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‘Show me,’ I told her, letting my guitar fall to the grass. Now this was interesting.
‘Are you crazy? Absolutely not!’ She went even redder and I don’t know how I stopped myself from grabbing her and devouring her right there and then. She smacked my arm with the paperback, but eventually she gave it to me.
We talked for hours about the sex scenes in the book, what was realistic and what was not, what she should be careful about and everything that follows. I had done little but kiss a girl at this point, so I had zero experience. But I had a mom and she did not. She knew very little except for the stuff she had read in these romance books, and even though they had done a much better job than I would have thought just by looking at that cover, she knew literally nothing. So, without missing a beat, I explained things to her.
She listened to me carefully, her cheeks glowing deliciously pink.
I had to mature from a stupid, moronic boy that stared at girls’ boobs, to a man who talked to a girl about becoming a woman respectfully and carefully, within half an hour. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
‘Do you have anyone… Any girl friend or relative…’ Why was this so hard? “Do you have anyone in your life that you can talk about this stuff to?’ I finally asked her. She just shook her head and offered no further information. I wouldn’t ask for more. I just looked her in the eyes and told her: ‘Well, you do now.’
I took her hand and, for the first time, she let me.
We held hands every single minute after that. I wasn’t about to ever let go.
‘So you finished all the classics, huh?’ I asked her at some point, feeling that the conversation was getting out of my depth. I would go to my room later and research the hell out of the subject matter, to be better educated for her if she had any questions. I would ask my mom. I would make a science of it. For her. But right now, I needed to veer to a different subject. ‘All the Jane Austens and the Shakespeares?’
Her face split in a huge smile. Those dimples on her cheeks, man. I’d have died for those dimples.
‘That goes without saying,’ she said. ‘I’ve read those several times over. The Brontes as well, Thomas Hardy, Dickens.’
‘What else?’
‘You seriously want me to keep going? I can go on all day.’
‘I’m counting on it.’
She smiled again. We talked books until the sun dipped towards the horizon that day, and the next and the next. She talked and I listened. Then I tried to memorize her favorite book heroes and her favorite book scenes. She brought me ‘homework’ every day, specific passages marked in her books for me to read.
Then she’d pretend to quiz me over them for fun, but I was dead serious.
I wanted to impress her, even though I was dumb as dirt. But she looked at me as if I was a god among men, and it hurt, it physically hurt me, that one day she would realize what a loser I really was. I was racing against time to prove to her that I was who she thought I was. To become who she thought I was.
‘Ok, once more,’ she prompted me two weeks later. ‘You got this.’
‘Darcy is the smolder,’ I said, concentrating hard, counting on my fingers.
‘And the change of heart,’ she added.
‘And the change of heart.’
‘Good. Go on.’
‘Rochester is the ‘give me my name’ dude and Heathcliff is the ‘I am Heathclif’.’
‘That’s Cathy.’ She was already giggling.
‘Well, it’s Heathcliff too, believe me,’ I said. I was concentrating too hard to laugh. My head was splitting from having to keep all those ruffle-shirted dudes straight, but, dammit, I was going to get it right or I was going to die. ‘Romeo is the ‘let me die,’ right? And Rochester… Oh, crap.’
Who was Rochester?
‘You’ve done Rochester.’ Eden could barely talk for laughing.
‘Well, stop looking at me with those eyes and smiling with those lips… It’s distracting.’
She laughed harder. And she kept looking at me even harder. With those eyes. Gosh, did she even know what she was doing to me? I’d have died for her if she was in danger, but at that moment, I’d have died for her even if she wasn’t in danger. All she had to do was ask, and I’d tear out my soul and just hand it to her.
‘Ok. Focus, Isaiah,’ I told myself. “Austen, ok? Let’s do Austen. I got Austen. Knightley is the ‘if I loved you less, I would talk about it more’ and Wentworth is the letter dude.’
