“You definitely had a strategy. Anya told me that you insisted that hooking up with you was a way of exploring her sexuality.”
“And I stand by that,” he replied with a laugh. He leaned back on his bed and watched the show for a while, and she realized she was unconsciously waiting for him to fall asleep or to get out his phone or laptop. Danny had done that all the time when Sarah was watching a show he didn’t enjoy, but Ren stayed focused.
“I have so many questions,” he said at last when there was a commercial break.
“Go ahead. I’ve seen the whole series.” She pressed mute to silence an enthusiastic advertisement for laundry detergent.
“So first of all,” he began, “he is two hundred years old, and he wants to date a high schooler?”
“He’s tortured. Dead inside. Until he spots the one girl who makes him feel something.”
“But why high school? If I was picking someone to break me out of my cage of loneliness, it wouldn’t be someone who still had acne medication on their nightstand.”
“She’s as powerful as he is and can kill him with a thought, which given his guilt complex, he probably likes.”
“So let’s leave him out of it. I get that he’s handsome, but why does she want a man who is at such a different point in life?”
Sarah sighed. “Okay, so this is embarrassing, but can I tell you about losing my virginity?”
Ren’s eyebrows shot up. “Sure. This was with Phil the Goth or Ivan the Terrible?”
“Philip. So…he and I decided to sleep together senior year, but we didn’t know what we were doing. So it took a few times before it stopped hurting.”
Ren grimaced and nodded.
“And after that, sex became something I kind of tolerated. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t really… And it wasn’t Phil’s fault. I didn’t know how to speak up for myself or explain what I wanted. I was worried about hurting his feelings by admitting that I wasn’t…” She waved a hand.
“You weren’t having an orgasm.”
She nodded. “So I tried gentle hints. And he got frustrated because I didn’t know what to tell him to do, and he didn’t know what he was doing wrong, so I gave up and pretended I was. And this went on for months.”
“This is a tragic story.”
“But the thing is, when I watched this show at seventeen, the fantasy wasn’t that I wanted a much older man. It was that I wanted a teenage boy who knew what he was doing. It would have been nice to lose my virginity to someone who didn’t need everything explained to him.”
Ren considered this with a frown. “There’s a lot I don’t recommend about losing my virginity to a woman five years older than me, but I did learn what I was doing.”
“What happened there?” Sarah asked. “You changed the subject when I asked about it earlier.”
“I know.” He considered her, and she turned off the television, which made him smile briefly. But he looked away when he started talking. “I was going through a tough time when I was a teenager… I told you I thought my mother didn’t love me. Which wasn’t true but it’s how I felt. And my father was pretty distant. So I guess I was looking for approval. And when I was sixteen, I met this cool twenty-one-year-old student who worked in a used clothing store. I chatted with her a few times, and she seemed really impressed that I’d seen some Godard films. So she invited me to her place to watch a movie, and when I showed up, she sat next to me and put her hand on my leg, and I remember thinking, ‘She can’t possibly be doing this. She’s too old. There’s no way that this is actually happening.’ And by the time I realized that it was, I didn’t have the words to tell her that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. I ended up going along with it because she expected me to. And then she told me to come back the next week, and I started sneaking out to see her every weekend.”
Sarah considered him. His expression was carefully blank. “How long did it go on for?”
“A few months. And she knew how young I was. I think she liked that she could set all the terms, tell me what to do, and I would do whatever she told me to.”
“Ren. That’s not good.”
“No. I kept telling myself how cool it was that I was having a fling with an older woman. But I think it messed me up in the long term. Anyway, my point is that I’m not judging you for not being able to tell your boyfriend what you wanted in high school because I didn’t have the words either. If I’d taken time to think about what I wanted, I probably would have waited and lost my virginity with someone I cared about.”
She wondered if his preternaturally beautiful looks had made him a particular target. “Do you think that’s why you hooked up with so many girls at university?” Sarah asked. “To get revenge on women?”
He frowned. “No. I don’t think so. I never disliked women. It was more that I wanted to get back a sense of control. When Giselle ended things, she did it by just announcing one day that she’d found a boyfriend and didn’t want to see me anymore, and I was destroyed for months. Not because I was so in love with her, but because it felt like she had picked me up like a piece of paper, crumpled me up, and tossed me in the trash when she was done with me. So when I started seeing women, I always wanted to be the one who started and ended things. I would offer women this casual fling. And if they said yes, then we could see each other, and then one day I would deliberately annoy them so that they would break up with me. I would say the wrong thing and offend them, because then I could pick exactly when things ended, and nobody would ever surprise me and dump me.”
“What kinds of things did you say?” She thought of Anya and Kristie and Ellen—how all of them had given up on Ren.
“Nothing personal or anything. It was pretty ridiculous, actually. I would tell them that I didn’t date for longer than three weeks because that’s the point when emotional attachments start to form, which is total nonsense. Then I would give them this speech about how I didn’t believe love was real, that it was a biochemical response, and that sex was the world’s only self-administered intravenous drug, and they would eventually roll their eyes and tell me I needed therapy. Which I would always agree was probably true. And then I would ask them if it was okay if I kept exploring, but that I was available for casual sex, and they were usually glad to be rid of me.”
Sarah glanced at the dark television screen. “I can see why you aren’t a fan of huge age gap relationships on television shows.”
