I wish I’d given James my virginity. Instead I gave it up at nineteen to a boring boyfriend I kept around because he paid for everything and I felt like I owed him the only thing I had. I ran through my to-do list while he fucked me on his twin bed with the Star Wars sheets. Paper on Edgar Allen Poe. Oh baby, that feels good. Buy groceries. Mmm, yes. Math tutoring at five on Tuesday, yesyesyes!

Turns out James’ first time wasn’t much better; he saved his virginity for his wedding night and did it in the Cinderella suite with his fat wife while Mickey Mouse watched. They never do it anymore, he confides. It’s because of all the pills he takes, anti-depressants and anti-anxieties and antibiotics make it hard for him to keep it up. Lately her ancient cat’s been using the bed as a litter box, so Miranda sleeps in the guest room while James sleeps on the couch. Cleaning it up or getting rid of the cat is apparently not an option.

We should have surrendered at seventeen in the bushes of the botanical garden the last night before I went home from another summer spent at Grandmother’s. It would have been perfectly mutually awkward, the way losing one’s virginity should be, instead of just embarrassing the way it was with Aaron. I used to dream about his sunken white chest, his skinny fingers on my bra clasp. I always woke before it got good.

One day between that August and the next June, he found Miranda. One day between that June and the next September he got engaged and one day, three Julys later, he was married. His wife lost my phone number and I grew to hate his answering machine. Life went on. I gave it up to two more boys, one out of boredom, one because I actually liked him. The one I actually liked took a semester in London and never came back. Aaron stuck around two years past his prime and then one October day, I was done with him.

I didn’t expect to find James again five years later, a long-distance phone call, a plea for leniency and an apology for all that time gone by without a word to whether he was alive or dead, happily married or miserably divorced.

Five years later and James is driving me back to my hotel while Morrissey wails on the radio, Andy Rourke’s bass keeping in perfect pulsation with the windshield wipers. It almost never rains in August. The tension is still there, it’s been there since he met me at the airport, hovering with the humidity, impossible to ignore, impossible to fight off. I wonder if he notices I’m wearing the same dress I wore the first time we tried this.

We pull up at a stoplight outside the Jesus is Lord Motor Inn and he shifts his eyes to meet mine. We used to kiss at stoplights and when he leans in for a peck I turn my cheek so that he gets my lips. He doesn’t pull away. I open my mouth further. I don’t even know why I want him so badly, it’s instinct, it’s memory. I’m seventeen and ready again.
The light turns green. I smile just a little bit and tilt my head a centimeter in the direction of the motel, it’s a gesture he can take or leave. He hits the turn signal.

*

That was almost as disappointing as the first time I lost my virginity. I always imagined virginity as a tangible thing, something I gave away rather than lost, lent out like a CD or a sweater or a pencil in math class and then got it back when the relationship ended to lend out another day. When I dumped Aaron, I packed my virginity back in the box with my Smiths records and the tee-shirts I left in his apartment. Until tonight I kept it at the bottom of my purse, almost forgotten among the gum wrappers and lipstick tissues.

“Ari, you’re amazing,” he murmurs, massaging my breasts from behind. I want to swat him away from me, gather up my clothes and stuff what’s left of my tattered hymen back in my bag; get the hell out of Oklahoma City on the next flight out. For years I carefully planned to reclaim what was rightfully mine, wave a used condom like a lasso and yell at his wife, “He’s mine, bitch!” I thought I wanted to be the other woman. I thought I wanted to be a whore for one night only. Now, at the end of the night I sit here with my thoughts and plans on the edge of the bed at the Jesus is Lord Motor Inn, disappointed, frustrated, empty. If I was a whore I could walk away, but he owes me something. A token. A kiss. An apology.

He’s still seventeen. I’m so much older now, but he still hasn’t grown up. He dropped out of college, he can’t keep a job, he’s a pharm-junkie in a filthy house with a fat wife. He’s a victim of life, he always was. I used to sympathize. I used to look at him and see a life in a distant land, a beautiful desert where we’d be tragically hip; he worked as a Japanese translator and I followed the crime beat for the Daily Oklahoman. We were happy. We were romantic, we were kinky, we were organic and oh-so-clever in a wasteland of rednecks and Republicans. Only part of tonight was love; the rest was a garage-sale remnant of what-should-have-been. It was easy to romanticize him when he was a ghost summoned by a song on the radio. Now I can’t even remember what I used to love about him. Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And worse, I can’t even pretend I was saving some scrap of myself for him. The lie I clung to regarding my chastity was gone. Sex destroys everything.

“I’m a terrible husband,” he murmurs, like it’s the sexiest thing in the world.

“I’ve got to get home,” I mumble, standing.

“Don’t go,” he pleads as I dress. “I’ll call Miranda and tell her it’s over. You and I can start again, the way we should have in the first place.”

For one second I consider his offer. I glance back at him, sitting on the edge of the bed in his Star Wars boxer shorts and instead of seeing the perfect life I saw at seventeen, I saw a life littered with fast-food wrappers and overdue bills, cat shit and Xanax. I need independence. He needs co-dependence. He needs someone to boss him around so that he can claim he’s powerless against a world, a job, a wife that just doesn’t understand him.

There was nothing I could say. There was nothing I wanted to say. He made no attempt to stop me as I left. This was not the ending of Casablanca, there was nothing tragic or romantic about my departure. The rain had stopped and the streets were humid and I had no real clue where I was. A woman in a sparkly mini-skirt lit her cigarette and gave me a look I could only interpret as sympathetic.

James came out a minute later, still putting one arm through his tee-shirt sleeve. “Can I at least give you a ride?” he asked.

I shook my head and took out my phone. “I’ll call a taxi,” I said. “Go home and clean your cat box.”

***

Libby Cudmore

Libby Cudmore

Libby Cudmore is a regular contributor to Pop Matters, Hardboiled and a Twist of Noir. Her work has appeared in Battered Suitcase, Inertia, the Southern Women’s Review, Shaking Like a Mountain, Celebrities in Disgrace, Thrilling Detective, Pulp Pusher, Eastern Standard Crime, Thrillers, Killers ‘n’ Chillers, the Flash Fiction Offensive, PowderBurnFlash, Big Pulp and the upcoming anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts, (the latter two with Matthew Quinn Martin).