But just like that, your finger there, your eyes lowered, I knew I likely loved you anyway. Because we were meant to cross paths, boy, just like I knew what was coming.
I could feel the blood pushing at my temple.
I knew you would taste like the inside of a sweet apple.
I talked you into following me up two sets of library stairs, among the humming copiers, the chug of the vending machines, whispering students, keys clicking.
Then I talked you into taking my hand as I led you between two rolling stacks in a far corner where books on things like tax incidence and the fishery industry sit.
My boy Keith spotted us and summoned a young pledge to wind the handle on one of the moving stacks, pressing us two together.
We could feel everything about each other. I wasn’t even embarrassed. We were crushed.
You reached out for my hand. In that moment, I would’ve married you. If only you—
The next night, we took that walk in Bailey Woods, beers poured into camelbacks, and the sky went gold, then black, and we got lost, even though it’s less than a mile deep. Sweet gum trees overhead, kissing long and slow at the juniper stump, our fingers poking into its dark pockets. Then we saw that dead dog and said a prayer over him because we both have Jesus sneaking in our hearts somewhere. We went back to the Kappa Sig house and to your mold-furry room and your roommate gone, and I couldn’t get my jeans off fast enough.
You owned my heart, frat boy.
So fast the feeling, I didn’t care what was coming.
I think it wasn’t what we did in your dirty-sheet twin bed that mattered. After all, it only lasted as long as it takes to walk across the square. I think it was the way you looked at me, the moon coming through the Reb pennant hanging in the window, pink on your boy face.
How you looked at me. Your eyes all crazy, like you saw something I’ve never seen in myself before, never seen ever.
There’s a universe out there, little girl is what I came to know through each of those soft explosions I felt after I showed you what to do with your hand, that trick of the wrist.
You had a surprising way of shivering through intimacies, which you did each of the twelve times we did it before I died.
My legs shaking, like a little bare-balled virgin.
I’d forgotten to put in my contacts and during it everything was blurry and flashtastic and I couldn’t see much of you in the dark except the dark inside of your mouth, open when you felt the shock of love, or pretended to.
There’s been so many girls, and they are all in some way one girl, tan and sparkle-lashed, like my sisters’ dolls arrayed on the circle carpet, hair stretched radical to center.
But you.
It was only after that I saw the tear in the condom. Which is on me, baby, it is. It always is.
Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t like the other times?
I swear I didn’t feel it rip, didn’t feel anything but you, your monumental fucking beauty and the little sounds from your throat, and the way your thighs, like smoothed sticks, held me so.
You were in the bathroom for so long after, and I was glad because my legs were still shaking and I didn’t want you to see.
The longer I waited, having slung the split condom from thumb to trash can, I started to wonder a little at how quick you had laid down for me.
But I swear, girl, getting you so easy didn’t make me love you any less. Just wonder, a little.
It was only when in the bathroom after, the boy bathroom so thick with mildew you could feel it fuzzing your mouth, that I found the piece of latex inside me.
My brother had told me once, and older girls too. They always know when it happens, they told me, and they should stop.
But it had broken and part of it was inside me now.
Oh no, I cursed myself. I have let myself be fooled and misled. I am such a girl. A weak, weak girl.
Except still, I didn’t know I cared, my hands trembling, shaking with that speckle of powdery latex on my fingertips.
Part of you was inside me now.
And you asked me to stay over. And you talked in your sleep, your face in my hair, your hands on my excitable hips.
You said I was your country girl even though I told you I was from Batesville. I guess you were still drunk.
You came back from the bathroom, scrubbed and smelling like our soap-on-a-rope. Your shyness made my blood hotten again, but I couldn’t make it work, the heavy of the beers pinning me down.
We slept.
I dreamed all night of scaling skyscrapers and sailing the high seas. Of pirate ship masts and spaceships. And I was king in all these worlds.
I didn’t even care to find I’d slunk so strangely in the bed that my head was resting against your chest, your tiny tits still in their bra, me too drunk to flick the hook.
There would be time enough.
I have to go, you said, before I could. I have my kitchen shift at six thirty.
No, I said, because, look...
Standing in the cold and big kitchen of the Inn at Ole Miss, I could still feel you the whole three hours. In front of the industrial dishwasher, scooping stuck-corn pudding and biscuit-gravy skim into the disposal trough, I could feel you inside, and slipping from me.
Is this the one? I wondered. Even as I knew it was.
You see, you were foretold, frat boy.
Sun beating down, the railroad festival in Amory when I was ten years old, a man in a shabby hat was giving out fortunes from his slanting card table. Staked between the heat-pressed T-shirts and the frozen cheesecake on a stick, he sat in that folding chair, the little sign before him, corrugated cardboard, that read: Fates Disclosed. Paths Foretold. I See You, and All.
My brother was far ahead, wending through tents and bouncy castles to catch up with some girls in snug shorts, and I could tell the shabby-hat man had me in his sights.
Pointing one horny finger, he said: I’ll tell anyone but yours. You’re too pretty to have your heart broke. That yellowing finger seeming to hypnotize me closer.
Tell it! said a passing lady, large of body with a hat shaped like a steam engine and evil eyes. Tell the little girl! Tell her what she must know!
And bringing me close, hand on my arm, the leather twists of his pinched finger skin, the man told. He will come with nectar on his tongue, he said, tears in his eyes, I swear. But he will send your head spinning, seal you up in silver. Swallow you whole.
Standing there, still in his clutches, I felt my heart cut loose inside me. Is this to be my fate?
Suddenly, my brother’s hand fell fast upon my shoulder, tugging me backward. Don’t you know not to talk to the tatty hobos?
Quickly, we were stumbling through the grass of Frisco Park, the sparkle from all the hanging goods, the sparkling purses and glad rags for ladies who’d venture through the festival, looking for objects to wear to entice boys and men.