Teddy Wayne - Loner

Her fingers interlaced with mine with a cheerful squeeze, as if hand-holding were what I was really after. I brought my other hand down and was likewise rejected. Now all four were clasped as I bodysurfed on top of her with our legs braided together, a two-headed octopus in coitus interceptus.

I took the double hint and lifted our tentacles out of harm’s way. Without any demarcating biological event, it was up to one of us to call a ceasefire. I let my kissing subside and parallel parked myself on the wall side of the bed. We spoke only about practical matters: if I wanted water, what time to set the alarm on her phone.

“Is your roommate going to wake us up?” I asked.

“No,” Sara said. “If she comes home, she knows not to turn on the lights anymore.”

“ If she comes home? Where would she be?”

“You do the math,” she said.

We spooned amateurishly, my body acclimating to the alien sensation of sustained contact with someone else’s, my forearm losing circulation under her upper back, my other arm unsure what to do with itself, until I retracted both and flipped over. Sara’s breathing slowed to sleeping pace as I listened for any sound of the door opening, pondering your whereabouts, sorting through the male regulars at your Annenberg table: the one with landscaped stubble (Andy Tweedy), the black guy who favored scarves (Christopher Banks), the rumored Italian baron (Marco Lazzarini).

I stayed awake until dawn pressed through the window shade, and woke up when Sara’s phone tinkled at eight and she took a birth control pill. “To regulate my period,” she explained awkwardly. No signs of your wee-hours entrance, if there’d been one.

A few nights later, after a documentary about migrant laborers in the Southwest, we went back to her room again. Sara talked about how she wanted to see more documentaries, how easy it was to get into an academic bubble here and forget how unjust the world was.

“Well,” I said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”

She squinted at me. “So it’s all right if there are inequalities now, because eventually we’re all dead anyway?”

I smoothed out her comforter with my hand.

“That’s a pretty cynical sentiment,” she said. “There are a lot of people whose lives are almost exclusively hardship. Just because we all die at the end doesn’t make it even.”

“I was only trying to lighten the mood,” I said.

“I know.” She reached for her copy of Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America and handed it to me. “But check this out when you get a chance.” She left for ablutions in the bathroom.

What I wanted was impossible; even this starter relationship was in danger of collapse. How foolishly optimistic to think it might somehow lead to you. When Sara came back I’d tell her that we’d made a mistake and should go back to being friends before anyone got hurt.

As if you’d heard my doubts and were telling me not to surrender, that nothing worthwhile was ever acquired without a struggle, the door was unlocked from the hallway. You looked at me with the vague recognition one has for a stranger on the same daily bus commute and walked toward your room.

“Aren’t you in Prufrock?” I asked, hoping to salvage the moment.

“Yeah.”

“Me, too. I’m David.”

“Nice to meet you,” you said as you opened your door, acknowledging there was no need to add your name — I’d have seen it on the sign outside, but I’d have known it anyway, much as I imagine celebrities don’t have to introduce themselves. And we’d met before, of course, but your error comforted me: our doorway encounter had been so undistinguished that I preferred it be stricken from the record.

Sara returned. “Your roommate’s back,” I said softly while fake reading her book about the unjustness of the world.

She lowered her voice. “Aren’t we lucky.”

I grinned in bogus conspiracy. She had some e-mails to respond to and asked if I minded if she took care of them before bed. “Happy to wait,” I said.

I didn’t have to wait long. You emerged from your room in a white silk bathrobe and flip-flops, a towel over your shoulder and a toiletries basket by your side. My eyes flew a brief reconnaissance mission over the terrain of your calves: still bronzed, the elevated plateaus of muscle sloping down defined cliffs to the lower planes of your Achilles tendons. Elegant, lean feet, callused heels; it looked like you’d spent a lot of time barefoot in the summer. Other guys, the philistines who chugged domestic light beer, might have salivated over the body parts your robe concealed, but I was a connoisseur of your peripheral qualities, an oenophile who sussed out your fruity bouquets and spicy notes.

“Hey,” you said to Sara on your way out.

“Hey,” Sara said, eyes on her laptop screen.

The next twenty minutes felt like days, my imagination rioting with you in the shower. You came back enrobed and glistening, your hair wrapped in the towel. The robe was monogrammed with a stitched, proud wound of VMW over your heart. As you opened the door to your room, an air current caught the tip of the lightweight belt, which fluttered up as if of its own accord.

A hair dryer rumbled in your room. Going out to parts unknown. Worse, you knew precisely what I was doing: tragically staring at a Marxist tome with your bookish roommate. I’d given myself more opportunity for surveillance of you, but it meant you were now privy to my own humdrum existence.

“Night,” you said as you left.

Sara nodded in your direction. “See ya,” I called to your back.

Sara asked if I was ready for bed. I put down the book, waited for her to turn off the lights, and stripped to my boxers and T-shirt.

Once again we lay side by side until, eventually, I kissed and mounted her. It looked like it was going to be the same restrained tussle as before, but tonight I was more driven. I thought of you — in your robe, in the shower — as I rammed against Sara’s dreary gray shorts. This time I succeeded in lifting the RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW!shirt. Her breasts were, to my untrained cupping, perfectly adequate. I pulled off my shirt, hoping my own nudity would induce her to shed additional layers. It didn’t.

“Hold on,” Sara said. She fumbled over her bedside table and her hand came back with a plastic pump dispenser she pressed into mine. “You can use this.”

In the dark, I didn’t know what it was or what its utility would be.

“It’s lotion,” she clarified. “Don’t guys do that? On themselves?”

I took off my boxers and applied the lotion to my erection as I straddled her lower body. With my left hand on her breast, my right took care of myself. I’d never done this in the presence of anyone, but it felt oddly natural.

Then she did something that surprised me: she rubbed under her shorts, her eyes shut, her breaths quickening. As she continued to worry her clitoris, I stayed silent until my denouement, when I startled myself with a squelched grunt. The seed that had been buried in innumerable shrouds of Kleenex now, for once, ended up on another human being.

Sara kept going until her own climax, a small affair that seized up her core muscles before releasing them like a bout of pleasurable indigestion. She reached on top of her bedside table for the white T-shirt she’d worn that day and mopped up her stomach and rib cage. Dropping it on the floor, she put her RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW!shirt back on, then curled her back against my chest. I slung an arm around her.

“Confession,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”

I didn’t say anything, just breathed on her neck.

“Have you?” she asked.