) We were in college, far from watchful parents. It might actually happen. I could reply to Daniel Hallman’s stupid message.