“Because I love you.” Her eyes were wide and dark in the lantern shadows. Her voice broke a little and I realized how close we were: one furious, aching breath apart.
Instantly I dropped her and turned away, fighting for control.
“It’s a crush. An infatuation.” I wiped the cooled sweat from my forehead and tried to put some distance between us.
“No one will suspect, Peter.” She was right behind me.
“Stop this.”
“No one will know I’m yours.”
“You’re not mine.” I turned around and she paused, too. She wasn’t confident enough to bridge that last gap. Still a child. I took advantage of her hesitation, of that last flicker of innocence.
“Can’t you see how wrong this is?”
“I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know until it was too late. I’d already fallen.” Her voice was low, pleading now, and it started to break things inside me, things I’d spent weeks fortifying. “I just want you to look at me like you feel it, too. I know you do. I didn’t imagine it.”
“What were you planning on doing, Hattie? Sleeping with us both?”
“No.” She swallowed. “Just you.”
My mouth went dry and my blood shifted from a pound to a dangerous pulse.
“But you let him kiss you.”
“Are you jealous?” A smiled flashed across her face and was gone. “It’s just acting, Peter. There’s not much to being Tommy’s girlfriend. I could have nailed it when I was twelve.”
I took a step closer, compelled beyond reason toward this girl who kept shedding masks like a matryoshka doll, each one more audacious than the last, a psychological striptease that racked me with the need to tear her apart until I found out who or what was inside.
“Is your entire life an act?”
She dropped her head and something like shame finally crossed her face.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And what role am I supposed to be playing?”
“None!” Her head snapped back up.
“You’ve planned this whole scene.”
“No! It’s not like that.”
“Who am I, Hattie? The big-city teacher who throws his whole life away for you? Who sweeps you off your lying feet? Like this?”
In a heartbeat I closed the distance between us and hauled her up again. “Is this the part where I declare my love? Where I tell you I can’t get you out of my goddamn head?”
“Yes,” she choked out.
“How does the fantasy go, Hattie? What comes next?”
Her eyes swarmed with fear, anger, and arousal, everything that had been torturing me since the Jane Eyre play, and then I knew what came next, what I couldn’t stop myself from doing any longer.
We moved at the same time. I took her mouth in a race of lip, tongue, and teeth, and pulled her down to the floor with me, straight into the welcome blood rush of hell.
HATTIE / January 2008
I LOST my virginity when I was fifteen, although lost is a funny word for it. I didn’t misplace it like a homework assignment or a cell phone. It wasn’t like I could find it again and tuck it back in there. I gave it away in Mike Crestview’s basement on an old sofa with a cabbage-leaf print while we watched Lord of the Rings. I suppose it was a pretty typical first time, except I wasn’t all starry-eyed about Mike. I was curious more than anything. You can’t watch that many seasons of Sex and the City without getting a little curious. And Mike was a nice enough guy, a senior all excited to leave for college. I probably liked that excitement as much as anything else about him.
We were watching the part where Gandalf fights the fire monster and falls into hell or wherever when I asked Mike if he wanted to have sex.
He seemed pretty surprised. He was actually better friends with Greg than with me, but Greg was gone for the weekend, so I’d come over alone.
“Do you have a condom?” I asked him. “If not, we can forget it.”
It was kind of hilarious how fast he found a condom and made sure his parents were still at the grocery store.
The sex itself was bumpy and weird and I didn’t help very much. Mike said he’d done it before, so I just lay back and let it happen, observing more than participating, I guess. The thing I remembered most, besides the scratchy fabric rubbing my butt, was the vein that popped out in Mike’s forehead, like a curvy blood river. After that I figured I understood what sex was all about, and didn’t have any urge to try it again.
Last fall, as my junior year started and Mike was off enjoying life in Minneapolis, my grandpa passed away right in the middle of harvest and my parents had to go to Iowa to take care of the details.