She groaned. This was her night of reckoning with Peter, her boyfriend of almost two months now. She was supposed to meet him and a few other friends at Max’s Garden on Avenue B for dinner. There was an unspoken agreement that “tonight would be the night” at last, with most of the agreement coming from him and her getting tired of putting him off. Peter was handsome enough and smart enough and nice enough but Finn had always been very careful about who she went to bed with.
In Columbus, at sixteen, Finn had already been wonderfully beautiful and dreadfully shy. It was a deadly combination. Boys her own age were terrified of the beautiful dream and bolstered their own feelings of inadequacy by calling her the Red-hot Iceberg and the Red Snapper. The result was she never went out on dates and by the end of her sixteenth year she hadn’t been so much as kissed on the cheek by a boy.
Eventually she’d thrown caution to the winds and told her problem to a young junior professor she babysat for, a widower in the English department at OSU who had a little two-year-old boy. She’d had a secret crush on him from the time they first met over a diaper change, so in the end she didn’t have trouble believing that in one night she’d gone from never-been-kissed to not-a-virgin-anymore, and she’d never regretted it for a minute. It might be the kind of thing Oprah would have called sexual abuse, but she hadn’t felt that way about it then, or now. To her it had been a miracle. On the other hand it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about very often.
The man had been kind, gentle and by later comparison, an astoundingly good lover. He’d also been smart enough to limit the relationship to a few months, not long enough to make her feel obligated to something beyond strong friendship. But he gave Finn enough time to gain the experience and the confidence she desperately needed, and taught her a few things about teenage boys.
He’d also given her a firm, practical grounding in condoms and how to use them and told her every excuse a guy was likely to come up with for not using one. By now she’d heard them all and more besides. She had a few condoms in her bedside table just in case, and there was always one tucked into one of the secret pockets in her wallet. Neither AIDS nor pregnancy was in the cards for her future, and somehow she didn’t think Peter was either. Of the five men she’d been to bed with since the professor, only two had been worth all the complications and the emotional ups and downs; the others had been clinging, needy or jealously possessive-and in one case, all three.
She’d long ago come to the conclusion that sex and love got confused far too often and this time she was pretty sure she was confusing it with Peter. Right now he was looking for both sex and love, and she wasn’t really looking for either. If she was looking for a relationship now it would be with a man to give her strong friendship as well. What she wanted was give-and-take; Peter was looking for all take and no give.
She reached out, grabbed the telephone on the bedside table and sat there with it in her hand, doodling on a little notepad. She could always beg off the date by telling him she was feeling under the weather, but he’d probably want to come over with chicken soup or something. She saw that she’d drawn a rough sketch of the Michelangelo drawing on her pad and grimaced. Who’d have thought finding an old master could get her into trouble? She still couldn’t figure out why Crawley had gotten so angry. She started drawing in as many of the veins, organs and ligaments as she could remember and then gave up. She hung up the phone without dialing. The least she could do was tell him in person. She sighed, got up and started to dress. Tonight, she feared, was not going to be Peter’s night after all. So how does one dress to tell a guy he isn’t going to get lucky?
5
They walked back to her apartment, strolling slowly down Avenue A, listening to the music coming up out of the little basement clubs, smelling the aromas from a dozen different cuisines from around the world. Finn was in no hurry to get home from Max’s but she could feel the tension coming off Peter in waves.
He had his arm around her waist, his hand slipped into the tight pocket of her Levi’s and about every third step his hip would bump into hers. In high school she would have cut off her left boob to walk down a street with a boy like that but now it just seemed… high school. Like a guy going out and finding a street sign with your name on it and stealing it for you. She sighed. Maybe that was the point; Peter was just too damn high school.
“You okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You sighed.”
“Sometimes people sigh, Peter.”
“You’re not getting your period or something?” He sounded nervous, as though menstruating was some kind of disease.
“Or something? Something like what? The clap? A yeast infection? Vaginal warts. Herpes maybe?”
He flushed, hurt at the hardness of her tone. “No, no, I didn’t mean anything like that. It’s just you’ve been down all evening and I thought maybe…”
“Thought maybe it would screw up your evening or something? Make things a little too messy for you? Blood and gore on the sheets?”
“No,” Peter answered a little distantly. “I didn’t mean that either.” He took his hand out of her pocket and moved away from her side a little. He smiled tightly. “Where I come from girls don’t talk like that.”
“Yes, they do, Peter. You just never listened.”
She sighed again. She was treating him horribly and it wasn’t really fair of her. She was being a bitch and that wasn’t her at all. It was one thing to let a person down easily, it was something else to shoot him down in flames.
“Look,” she explained, “I just got fired from my job for no reason. I was pretty sure I’d done something good and it turned out to be bad and I got into a fight with someone and wound up looking like an idiot. On top of that, Alexander Crawley is the biggest inflated-ego chauvinistic prick I’ve ever met in my life!”
“Gee,” said Peter. “And I was worrying that it might be me.” He gave her a boyish grin and her resolve wavered briefly. They reached the door to her building and she got out her keys.
Somehow a few seconds later she was kissing Peter. After the day she’d had at the museum she could feel her decision beginning to weaken even more. His lips felt soft and warm and his tongue poked coolly and insistently between her teeth. She could feel that little space right underneath her stomach begin to melt.
Then she tasted cinnamon Tic Tacs and realized he’d somehow popped one into his mouth a little while back, already planning his attack. His hand went up to her breast and she gently removed it. She broke the kiss.
“Not tonight, Pete. Really. I’m too tired.”
“At least let me see you to the door of your apartment.” He turned on the grin again. The grin and the Tic Tac seemed to go together.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“But I want to.” He shrugged. “God knows what might be waiting for you in the elevator.”
“The elevator monster,” said Finn. “And you’re it.”
“Then I’ll protect you from myself,” he said. She laughed and turned the key and the two of them went inside.
Peter started kissing her again on the way up in the elevator and by the time the long jerky ride to the fifth floor was over she knew she was probably going to make a mistake and invite him in after all.
She also knew that she was just looking for comfort and distraction from the events of the day and Peter would try to turn it into much more than that, but right now she really didn’t care. She wanted his taste and his smell and the feel of him. Maybe it was time she allowed herself to be the selfish one. After all, it wasn’t her job to protect him from the realities of life. She wasn’t his mother, for God’s sake! She giggled at the Freudian implications of that thought and turned her door key in the lock.