“Well, I don’t know what women think either, but I think I’d like to touch you.”
I tried not to laugh when I thought about the exchange of services: a hand job for calculus help. I said it aloud, and Mark flinched.
“Let’s leave anything to do with school out of this,” he said.
“What? It’s funny,” I replied. “Stop being so uptight.”
He relaxed then and watched me carefully as I unbuttoned his jeans. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d never touched one or seen one in the flesh. My limited knowledge of penises extended to the sex ed class at school. But a flat picture in a book is far different from the real thing. I couldn’t pretend to have a clue.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, and it came out a mixture of fear and irritation. And maybe a sprinkle of fascination thrown in, too.
Mark sighed. Not out of frustration, though. It sounded like a sigh of helplessness. Did he not know how to direct me?
“Cadence, I feel weird about this,” he said. I unzipped his jeans but stopped when he grabbed my hand. “Let’s just wait.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Something feels strange to me about it,” he said.
I cocked my head. “Really? You ate me out this morning.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” I said.
“I don’t wanna be the one teaching you how to do that,” he blurted.
“Why?”
“Because it makes me feel guilty.”
“Why?”
“Jesus Christ, Cadence! I don’t know.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” I replied automatically.
“Oh, man. Okay, that’s why,” he said, and pushed my hand away, zipping and buttoning his pants.
“What? Because I’m a Christian? I can’t touch you or blow you because I’m a Christian?” I wasn’t mad when I said it. I was confused. I really wanted to understand where he was coming from.
“Why don’t we get back to work?” Mark suggested, picking up his pen.
“No!” I cried, and slapped the pen right out of his hand. It flew across the room and hit his flat screen. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Cadence, you’re adorable, and I wanna keep you that way,” Mark said, looking me square in the face.
I shook my head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“If you touch me, it changes things,” Mark said.
“What? I’m not innocent Cadence anymore?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do you realize how stupid that sounds? You’ve seen me naked,” I said.
“I realize that.”
Silence.
“Don’t you want me to touch you?” I asked softly.
“Yes,” Mark replied just as softly. He gripped the tops of his thighs while he said it, like the words were painful leaving his lips.
“I’ll still be innocent. It’s not like I’m going around touching and blowing a bunch of guys. It would only be you. Ever.”
Mark nodded.
“Look at me,” I demanded. He did. “How do you expect to ever have sex with me if you won’t let me touch you? You have to give yourself to me like I’m giving myself to you. It’s not wrong. It’s not dirty. It won’t change me in a bad way. It’ll draw me closer to you. And that’s good, don’t you think?”
I saw the tension go out of his body then. He actually sunk a little deeper into the couch as he nodded.
“You’re so interesting and insightful,” he said after a time.
“And can you believe I’m only seventeen?” I joked.
“That’s what I like about you, Cadence. You’re definitely seventeen in many ways. You like your little fashion magazines and gossiping and shopping. And I love to hear all of it. But you also have a wisdom and maturity that not many girls your age have. I like that dichotomy.”
“I know that word!” I teased.
Mark grinned. “That’s why you’re irresistible. That’s why you turn me on.”
I moved on top of him, straddling his hips.
“You didn’t know what a doctoral program was when I mentioned it to you, did you?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I went home and looked it up.”
“I know you did. But you could have just asked me.”
“I didn’t want to sound stupid,” I confessed.
“You’re not stupid at all. How can you even think that after saying something so profound to me?” He cupped my face and studied my eyes. “I like you without make-up.”
“I just wanna be able to keep up,” I said. Whatever that meant.
“You do.”
“So are we cool?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re cool. But I’ll be honest, I’m not ready for you to touch me right now. Kind of not in the mood.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m totally over it.”
Mark laughed as I climbed off his lap. We went back to our work, chatting pleasantly in intermittent conversations about random things.
“What’s your favorite color?” I asked after five minutes of silence.
“Green.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s pleasant to the eye.”
Ten minutes went by before a break in the silence.
“I read somewhere that women’s brains look like cooked spaghetti, and guys’ brains look more like a grid,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” Mark replied. “How do you figure?”
“Well, the spaghetti is supposed to represent how women multitask. How we have a bazillion things going on in our brains at one time, and they all kind of run together.”
“Uh huh.”
“But guys compartmentalize things. That’s why your brains look like grids. Everything is organized in nice, neat little boxes,” I explained. “And you can focus on one thing at a time.”
“Interesting,” Mark said. He grabbed his HTC tablet off the coffee table and typed something. He held up the device so that I could see the screen. “Cadence, this is what a brain looks like.”
I laughed. “Shut up! I meant metaphorically.”
“Oh, okay. Just making sure.”
Another bout of silence before I piped up.
“What’s it like to suck a dick?” I asked. Perhaps at the wrong time. Mark was taking a sip of his beer and he choked. It was exactly like something out of a cartoon. The beer went flying out of his mouth in a violent spray, and I fell over laughing.