The third time Cross came over, he was half-lying on me, our arms were already tangled (it surprised me how sloppy hooking up was, and how this was one of the good parts: how your bodies did not become sleek and precise, as in a synchronized swimming routine, but how they remained your bodies-your arm still hurt if the other person’s weight was distributed the wrong way, your nose could bump his collarbone, and this clumsiness made me feel at home, like Cross and I were friends) when I said to him, “We can’t stay in here. We can’t-” and then he cut me off by kissing me and I said, “No, Cross, really-” and then we were kissing more and then I heard Martha roll over, and I said, “Just follow me. Get up and follow me.”
Stepping into the brightly lit hall was terrible. I had pulled him out of bed, tugging him across the room, but when I’d opened the door we’d lost physical contact and to be in the light, not touching at all, was hideous; I missed him, and I also felt self-conscious because he was behind me. Was my hair sticking up in back, and really, did Cross even know what I looked like in the light? I certainly wasn’t about to turn around, face-to-face, and show him.
“Wait up,” he mumbled as he followed me, and then I opened the door to the day student room. The room had one window, with the shade up, and light from a lamppost outside made it possible to see. On the bed was a sleeping bag and I lay on it, and then I sat up and reached for Cross and he was on top of me again, his khaki pants and belt buckle, the buttons down his shirt, my face at the side of his neck, just below his left ear, his stubble and how good he smelled and how warm he always was and how much I liked to be with him. I already recognized, even then, the sadness of another person lying on top of you. They will always leave (what’s someone going to do, just lie there forever?) and that’s the sad part. You can always feel the imminent loss.
It seemed to me, and it kept seeming like this for a long time, that this was what it was to love a boy-to feel consumed. I’d awaken in the morning, without him, thinking, I love you so much, Cross. Knowing that other people would not consider what went on between us to be love-of course they wouldn’t-only made me more certain. When he arrived at night, tapping my shoulder in the dark, then the two of us walking down the hall to the day student room, then finally being in bed again, our bodies overlapping, my arms around his back-that was one of the times when not telling him I loved him required willpower. Also when he was about to leave. I loved him so much! Later, with other guys, I’d think, Do I? Is this what it feels like? Does love feel different with different people? But with Cross, I never wondered. There was nothing about him I didn’t like. The other guys, guys in my future, were maybe also tall but as slim as girls, they listened to classical music and drank wine and liked modern art, and they seemed to me like sissies. Or we had enough to say to each other to fill an evening, we could go to a baseball game, but it never stopped being an effort. Or their fingers were-not stubby, but not long and sure. If I kissed these guys, I’d wonder if it would turn out to be an obligation, if I was moving forward into a situation from which I’d later have to extricate myself. It’s not that they were unattractive, they weren’t boring. But I never thought of what Cross wasn’t, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn’t even care what we talked about. It was never a compromise.
Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me.
If people asked, which not many did, I said I was staying on campus for long weekend to work on college applications. Really, I was staying at school because school was the place of Cross. He was leaving, of course-I knew, not because we’d talked about it but because I’d listened to a conversation in the dining hall, that he and a few other guys were going to Newport to stay with Devin’s mother and stepfather-but at least school would be the place he’d been and was coming back to, whereas Martha’s house in Burlington, where I’d gone every long weekend since freshman year, would only be a detour; all I’d be doing was waiting to leave.
Martha was taking the bus, a bus I’d been on with her many times, and just before she caught the one from Ault that would transport her and other students into Boston and leave them off at South Station, she stood facing me in the room. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she said. “I promise I won’t distract you.”
“It’s better for me to stay here,” I said. “But tell your parents hi.”
Martha looked at me. “You’re okay, right? Nothing’s wrong?”
“Go,” I said and hugged her. “You’ll miss the bus.”
I was relieved as I watched the buses pull away. In the room alone, I lay on the futon, not reading, not sleeping, not even shutting my eyes, and I thought of Cross. I thought of him otherwise, of course, but it was while I was doing things, and when I tried to think of him at night, I usually fell asleep; but lying alone on the futon was almost like meditating. Everything that had happened between us, every comment he’d made, each way he’d touched me, I could now think about for longer than the thing had taken to occur.
For a while, I was glad it was getting dark, glad that campus was mostly empty-the only people who stayed around for long weekend were the ones who didn’t get invited somewhere, or were too poor to travel, or both. There was a long weekend every term, and as a freshman, I’d stayed on campus for all three, though it was hard to remember how I’d spent them-reading magazines probably, and waiting for it to be time to go to a meal, and feeling isolated. But maybe this was the beginning of my luck, maybe from now on, I’d get what I wanted most, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever want anything more than I wanted Cross.
He had been coming over for three weeks by then, and we’d almost had sex. A few nights before, we’d both had all our clothes off, and his penis had been jabbing at me not so it hurt but so it felt like something I wanted. I had opened my legs to him and neither of us had spoken because if we did, it could only be to acknowledge what was happening.
Finally, I said, “Do you-”
He was kissing my shoulder. He did not say anything but I could feel him listening.
The moment stretched. He propped himself up to look at me. My hands had been set on either side of his rib cage, but I became self-conscious and pulled my arms in, as if to block a ball from hitting my chest. He moved my arms, first one, then the other, and set them at my sides. I liked this about him, how he didn’t let me get away with things. If it was like we were starting from the beginning every time, it wasn’t that I was testing him. It was more like needing proof: You want to be here; you want to touch me. In these moments, when I was stiff or bashful, he’d say, “No shyness,” and burrow into me, and shyness seemed such a generous word for it.
“Do I what?” he said. He was smiling.
What could I ever say to equal Cross’s face above mine, Cross’s smile? Down below, the stabbing was milder now, but both of us were still moving.
He settled back onto me and said, “You have the softest hair in the world,” which was a compliment I loved. Because I couldn’t control it, it seemed true, not like if I were wearing perfume and he said I smelled good.
He was nudging my legs further apart, starting to enter, and I felt the first flash of not actual pain but anticipatory pain. But I didn’t know I was resisting until he said, “What?” Then he said, “It’s cool,” which I thought for a split second was his way of reassuring me that it was okay if I didn’t want to go through with it. But that wasn’t what he meant-he was still easing my legs open with his own.
“I just don’t think-” I said, and then he stopped. It was good he stopped, and also a letdown. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I knew I shouldn’t. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said.