He laughed and said, So you want me to come early, huh?
—Omar, god! You know what I mean. Just – just come over tomorrow.
—All right, he laughed.
I inspected my knees, the spikes of hair on them I needed to shave.
—Hey, I said. I should warn you I’ve gotten really, really fat since you last saw me.
—For real? I heard him shift the phone to his other ear. I didn’t expect him to play along with my joke, but he said, Like how big are we talking?
—I probably gained two, three hundred pounds I’m guessing.
He whistled into the phone. He said, You’re still fucking weird, El, but that’s okay I guess.
After a second he said, I can’t blame you for beefing up for the winter.
I laughed, and he said, But is it okay if I’m still ripped as hell? Because I am fucking fine. I’m still lifting like crazy and I am so fucking cut up these days it might be hard for you to keep your fat hands off me. That’s okay, right?
I’d blocked out so much of our last night together before leaving for New York—the humiliating tow truck, the birth control I didn’t mention because he’d assume it meant I was planning to cheat on him. But the good parts of that night—him sucking on the spot where my shoulder met my neck, the lick of cool air that rushed over the tips of my breasts just as he’d snatched off my bra—flared in the quiet of that moment like headlights through the windows. I thought of his chest and arms stretching the fabric of the Rawlings shirt I hadn’t bought him, of the way Jillian had gawked at the very first picture of him I’d ever shown her, her mouth an open O.
—I guess that’s fine, I said.
*
I spent a good hour after hanging up sitting in the living room and promising myself I would not have sex with Omar, no matter how good he looked, no matter what else I ended up doing with him out of sheer horniness. I will not suck his dick and I will not have sex with him, I told myself as I thrashed around on the living room couch, hoping to work out my frustration in advance of seeing him while Leidy and Dante and my mom slept in their rooms. I told myself Omar could suck on any part of me he wanted, stick anything he wanted into me, so long as it wasn’t his dick. As long as his dick didn’t make its way into any orifice, I’d be free and clear to let our relationship dissolve. We could be what Jillian called friends with benefits, except the one benefit she’d talked about—sex—would be the only thing we wouldn’t do. Because sex with Omar meant too much: Omar was my first, and I was his second (though he’d only done it with the first girl three times—she was older than him, an aspiring dancer for the Miami Heat that he’d met at a club the summer before we got together). Sex meant, for both of us, that we were a serious couple destined for something together, and until I had my grades—until I knew for sure what my future at Rawlings would be—I didn’t want that pressure back again. I vowed not to let it happen.