Z meets me in the bar where I sit with my friends, watching another friend play acoustic guitar up on stage. I’ve been drinking Diet Coke. I swirl two straws in the giant plastic cup and listen to my friends talk about other friends and laugh about things we did while drunk. I’m tired, and I feel a bit off in a way I know well but can’t quite describe. Z smiles with his perfect teeth, then laughs at something someone says, and his brown eyes look bright and almost green in the setting sunlight. He looks at me a lot, says ‘hey’ and asks me how I’m doing. We talk and I can’t help but slip away into that place I go sometimes, where I’m not quite sure how to act or what to say or how to prove I’m happy and nothing is wrong (I think I am, I think nothing is).
But something is, and I don’t know what to say. I hate being her, this girl with the intimacy issues. I’m reeling, trying not to freak out about the fact that he could throw me away at any second.
He’s too sweet to me and keeps asking if I’m okay (I hate being this). He knows I’m not okay once I sort of whisper I’m nervous sex might have changed things. Even though I know, sort of, that him even being here, with his arm wrapped around me, means it didn’t. But still he drives us to a park down the street, near where his grandma lives. Once we’re there, away from the bar, I inexplicably unwind. I’m able to talk and debate politics and laugh and knock him over on accident on the swings. One of the swing chains hits him in the face, and he stumbles, laughing.
When girls cause injuries to boys it’s always very awkward.
“I was trying to be cute,” I’ll say, thinking about how I shouldn’t have said that — shouldn’t have admitted I was trying much of anything — and laughing nervously.
But he’s still laughing, hard, repeating what I said and then kissing me on the cheek.
I guess it was okay to say it. The business of this — relationships and falling for someone — you forget how awkward all of it is in the beginning.
I always forget what it feels like to feel someone out.
We lay on the grass. I’m laying on my stomach and smoking a cigarette, watching it burn between my fingers, thinking about things I want to say but things I probably don’t need to say. We joke and then there’s silence. Lighting bugs and the swing set remind me of those days in high school when I was a virgin, still moody, on playgrounds with boys who could never quite figure me out. Even when I didn’t have the sex problem I had the trust problem. The closeness problem.
I’ve been doing this for years. So much changes and I’m pissed the things I want to change the most always stay the same.
But then there’s Z. I flop over on my back and consider the stars, and the corniness of this whole scenario isn’t lost on me. I catch him looking at me with that sort of open tenderness I’ve seen in certain sets of eyes laid on me before. And I ask him “what?” and he says “nothing” and we both know that’s kind of the furthest thing from the truth. He’s as wide open as a reaching palm. And I’m a fist trying to unclench.
Posted by Katie 
Posted by Katie 
Posted by Katie 
