“I need you to hug me sometimes. I need that warm, overpowering hug to remind me that you’re a real person, and that I’m a real person, too, and that I’m going to be okay. I’m freaked out a lot, you know. But … crap … do you have a girlfriend at home? Jeeeeeeeze, I can’t believe I never asked you. What’s wrong with me?” Her words spill out faster and faster.
“Kennedy … Kennedy. K. Sawyer!” I half-shout through a laugh. The woman across the aisle is thoroughly enjoying my half of the conversation. “Calm down. No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Oh,” she sounds equal parts relieved and disappointed, “I thought you’d developed a guilty conscience about hugging a girl who wasn’t your girlfriend.”
I’m silent because, in part, she’s right.
“Wait,” she starts, as if she can read my brain, “is that it?”
I swallow hard. “Is what it?”
“Is it because of some personal rules about not hugging non-girlfriends? I mean, a couple of the times you hugged me were in pretty emotionally intense situations, so I get that in your mind that might have been getting carried away, or something. And, I know that the CU guidelines are actually less strict for some students than their own personal or home rules … is that you?”
“Again … it’s complicated. I don’t really feel weird about hugging you, but I need to keep that in check.” I decide to be as honest with her as I can be. “Like, I wouldn’t want one of us to get the wrong idea, because then both of us will end up getting hurt. I just …” I trail off, taking a breath to stop myself from telling her I like her like that.
“You just …” she prompts me.
“I’m broken there, Kennedy. I’ve got issues.” Admitting it feels like a ten-ton elephant left my chest, then kicked me in the head.
“Was it a bad breakup? Like, have you been down this road with someone? Sleep with someone and you both, like, regretted it or something?”
“No!” I respond instantly. “There was no bad breakup, and no sex.”
“No sex? Like … ever?”
“No,” I whisper-shout. “I’ve never had sex. What don’t you understand about where I come from?”
Kennedy clicks her tongue. “I understand that people break rules all the time. And, from talk around campus, I realize that I’ve got more in common with Bridgette and Eden than I thought I did in the V-department.”
“You’ve never had sex either?” I try to hide my astonishment, but even the lady across the aisle catches it. She clears her throat in an attempt to hide her laughter, avoiding eye contact with me.
“You sound so surprised,” Kennedy spits out.
“I didn’t have a ton of information to work with, K. Sawyer. Just goin’ with what I know.”
“And that made you think I’d had sex?” She sounds offended, but I’m not about to let her get away with it.
“Don’t give me that,” I challenge her. “You know where I was raised, Kennedy. I’m supposed to save myself for marriage and for a girl who does the same. And everyone who hasn’t come to Jesus has probably stumbled in this area. The teen pregnancy rates are what they are for a reason. Someone is having sex.”
“Did you honestly think I’d had sex before?” she asks. “I mean you know I’m a Christian.”
“Right.” I sigh. “But not born again, so, in some circles, that doesn’t count.”
“Nice,” she cracks.
“Right?” I agree. “What are some things you’ve thought about us?”
“Who? Evangelicals? Or Southerners?”
I grumble. “Both.”
“Okay, as far as Evangelicals go … that you’re all crazy. Too intense. You think you’re all right about Jesus and the Bible is a hundred percent accurate. Oh, and people and dinosaurs walked together and the earth is, like, four-thousand-years-old, or something like that. Which, honestly, leads to the assumption that you’re all a little dumb. Sorry,” she adds in quickly.
“Forgiven?” I ask.
“Forgiven,” she answers. “And me?”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll let you off the hook this time.”
“Oh, come on!” She shouts away from the receiver, so I know she’s not talking to me. “Matt, I gotta go.”
“What’s wrong?” I’d almost forgotten that I’d asked her to talk just so I knew she was okay with that miscreant on the train.
One you’re supposed to love.
Kennedy’s voice is higher pitched than usual. “Our psychedelic baseball fan just spewed his Gatorade all over his seat.” I chuckle at her invisible air-quotes around his beverage of choice. “Good news? We get to move into a new car and he is staying in here. Bad news? I gotta go so I can get my crap together. Then, I’m probably going to try to sleep for a while since I’ll get to Connecticut at the crack of dawn. How much more time do you have on the train?”
I pull my phone away from my ear to check the time. “Just a couple hours.”
“Well, stay out of trouble,” she says with a small laugh. “Text me any excitement, if you should be as lucky as I’ve been today. Oh! Also text me over break, okay?”
“You got it. You text me, too.”
“I will. Oh,” she adds in again. “Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not broken. I don’t know what your story is, and I know you’ll tell me eventually, but you’re definitely not broken.”
I let out a soft sigh. “You’re sweet.”
“So are you. All right, it’s starting to stink in here, gotta go. Bye!”