the love that was radiating from my body. It was like he just turned the valve a little to the left and it started to flow right out of me. I thought his smile was from being happy—happy that I loved him and that we were sharing this moment. But then he started to tell me about the girl he’d walked in with.”
This is the part where I do pause. One hand squeezes the glass. The other begins to close, fingers bending in perfect unison until they reach the palm.
The smell of the fire. The damp brush of the deep woods. We steal a kiss behind a tree. He breaks away. He looks at me with tenderness, and I have a moment where I believe that I have finally done it. I have given enough, been enough. He opens his mouth to speak. I think the words before he says them.
But he didn’t say the words old me was waiting for. The small child tugging on a sleeve, wide eyes. Pleading eyes. And the words that he did say filled me with a bigger rage than I had ever known.
Jonathan has guessed it.
“He told you she was his girlfriend,” he says.
I nod. “He said he needed to get back to her. And the thing is, I was not the kind of girl who would cry and beg and plead. That was my mother, so I knew it was useless—and besides that, it repulsed me, violently, to show any sign of weakness, even if I was weak. So instead I just shrugged. I told him he’d better go, then, before she got mad at him.”
I see us now, in my glass of scotch. I see Mitch and remember the swirling together of warm, lusty bliss and red-hot rage. Danger waking me from the illusion of safety. My hands in fists at my sides, but a smile on my face because I knew how to win that fight. Or, at least, I thought I did.
“Then he said, changing course, I could send her home. He was a worthy opponent that way. When I didn’t try to stop him, he brought out bigger guns. I said he should do what he wants. And he said that he had a dilemma.”
I hear his words. I’m back in those woods.
I have a dilemma.…
What dilemma…?
I know she loves me. But I don’t think you do.
“He said I needed to prove it to him.”
“What the hell did he mean by that?” Jonathan asks. He seems genuinely pissed off on my behalf.
“He meant exactly what you think he meant,” I say. “He wanted me to sleep with him.”
“Well, I hope you realized what was going on!” Jonathan is so sweet to be concerned for me eleven years after the fact.
Of course I realized what was going on. The boy I loved wanted me to have sex with him as a condition to staying with me. To loving me. Not exactly earth-shattering stuff.
“So what did you do?” Jonathan asks. His eyes are wide, his brow furrowed.
“I laughed like it was no big deal. I told him I’d been with someone else all summer, so he missed his chance to be my first. I told him I was worried he wouldn’t measure up, but I was happy to find out. Let’s go, I said. Honestly, this story should make you go back to the kitchen and grab your keys and walk me straight to my car.”
Jonathan places a hand on my shoulder. “Why? Because you were young and in love and couldn’t make the best decision?”
“It’s more than that. Most girls would have run away in tears, cried to their friends. Got shit-faced, puked, then gotten on with their lives. That’s what Rosie would have done.”
I’m not digging for sympathy, or for one more person to let me off the hook for my self-destructive behavior. I hate this part of me, then, now, and at every moment in between. She is undeserving of sympathy.
I look at Jonathan Fielding and wonder if it’s this part of me that has drawn me to him. That let him inside my head, which is the straightest path to my heart.
I’ve paused to drink and ponder. Jonathan is eager for the end. He says nothing, but stares at me with that serious expression.
“But I’m not like those other girls. Not like my sister. I rattled off things I could do with him—using as many obscenities as possible—and then I asked him if he knew what