“Does that mean you do want to?”
In a small voice, I said, “Yes.”
“Then what’s wrong?” He asked it softly, not accusingly.
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you afraid it’ll hurt?”
I sometimes wondered if Cross knew just how inexperienced I was; this question indicated that he did, or at least that he knew I was a virgin.
“I’ll go really slow,” he said.
“We don’t even have a condom.”
“I know you hear all this sex ed stuff, but I can pull out. I’ll be careful.”
It wasn’t really because of not having a condom. But it was hard to say what it was because of. And it was hard to believe this moment was existing-that Cross was trying to persuade me to have sex and I was declining. It did not feel, as I might have imagined, satisfying; instead, it felt weird and precarious.
“We could do other stuff,” I said.
He didn’t reply. But the energy had changed, with that single comment. I’d been at the top of the teeter-totter, perched in the air, and then I’d thudded to the bottom; I was squatting on the ground, calling up to Cross.
“I want to make you feel good,” I said, and I didn’t even realize until the words were out that they were the same ones he’d uttered the first time he’d come to my room. If he had said, Why?–he’d have to have said it on purpose, a further echo of our earlier conversation-I’d have thought he was great. I’d have wanted us to watch bad movies together, to go bowling together, to eat too much and tell embarrassing stories. I’d have thought we had the same sense of humor, which-there was enough Cross gave me, more than enough; it’s not a complaint-we didn’t.
“I want to make you-” I couldn’t say the word come.
“Come?” he said.
I was quiet. In all the times we’d hooked up-he visited every three nights or so, five times so far, and in the time between his visits I always convinced myself that the time before had been his last, he wouldn’t be returning-he had never come. I had held his penis only once, and it had been another moment in which I’d had no idea what I was doing. All those years of reading women’s magazines, and I couldn’t even remember the fundamentals of a hand job-I had simply run my curled fingers up and down the length of it. I’d been lying on my side, and he’d begun rubbing my thigh and hip and then his fingers slid down and into me and it had seemed confusing (surely, this notion would strike other people as laughable), it had seemed chaotic even, for both activities to be happening at once. I’d wondered if he was trying to let me know he’d had enough of my hand. I let it fall away from him and rolled my body toward his, and he said, “You like to be close, don’t you?” I was always yanking away the sleeping bag if it got wedged between us, or making sure we touched at all points if we were spooning. And it seemed like these were things he wanted, too, but the truth was that there was almost nothing about Cross or Cross with me that I knew for sure. I’d considered asking Martha about the fact that Cross had never come, but I feared that the explanation would reveal an inadequacy in me so humiliating that it was better not to share it even with her-wasn’t it a joke how fast high school boys usually came? Also, I suspected that both Martha and Cross were people who’d disapprove of disclosing intimate details. If it would bother only one of them, I might have told Martha, but imagining the double force of their censure stopped me.
“What are you saying?” Cross asked.
I didn’t reply, but I understood how now I had to go through with the thing I had not even been certain I was proposing until I had heard in his voice that that was what he took my proposal to be. I had to go through with it not because he would make me, not because he was trying to show me that I was testing his patience but because I actually was testing his patience. And anyway, I had been the one to bring it up.
“Here,” I said, and I shifted so he’d shift, too. He rolled onto his back, and I got onto my knees and let my hair hang in front of my face-as if it might veil how my stomach looked from this angle-and scooted backward. It was very different to be naked above Hillary Tompkins’s sleeping bag, out in the dark but not pitch-black air, than it was to be naked beneath it. I was straddling him above the knees. Then it was like when you had to do a presentation in class and you felt like you needed some official sign to begin, like a whistle in a race, but instead everyone was just waiting for you and the most official thing that would happen would be that you’d say okay a few times: “Okay. Okay, the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War, began in 1754…”
I even said, “Okay.” Then I crouched down, and as I did, I thought of how probably there were women who did this in daylight, their asses exposed, bobbing toward the ceiling, and how I would never, ever be one of them. I had hoped, without realizing I was anticipating such an event in my own life, that it would feel different from what it was: something bigger than you’d ever under normal circumstances put in your mouth going into your mouth. It seemed difficult to breathe. I didn’t like it-I definitely didn’t. But then, in its uncomfortableness, I felt a sort of nobility-a kinship with all the girls who’d done this before me for the boys they liked (I thought of Sophie Thruler, Cross’s girlfriend from freshman year), an affection for myself for being willing to do it, an affection for Cross for being a person I would do it for. It made me feel like an adult, like drinking wine would later, before I liked the taste of it.
He set his hands on my shoulders, lightly, and occasionally, he’d reach for one of my breasts, he’d swipe it-I had not thought of him as guarded before, but he definitely was the most unguarded I’d ever seen him-and he was gasping and moaning in a ragged, sometimes high-pitched way that startled me. I wondered, did all boys make noises like this? And I felt glad that it was Cross, who could never disgust or offend me, whom I was first seeing this way. If it had been another boy who seemed less cool or less experienced, I might have judged him, chalking up such a reaction to his uncoolness or inexperience.
In the middle-until then, I’d been doing with my mouth pretty much what I’d done the other time with my hand, a steady up-and-down motion-I actually did remember a tip from a magazine: Treat his penis like a delicious ice cream cone. I slid my mouth off and began to lick the sides, nodding and turning my head. Less than a minute had passed when Cross shuddered once and then the hot milky liquid was all over my chest. If he’d come in my mouth, I would have swallowed it; I definitely would have. He reached for me, pulling me back up to him, and when I was lying against his chest, he petted my back, squeezed my ass and arms, kissed my forehead. He said, “That was a great blow job,” and I felt prouder than if I’d gotten an A on a math test. Was it possible that I had a particular gift? If I did, it would be like with haircutting (except better) and the fact that I didn’t find the act particularly enjoyable would be irrelevant. When you were really good at something, you just did it, because it was a waste not to. In the next second, of course, I wondered if Cross was only trying to make me feel good, but in the second after that, I thought that if he were, Cross trying to make me feel good was in itself a reason to be happy.
That episode had been earlier in the week. The first night of long weekend, while I was lying on the futon, the memory still felt bright and thick; I didn’t sense yet how over the next few days I would return to it until it was frayed and diluted, a mental exercise rather than a physical interaction with another person.
It was completely dark-it had started getting dark at four-thirty-and it occurred to me just to go to sleep for the night, but then I’d probably awaken at eleven p.m., disoriented and hungry. I stood and turned on a light and pulled down the shades, and I felt the first ache of loneliness, the first inkling that staying on campus might have been a mistake. I turned on Martha’s computer and clicked on my college essays folder and, inside that, the file titled “Brown app.” Then I sat looking at the single, incomplete paragraph I’d written the week before: My most unusual quality is that I am from the Midwest yet I have lived in New England for the last three years… I wished that at that moment, instead of facing a computer screen, I was making out with Cross, and that he was reaching up my nightgown or inside my underwear.