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Something I also normally despised. Not fun, per se, but fun that involved singing along to ancient Journey songs in a crowded bar that most likely had fire code violations. Bella’s idea of a great night was to go to a bar and have men admire her and buy her drinks. My idea of fun was quantifiable statistics with a side of Star Trek trivia. But I knew I had to go. Not just for Bella, but for me.
I was going to approach a particular problem tonight—that of my virginity—and solve it. What better place than somewhere far away from where I grew up in Boston and nowhere near my college campus. It had become an issue. When you reach the age of damn near twenty-five and hadn’t relinquished your V-card, the assumption is you’re waiting for Mr. Right, which basically ruins potential relationships before they even have a shot. Or men assume you’re a freak.
I wasn’t either. I wasn’t holding out for some magical-unicorn-over-the-rainbow-he-played-the-harp-in-a-meadow kind of moment. I just never quite got around to it, and now it was too late to have that first teen love where you fumble over each other and explore and discover all the amazing things a body can do. Nope, missed that. I was busy studying for the SAT, which I didn’t regret, but a little more work-play balance would have been advisable. Then, as an undergrad, I had had a boyfriend, but ours was a meeting of the minds. We bonded over calculus and spent every day together, holding hands, making out but never actually having sex. Because as it turned out, he was a genius who did in fact love my mind, but not my vagina, because he was gay and trying to pretend otherwise.
After that I had stuck to friendships and studying and shower sex with myself. It had gotten to the point of pure ridiculousness. I used to roll my eyes when girls would claim to be a “woman” after initial penetration, but now I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that everyone in the free world knew the secret of sex and I was still playing with toys. Literally.
“I can do that,” I told Bella. “I can have fun.”
As long as no one defined “fun.”
Now I just wanted to go out, have a nice, sweaty hookup, then be able to move on with my life, and potentially find a boyfriend who liked my body and my mind, and do the standard conscious-coupling thing.
“Okay, then. Good. Sophie, you just have to be open to new experiences.”
What I wanted to be open to was a penis, but I could never tell her that. Bella didn’t like the way I reasoned out life. She operated on emotion, and she was a lover of romance, inspirational quotes, and kittens. The kittens I was on board with. The rest was not my thing. Romance and science aren’t a natural pairing and I’ve never met an inspirational quote that didn’t need to be stamped with a giant “OBVIOUS” all over it. See? Too literal. That’s me.
Bella checked her own makeup and fussed with her controlled beach waves, her hair a blond halo around her heart-shaped face.
I’m not an ogre, but I don’t have the definition of features that make women considered beautiful. My eyes are brown. My hair is equally brown. My skin is creamy and smooth, but my lips are (normally) thin, and I cannot be bothered to wrestle my eyebrows into penciled-on perfection. I want to be considered attractive, because who the hell doesn’t, but I had never devoted the time or the energy required to take my looks to their highest potential. Bella was born beautiful, so precious that even jaded nurses came over to coo at her and admire her perfect features. I was born blinking like an owl, my mother always said. And watching everyone and everything like a hawk, according to my father.
I put on pink Converse. “Not a word,” I told her. “I’ll wear the heels to the wedding but not to a bar.” I was already squeezed into the world’s shortest and tightest dress, which seemed excessive for a Tuesday in June in coastal Maine, but I was willing to own it. And the eyelashes. That counted for something. I wasn’t killing myself in the heels too.
Bella sighed, disappointed in her protégée, but she did begrudgingly add, “On you, it kind of works.”
“Thanks, Be.” We were in Bella’s room and when we left I turned the light on, off, on, off, four times. It’s a tic and it drives Bella crazy. I have a few tics—my mother refusing to acknowledge that I am borderline OCD, I, well aware that I am. I have an obsessive mind that fixates and churns in circles around and around. It’s why I love math. It isn’t circular. It can go on and on but there is either an answer or infinity, which I love. Give me a solution to an equation and I’m happy.
Bella sighed. “Why must you do that?”
“It’s what I do when I’m nervous. It confirms the flow of electricity for me, but also that I can control it. But then when I do it, I doubt the results and need to test them again.”
I knew what she was thinking—that I was a freak. But she didn’t say anything. Bella was easy to read. I could practically hear her thoughts—the “why the fuck does it matter?” that was running through her head. But she had lived with me for the majority of her twenty-six years. She knew there was no point in asking the question. I’d already given her my answer, whether she understood it or not.
The house was quiet as we went downstairs. My parents weren’t arriving until the weekend, and Bradley wouldn’t be there until after that. Bridesmaids and groomsmen were due in a week. This was the first time Bella and I had been alone in the house. It was six thousand square feet, so it was a little eerie to be staying there without our parents and a parade of other relatives and my mom’s friends. The water views, so peaceful and beautiful during the day, unnerved me at night with no one else around. Bella liked to watch TV and talk to Bradley on Facetime and I had been on my laptop, avoiding the wall of windows. The bay seemed too dark, too vast, in the silent house. My father had built the house five years earlier and I had never thought of it as lonely, but it felt that way now.
So for that reason as well, I was glad to get the hell out of there and head to town. Leave my father’s enormous house that hovered arrogantly over the sea, defying nature. Be a normal girl, like my sister, out for the night in a tourist town.
I saw him the minute we walked into the bar. A guy perched comfortably on a stool, his arms muscular, his grin confident, arrogant. He had short, dark hair and a jawline that was sharp and symmetrical. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, this was no software engineer or physicist. This was one of those manly men that they use for memes on Pinterest and for beer commercials and underwear ads. He was abs and ass, muscles and machismo, and like any other female, I had an immediate reaction to all that testosterone.
My heart started to race and my body started to tense and tighten and grow warm in places that normally only got hot and wet in the privacy of my own apartment. I wanted to fan myself as I stared at him, blinking through the veil of mascara and fake lashes.
It was like my vagina stood up and sang. Him. He would be the one. The man to take my virginity and make it a memory. He wasn’t my type, but that wasn’t the point. He wouldn’t be interested in me either, but I knew enough about bar culture to know that if he was here, he was interested in going home with a girl. I could be that girl.
I was delusional, of course, a fact I was forced to acknowledge immediately when I realized that despite the fact that my dress had coaxed huge cleavage from my reluctant breasts, the hottie was checking out my sister.
So typical. But I couldn’t deny that blondes were more fun. At least more fun than me.
I walked past him to the bar and plucked the menu off the countertop, debating how to proceed. Men. The one equation I could never solve.
—
I saw her the minute she stepped into the bar. The blonde with the big smile and even bigger tits. She knew how to walk in her high heels, swinging her hips with that roll designed to make guys get hard. She reeked of money. It was there in those shoes, that one-piece shorts thing she was wearing, and a pricey-looking handbag. Not a local. Not a tourist. She belonged to one of those new-build mansions that had sprung up along the coast. Daughter of a rich man, without a doubt.
She was perfect for a hookup. The daddy’s girls always loved to slum with the townie guys. It made them feel naughty and I was more than happy to be used to give them their imaginary street cred. The best thing about it was then they left. Went back to wherever they came from and I never had to see them again. Usually the next time they were at their father’s summer compound, they pretended not to know me. That worked for me.
I gave the blonde a smile, sipping my whiskey. Happy hour was mellowing me. My shoulders had relaxed a little, giving in to the alcohol. My body was at home on the stool and I was mildly interested in having company tonight if it was easy. I wasn’t going to work for it. Let it come to me.
The blonde approached me. “Hi! I’m Bella.”
