We were sitting on the same couch. Later, I would learn that this is what he considered “cuddling.” We were sitting on the couch, his elbow resting on my legs and vice versa and we were just talking. It was nearing four in the morning.
A lot of what was said in that conversation I can’t remember. Something about the bands he liked and a book he was planning on reading went in and out my ears while I just stared at his face. A cat was on the armchair next to us. There were plenty of seats available, but we crammed ourselves lengthwise onto that tiny two-person sofa; elbows, knees, legs, feet, fingers touching.
No wonder he thought we were cuddling.
I am not that kind of girl, I thought when he asked me to spend the night a couple days earlier. I had denied his request, but it was nearing four in the morning and here we were, the gangly twenty-two year old male and the round-faced eighteen-year-old female crushed together on this couch. Talking. I wondered how it would have been different if I had agreed to spend the night.
It was a strange weekend, spent with this man-child who had rescued me from nearly being raped at a party by some drunken asshole from my English class. Partying, for us, was listening to our friend Jake ramble on for hours until three a.m.; breakfast the next morning where he made me laugh so hard I spat water everywhere (the joke wasn’t even funny); and now conversing on his couch in the wee hours of le matin.
Weeks later, he told me I was his best friend. Via the internet, no less, but still his best friend. He told me hilarious jokes, left notes in my mailbox, pulled (artificial) yellow roses out of his backpack to surprise me, burned me a CD of his favorite musician, gave me a world map.
The note that accompanied the CD read as follows: “Everything he’s ever sung, I want to say to you.” Or something like that.
He was older than me.
~
It was the first time I had ever even come close to kissing anyone, and I felt sorry for rejecting him for, what was this? The third time? But there was something not right in the way he was holding me, and the way I heard him practically beg for me to show him even a tiny bit of affection.
We were in his kitchen, arms locked, and if his father had walked in at that moment, it might’ve looked like a romantic scene from a movie: his arms around my waist, me bent as though I was being dipped at the end of a waltz. If only I didn’t have an expression of utter disgust and fear on my face.
My problem began months before as I sulked over losing an amusement park game. We were spinning around to the beginning of the ride, and as I pulled away from him in mock-disappointment, I felt a ghost-like brush against my cheek and realized he had just tried to kiss me.
I remembered that moment now, in his kitchen, after I had just eaten dog food on a dare from his mother. To this day, I remember that moment, along with all the Two Door Cinema Club we listened to that summer, the look on Sheena’s face when I stayed with him instead of going to her graduation party, and the handmade skirt I had been wearing when this happened.
I didn’t want it like this. I reeked of kibble-n-bits and wanted to escape his embrace, and I avoided his eyes as they implored, “Come on.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
I offered my cheek to him, and he planted an awkward kiss on the edge of my jaw bone.
He was the same age as me.
~
I was gazing longingly at the boy I crushed on last year from my solitary seat down the hall when suddenly a thin boy in pinstripes and a shock of perfect hair came into my view. He wasn’t particularly attractive, but was looking at me with such... intensity? I can’t remember exactly. And I was prepared to ignore him, despite recognizing him from auditions earlier that day.
Suddenly he was next to me, shaking my hand, telling me even though I beat him in the contest I won that year, he was okay with it, because I deserved it, and all this information was coming into my ears at such a rapid pace. I was charmed, to say the least.
Later that weekend, as we sat backstage in the dark, I learned that he and I played the same role in that Shakespeare play, we both loved writing, and by the end of the weekend he had dubbed me his nemesis. As the months crept on, and we spoke on the phone nearly every night, I found myself being even more charmed by his strangeness, his quirkiness, his nerdiness, and the fact that even though the call dropped eight times, he still called me back for the ninth.
He emailed me a short story sometime later in which his character fell in love with mine, and although I was dating someone else at the time, it was then I realized I was head over heels too. I started imagining what our wedding was going to be like. He respected me and asked my opinion and said I had beautiful hair. I was in love.
Then, I admitted it. And the compliments stopped. The writing samples I sent him went ignored, although he kept running back to me to critique his college applications. I cut off my hair, and he stopped talking to me. I went for a run, and broke down in sobs at the end of it. There had been someone else. I was heartbroken.
He was younger than me.
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