What I Want
Four a.m. End of the party. There’s already one person passed out on the couch. I’ve already got a friend coming home with me to pass out on mine.
But there’s this boy left over. He’s the remainder of this long division night.
“Please let me come home with you,” he begs.
“You’re either going to sleep on the floor here or on the floor at my apartment, so…”
“Please,” he pleads again.
“Whatever.” But then, rethinking things, I stick my finger in his face and say in a very stern tone “but you’re not getting into my bed, ok?”
“Yeah. Totally,” he agrees.
And the three of us fumble down the street, creating wave frequencies on the sidewalk with our drunken staggers.
Arriving home, he immediately tries to sit on the sofa, but my friend immediately kicks him off, and stretches out, claiming her territory. While I wash my face, he stiffly places himself in an angular, upright chair and drapes a measeley afghan over his legs, making every attempt to look as pathetic as possible.
I emerge from the bathroom and he looks at me with whimpering eyes outlined in dark bags. “Can I please sleep in your bed?”
I huff.
“Please? I promise I won’t try anything.”
“Whatever.” And for the second time tonight, I give in.
But strange things happen when, if my bed were a cauldron, you begin to mix whiskey, four a.m., not being able to sleep anyway, a boy who has a very decent beard, decent conversation, conversation about sex, a hot summer, a boy who was so hot he needed to take his shirt off, a boy who has a very decent chest of manly hair, and me, who hasn’t had a boy in my bed for a while.
“Let me kiss you,” he says rather than asks.
“Seriously? What did I tell you earlier?!”
He brushes aside the pillow I’d cleverly placed between our bodies. He pulls me in so that where we were once the outline of the bed, we’re now the content.
“Why are you denying yourself something you want?” he asks.
And this is where the record screeches to a halt. This is when all the feminists in the room throw up their hands and shake their heads. This is the part of the story where you decide he’s an asshole. This is the part of the story where you determine what kind of character I am- either strong and assertive or naïve and guillable.
So what. Maybe I am naïve and guillable. But he was right.
