Teddy Wayne - Loner

But tonight no shirt would be necessary. Sara was drunk. So was I. We had both soaked up the collective id of late capitalistic Halloween. I’d waited long enough. I kissed her. She kissed me back and I pressed my erection against her. “Let’s just be naked together,” I said, hooking my fingers under the waistband of her underpants. This time she didn’t object. I rolled them down her legs.

In the midst of a kiss, I allowed the tip of my penis to graze her crotch. She shivered and clasped her hands tighter around my back. I paused and did it again, this time drawing out the contact. After the third pass I whispered, “I want to be inside you.”

“We should wait,” she said, sounding more sober.

“But it feels so good,” I said, poking at an oblique angle. “And I want to feel close to you in a way I haven’t before.” It came off as a cheesy line. I needed something heartfelt.

“I love you,” I said. The words tumbled out with strange ease. I hadn’t told my parents I loved them since I was a child.

The sounds of our breathing. The rumble of her white-noise machine. The clanking of the radiator.

“I love you, too,” Sara said.

I evol uoy, oot.

I cautiously rejoined our bodies.

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” she said.

“We’ll take it slow,” I promised her, gripping my penis and manually rubbing it up and down her vagina. She was wet and didn’t say anything as I guided myself inside.

I won’t lewdly describe the sensation. Greater than the physical pleasure, anyway, was the gratification of clearing away the stigmatized reek of virginity I emanated.

“I want to come inside you,” I whispered into her ear. She didn’t protest, and so I did, in a gloriously undammed eruption whose aftermath felt so unlike the disgrace that typically accompanied my self-inflicted climaxes. This was more akin to extricating a slimy clot of hair from a sink drain and watching the filthy standing water swirl out of sight with a satisfying glug.

And with that, my chronic ache for you felt a little less acute. I was a copulative agent now, same as you, inducted into the society of those who practiced physical intimacy in its most classic form. You weren’t towering above me anymore.

“Have you done that before?” I imagined you asking, our limbs tethered in a postcoital clutch.

“Of course,” I’d say, and it would be true.

In the morning Sara seemed aloof, or maybe bashful; she didn’t mention anything about the threshold we’d crossed hours earlier, and I wasn’t going to bring it up. Perhaps it was the result of her vicious hangover. Or maybe it was her attempt to mirror my cool, which she likely attributed to my veteran reaction to intercourse: the emotionless junction of anatomies, a mercantile transfer of bodily fluids, nothing worth making a fuss about.

Yet inwardly I was rejoicing over my new status, estimating how many of the other freshmen in the dining hall were virgins — those sad, perfect little Harvard students who spent all their time in libraries. Indeed, there was more to college than studying.

I went to Sara’s room that night, hoping to repeat our performance and to see you. Neither event happened. Though we still didn’t discuss having had sex, upon getting into bed she mentioned that she was having painful premenstrual cramps. I took the hint and we went to sleep.

Only three more weeks until our next paper was due in Prufrock. Based on the successful results of our first collaboration, I expected another request for assistance. I just needed to go through the motions a little longer with Sara.

That Friday evening we saw Macbeth at the American Repertory Theater, with Layla as a third wheel, and went afterward to a nearby café for tea. As we waited in line, I observed a cat — I assume the owner’s — staring with a stoner’s intensity at a heating vent. Eventually a cockroach crawled out of the vent, and the cat lunged. But instead of killing it, it pawed the insect around, curtailing its path in every direction.

I nudged the girls and pointed. Layla looked disgusted; Sara, distressed.

“Don’t watch,” Sara said, turning away. “It’s upsetting.”

The cat flipped its quarry on its exoskeleton and, as the cockroaches’ legs waved feebly in the air, enjoyed the spectacle for a few moments before further torturing it.

My attention was diverted by a familiar voice at the front of the line. Tom the TF. When he was done placing his order, I stepped forward to say hello. This was what I had imagined my life here would be like: bumping into people I knew wherever I went, even grad students.

“Tom,” I said as Sara and Layla spectated. “It’s David.”

He looked as if he were trying to place me.

“From Prufrock,” I added to jog his memory. “Not your section, though.”

“Nice meeting you,” he said.

“We actually met a few weeks ago. At another café, in fact — the Barker Café.” I forced a chuckle. “You made the joke about how your section devolves into prurient discussions about nineteenth-century sexuality.”

He thought for a couple of seconds. “Oh, right-right-right,” he said, seemingly less self-possessed out of a classroom context. “This is my wife, Lucy.” He put his arm around the woman by his side. “And I’m sorry — remind me of your name?”

“David.” Though not in the same league as you, his wife was sleekly attractive, and it baffled me that she’d be with Tom. Ever since the Barker encounter, I’d found his comments in Prufrock — especially the sardonic ones — increasingly smarmy. He wasn’t even that good-looking; he just carried himself as if he were.

“Are you an English grad student here, too?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I teach comp lit at Colby in Maine.”

The barista set two lidded cups on the counter. “And she’s been driving all day,” Tom said, grabbing them. “So we should get going. Have a good weekend.”

After our orders came we took a table. I had a hot chocolate with soy milk and Sara and Layla shared a pot of decaf green tea. Sara dispensed quarter cups at a time so that it wouldn’t lose its heat, thwarting any burns by vacuum-sipping the liquid’s surface. The girls talked about their elementary school drama careers, one-upping each other with tales of botched lines and missed stage cues.

“I wish I could act,” Sara said wistfully. “Not for plays, but because it would have benefited me in a number of life situations. David, try my tea, it’s really good.”

She poured a fresh serving and passed me her cup. I took a gulp, singeing the roof of my mouth, and loudly sucked in cool air through my teeth.

“Is he okay?” asked Layla as I rocked in discomfort.

“He’s fine,” Sara assured her. It took some time for me to recover, and when I did, Sara gave me a tender pat on the head. “It’s a good thing you’ll never have to endure childbirth.” She turned to Layla. “David doesn’t have the highest pain threshold.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know,” she said. “You’re always whining about the littlest things.”

“No I’m not.”

“It’s okay that you’re sort of delicate,” Sara said, now rubbing my back. “I’m not the kind of girl who needs her boyfriend to be some manly soldier.”

“Did you ever act in high school, David?” Layla politely inquired, trying to head off a lovers’ spat.

My last theatrical role was a nonspeaking part as an anonymous Pilgrim in a fourth-grade Thanksgiving production.

“Actually, I was in Macbeth senior year,” I said.

“You were ?” Sara said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”