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When I said that he got off me.
“No, no. Don’t stop. Just shove it in there! I don’t care if it hurts!” I told him.
“Shhh… My parents are right upstairs!” he told me.
Finally I told him to just forget it. I had light years of experience compared to the day before, and I was ready for Alex.
“Thanks, Dougie. Now remember: You can’t tell anyone this happened!”
“I won’t!” he said, sitting down on the edge of his bed to play Street Fighter.
Alex offered to pick me up Friday night but I told him that I would meet him. There was no way he was coming to my house! I was working at a coffee shop a few nights after school and on weekends, and I told him to meet me there.
“You work at a coffee shop? Cool. Can you make me a cappuccino?”
“Sure.”
I got behind the counter when he arrived and made us both cappuccinos, whipping the foamy froth expertly while he watched.
“You’re so fucking hot,” he said. My coworkers Lyle and Sherry looked at us in disbelief.
“Hot?” I saw Lyle mouth to Sherry.
“Fucking hot?” she mouthed back.
It didn’t matter to me if they thought I was hot; Alex Wescott was crazy about me! Suddenly I was catapulting to coolness. Skipping all the gooshy prom dates and dinners at the Olive Garden, landing in the funky Bohemia of twenty-something-ness. I was leaving the Jennis and Karis in a cloud of my dust!
Alex and I drove around in my car, smoking cigarettes and listening to Tom Petty. We stopped at a Greek place for dinner and Alex casually ordered a beer. The waitress didn’t even flinch, so I ordered one too. Moments later she brought them to us on a roun
d tray, a paper doily attached to the bottom of each sweating glass. I felt like we were, like, twenty-four. I drew on my vast history of movie watching to come up with bored, clever comments. We were Heathers and Pump Up the Volume and The Breakfast Club all rolled into one.
“Is there a park around here we could go to?” Alex asked after dinner.
I knew what that meant! “Sure,” I said, eager to put my experience to the test.
I took him to Willow River State Park, just a mile or two away. When we parked he said softly, in a voice that frightened me with its sincerity, “This is really nice.”
Instead of attacking me or at least reaching for my hand, he closed his eyes and leaned his seat back until it was almost horizontal. “My parents are divorced. That’s why I moved here. You were probably wondering what made me come here, right? Yeah, they split up. I’m with my mom and she wanted to come here because her sister lives here,” he started in.
What? Was I his psychiatrist all of a sudden? We couldn’t be characters in a John Hughes movie anymore if he was going to act all needy and nice.
He poured his whole life story out for me and by the end I was pretty sure he was gay, but that didn’t stop us from going out for the rest of high school. We didn’t have sex for almost a year, and then we only did it about five times before the subject just stopped coming up. And that made the whole Dougie thing so much more pointless and regrettable.
Chapter 51
Three days undercover in a hotel with morning sickness that lasts all day is not an experience I would wish on anyone. I kept a steady stream of porn coming my way, the volume muted and a towel draped over the screen when I’d reached my limit of smut. I tried to read some books I’d brought along, but I could not concentrate enough to even follow along with the room service menu. When I woke up the first morning there, I walked to a coffee shop and set up an email account, just buying a cookie with cash. I sent Sexxy Lady a message that said, “Hi. I think I’m coming down with the flu. What should I do?” but the message bounced right back to me. Well, at least I had it set up. Then I went to a different coffee shop and bought a coffee and orange juice with our credit card. I felt completely paranoid, like I was going to goof up somehow without realizing it. I took the coffee and juice back to the room and sat there, waiting for time to pass. It took all my willpower not to stay planted at the coffee shop with the computers.
I cried every time I thought of the picture of Jeb, afraid I was going to get a letter like that with a picture of Adrian. And then I thought about how my baby had bad, bad parents and I cried some more. If anyone had knocked on the door they instantly would have known I wasn’t half of a happy couple on a dirty rendezvous.
By three o’clock I was starving so I ordered some pasta primavera for myself, and a porterhouse steak for my invisible husband. I put on a slinky little nightie with a robe tied loosely over it and turned on the shower. The food arrived with those big metal domes over the plates, reminding me of decapitations on platters. The man started to push the cart into the room, but I grabbed it instead.
“Thanks, I’ve got it,” I said. I handed him a five-dollar bill. I have no idea about tipping. That’s Adrian’s territory. I set the domes inside the closet.
I worked my way through the pasta primavera, then cut the steak into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. The baked potato wasn’t too bad though. I decided I had earned the right to watch some non-porn, so I turned on the Gardening Channel and learned how to install a fishpond.
I waited all evening for something to happen, some phone call or something, but Adrian stayed true to his word and the night passed without any contact.
The next morning I went to the coffee shop to check my email. There was a message from my husband that simply said, “I have the flu but everything else is o.k. I am going home.”
