TKO and
I had been hanging out for a few weeks when I finally asked him to be my
boyfriend. We went to the same middle school, but I was invisible to him until the
end of eighth grade when he started popping up randomly with other people I
knew. Throughout middle school, I had watched him date only the most beautiful
girls. When he finally knew who I was, I understood my place as “one of the
guys” for years before I was given reason to reconsider it.
We had
a mutual friend, who mutually ditched us whenever he got a new girlfriend.
Either as a defense mechanism or as revenge we started to hang out without him.
The third night I came over to play Zelda we ended up kissing. He initiated, and
I was overjoyed to reciprocate. He had kissed me only one other time before
that, but that was two years earlier on New Year’s Eve and he was completely blotto.
I also found out later that he made out with any number of girls that night, so
I had kept my excitement to a minimum. But this night we were both hands down
sober and fully aware of what we were doing. After his game, he locked his
piercing blue eyes onto mine and slid his fingers under my hair to pull my face
closer to his. His free hand entwined with mine… and he was willingly,
knowingly, and passionately kissing me with the softest lips I’d ever kissed. I
was surprised as I had ever been. Suddenly I was cool enough, hot enough, and
(not that it mattered to him) smart enough to snag the hottest boy in our
neighborhood.
It had
been enough to be in his bedroom with all of his smells, and his guitar, and
his bed. I was just fine in my place as the platonic girl who came over to play
video games and help baby sit his little sister. It wasn’t until he started
telling me things about himself, his life, his feelings, and his thoughts that
I felt we were leaving the realm of “just friends.” And then, he confirmed it
with that kiss. After that first kiss, it was just what we did after Zelda. It
was very much like a new relationship, we built walls around us. When we were
together we turned off our pagers. We didn’t answer the door or the phone. We became
our mutual friend, and he, especially, took a backseat to our time together.
It might
have gone on forever like that. I’ll never know because I did the girl thing. I
wanted more than what was being offered. I wanted exclusive rights to those
lips, and that room, and Zelda, and the guitar. I wanted to eventually leave
the room and rejoin society with him at my side. I wanted a commitment. He said
no. He didn’t give a reason and I didn’t ask. He just said sorry, and I went
home. Oddly enough, I didn’t cry over him, but I didn’t go back to his house
after that. A part of me still really respects that he wouldn’t agree to
something he didn’t want to do just so I would keep coming over. There are
enough guys that say “yes” when they don’t want to and end up cheating and
lying for the rest of their lives.
TKO was
yesterday and I was onto my next victim. It had actually been a couple of
weeks, but I was in a pretty fresh relationship with a guy too old to live with
his mother and too young to have a kid but did both. I was at work at McDonald’s
and I was fetched from the back because someone had come to see me. TKO just
asked what time I was off and if I would talk to him after. I told when and where,
and he left.
I spent
the rest of my shift trying to psyche myself up for being stood up, but when I
got off work he was waiting for me. I was impressed that he had shown up, duly
moved even. We walked down the road toward his house. He told me he thought he
might have made a mistake and that he wanted to try being with me and see how
it went. I could smell the whisky on his breath, the sweetness stung in my
nostrils. For once, I did the right thing; I did the unimaginable. I told him that
I was no longer interested. I even told
him about my new beau and that I was really quite happy with how things turned
out.
We
walked on anyway until we got to the edge of the park. He took my hand and we
stopped in the road. I turned to face him and his breath was intoxicating. He
locked his piercing blue eyes onto mine and slid his fingers under my hair to
pull my face closer to his. He hesitated, studying my eyes as he swayed
drunkenly in the moonlight. He wrapped his free hand around my waist and I
could tell he was hard without even having kissed me yet. I let my face drop
next to his and our cheeks touched. All I could smell was the whiskey on him,
and I was suddenly overcome with a desire to taste it.
When
our lips met we tumbled onto the grass, and ended up making out in the trees at
the park for an hour. I walked him home feeling a little tipsy myself in the heat
of the summer night. When we got to his house I told him that it didn’t change
anything. I was with the other guy now, and that’s the way it was. He said he
understood and we parted ways.
A few
weeks later, when it wasn’t working out with the other guy, I doubted myself
quite a bit. Fate had delivered me a gift and I refused it. Was it possible to
fuck up destiny? It was impossible to tell. Whichever path you take, you’ll end
up somewhere, right? The relationship that followed was with a nerd who had
never even been with another girl, and it felt a hell of a lot better to be
myself with him, than it did to be so worried about being cool enough for TKO. I
came to realize that he was actually a lot cooler than TKO, sexier too, in ways. The
image you have of people isn’t always who they are when you see them up close,
drunk and stumbling, just as sad and confused as everyone else, wondering if it’s
possible to fuck up destiny. I mistook TKO’s image for what he really was: just
a teenager trying to figure things out.
No comments:
Post a Comment