If You Never Hear From Him, That Just Means He Didn’t Call - continued, page 2
A little more than a week before graduation and we were finally together, in his new apartment, getting ready to do what I had wanted to do from the moment I met him.
“How come we had to wait so long?” I asked him.
“I think you know the reason for that,” Alan admonished me. I felt like I was back in class again.
“So, it’s okay now that you’ve turned in my grade and all?”
“And, I might remind you, I’m no longer married.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I understand.” It all seemed a little too technical for me. “You know, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“Oh, sweetie, do shut up,” Alan sighed, as he kissed my mouth and started to slip the summer dress down from my shoulders. That should have been a clue, I suppose, that we weren’t going to last, not really. That whatever hopes I had that this would be some big romance were not going to materialize. I realized at that moment that I was in love with him and that he wasn’t in love with me and that he also wouldn’t want to know that I was in love with him. He preferred to think of me as the lovely young thing who was just aching to go to bed with him. When I saw him naked I knew I could play that part, especially when I saw the way he looked at me naked, as though he had just had an epiphany or something. I even had a moment when it seemed I could change his mind and make him love me. But I knew better, and I guessed he had been right to make me wait, because the truth was I was wiser than I had been four years earlier. I suddenly knew the difference between sex and love and how it felt to want one or the other or both and how you knew how things would turn out, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted them to. This would be the first affair I would go into with my eyes wide open. Even making love to him felt different because of it. It was transporting. I can yet, all these years later, see his body on mine, his tan and still beautiful skin wrapped around my young firm pale freckled flesh, my breasts still high, my stomach flat and unwrinkled, the soft brown length of my hair flat out against his pillow. If I try a little harder, I can feel him inside of me.
I spent that night with him and most of the others. We didn’t go out to eat again. The week slid toward graduation. I worked up my courage to ask him to the dance the night before the ceremony. I had made no other plans, I was dating no one, hadn’t for months. I felt as though I were already gone from the university and sleeping with Alan only reinforced that feeling; I didn’t feel I could tell my friends what was happening. I was afraid they would be shocked, or worse, would laugh.
Alan grabbed me by both shoulders. We were naked at the time. Had just made love. Had gotten up to get something to drink. I swallowed my pride and said “So will you go with me?”
When he grabbed me by my shoulders, he looked straight in my face, and said “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then,” he said. “I will meet you there. We’ll set a meeting place and time. I think it will be better like that, don’t you?”
“Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it any more. Whatever he said was fine. I couldn’t believe he had even agreed.
