Love Story(23)
Author: Jennifer Echols

The girl from home had crossed the room behind his back and settled on a lawn chair. He could hear her now, joining a conversation as if she wasn’t staring a hole through him.

Maybe she wasn’t.

That decided the matter. He kissed the girl in front of him. He eased her backward until she was trapped between his body and the mildewed wall. Not that he needed to trap her. She willingly opened her mouth for him.

Maybe she knew what his major was and what town he was from. He had not told her, but maybe she’d found out. Or maybe it really didn’t matter.

This is what he told himself as he pressed his tongue into her oral cavity. Her upper and lower lips were erogenous zones. The harder he kissed her, the faster her sensors fired messages to the nucleus accumbens in her brain. That center in turn sent a tingling sensation to her mons pubis, awakening it to the possibility that it might be next. She and he were from different states, after all, and unlikely to be related, and sensing this through their pheromones was apparently all the motivation they or anybody else needed to start the reproductive cycle.

He was running his tongue just above her clavicle when she pressed her hands to his pectoral muscles, feigning a request that he pause. “It’s awfully crowded in here,” she whispered, her breath curling the steam. “Could we go to your room where it’s private?”

She had made the first move. He would get what he’d come for without even feeling guilty. He sniffed deeply with satisfaction, savoring this moment—and smelled the Stachybotrys growing on the walls.

Before he could back out of the situation, he grabbed her hand, epidermis to epidermis, and pulled her toward the door. The crowd was thick, the mist thicker, the lights flashed and bobbed in a bankrupt approximation of a disco, and still he caught a glimpse of the girl he’d hoped was not really behind his back, watching him.

Outside the bathroom, in the frigid hallway, his companion’s ni**les hardened beneath her bikini top with the release of testosterone because of the alcohol, and oxytocin because of his hands on her. As he led her toward his room, she tripped. He slowed his pace and generously supported her gluteus maximus so she wouldn’t fall before they reached their destination.

He closed his door behind them. She stumbled to his bed, sat down, and kicked off her flip-flops. She was a lot more ready than he was. His friends would be appalled that he hesitated. There was nothing wrong with this scenario. Nothing.

He pulled her up to standing, tossed back the blankets, and sat her back down on the sheets. Cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, rather than silk, a secretion of Bombyx mori, but he was in college and nobody lost his virginity under ideal circumstances. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a story to embellish when he was fifty. Gently he drew her down on top of him. He opened his bathing suit and pushed past hers. As the nucleus accumbens in his own brain flooded with activity, he pondered what species of monster he’d become.

*

“A MONSTER WHO GETS SOME,” KYLE murmured as we all placed Hunter’s story on top of our stacks. But that comment was under the table, so to speak, not part of the official class discussion. The official discussion, starting with Manohar’s opinion, was even worse: “I just want to thank Hunter for being so brave and sharing his first time with us.”

The response was snorts and howls of laughter from the men in the class, and it set the tone for the discussion of Hunter’s story. I expected someone, maybe even a treacherous Manohar or Brian, to point out that the narrator’s “horse country” place of origin was not Long Island. The limestone fences, black tobacco barns, and green grass in winter were iconic Kentucky, Bluegrass Region, and anybody reading between the lines could have figured out that Hunter was my stable boy. But nobody mentioned this. They were too busy guffawing about sex.

The women stammered about how moving the story was, how vulnerable the narrator was, and how interesting it was to get a guy’s point of view on dating. This was polite of them and hid what they really wanted to say, which was that they’d been hot for Hunter before and now they could hardly stand it. He had become a movie star.

The men snickered and said they thought the story ended too soon, which was their way of saying they realized all the women were hot for Hunter and they wished they’d thought of this ploy themselves. They tried so hard to have the right clothes, the right hair, and money for dates. None of them had ever thought to use the writing class as a pickup place.

Summer put her chin on her fist and squinted across the table at Manohar. “What do you think this story is about, Manohar?” She leaned across me and said to Gabe, “Please excuse me for speaking out of turn, but I think this is important.” She turned back to Manohar. “You don’t think this story is about unrequited love at all, do you? You think it’s about getting laid.”

“Yes!” exclaimed most of the men, while most of the women chirped, “No!” Gabe and Hunter, at opposite ends of the table, both scribbled across their papers without looking up. Hunter sat draped across his comfy chair as if the class discussed his writing every day.

“Even when it’s so laboriously unsexy?” Summer asked. “There’s a lot more going on here. Hunter is smarter than that.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” Manohar said. “He’s making fun of a certain other supposedly sexy story written for this class. He’s showing how clinical and predictable and unsexy it really was.”

I opened my mouth to tell Manohar that I’d had enough. It was one thing for him to insult my story while we discussed it in class. It was too much for him to insult my story while we discussed someone else’s. He had already let me know he loathed my writing. I got it. Enough already!

As usual, Summer beat me to it. “I’m not sure whether Hunter did this on purpose or if he even realizes he did it, but there’s a beautiful dichotomy between the language he uses for the two girls. The girl he’s with in the shower is described in anatomical terms, like an object. He even calls her ‘it’ once, near the beginning. ‘It does feel good.’”

The room filled with the clatter of flipping pages, then a pause as everyone searched for the passage.

“Noooo,” Manohar said. “He’s responding to the girl saying, ‘This feels so good.’ ‘It’ equates to ‘this,’ which means standing in the shower.”

Summer talked over him. “The girl he’s trying to make jealous is never physically described at all. He conveys only his emotions about her. He loves her so much that he can’t even see her.”

I had resolved not to look at Hunter while the class was discussing his story. I would not peek at him now to gauge his reaction. If Summer wanted to make more out of his relationship with me than was actually there, that was her issue, not mine. I had a vested interest in staying out of any further tangles involving this creative-writing class intersecting with my real life. To remind myself of this, I traced INTERNSHIP over and over on a scratch sheet of paper—not on my copy of Hunter’s story, which I would have to pass back to him.