I didn’t date a lot in high school. Other than a random makeout backstage during play rehearsal, I managed to keep my hands to myself. Since I kept mum about my collective crush on the entire varsity soccer team, my parents hinted that they perfectly fine with my concealed lesbianism. I finally found myself with a debilitating crush on a guy two years my junior at the beginning of my senior year. We’ll call him Junior. We got together by way of a mutual friend and AOL Instant Messenger in September and began our status of boyfriend and girlfriend through innocent hand-holding and makeout sessions on his parents couch.
After several months, things heated up. Think Cinemax late at night, both of us trying to keep our voices down while we had oral sex on his living room floor. We exchanged “I love you”. I was blissful despite knowing the iffiness of our future when I moved off to college. I made it perfectly clear that I was not ready to have sex. Junior agreed to wait, but one night he mentioned that he had some condoms upstairs. I balked and shot him down in a loving tone.
I graduated that June, then he spent most of the summer as a counselor at a Christian camp. He came back to visit in July and said he no longer felt “right” exchanging oral sex. Oh. We walked around my favorite park, having a heated discussion about his sudden interest in religious values, on what was supposed to be a lovely date. There was a lot of crying on my part, and a little on his, but we stuck it out. I moved away to college in August, and caught a ride back home several weeks later to break up with him on what would have been the day prior to our one-year anniversary. It was “mutual” in a way that made me hope for all my future breakups to be mutual. No lingering bitterness, no bargaining or pleading, and no stuff to exchange.
Junior made it out pretty unscathed, as did I. He started dating a girl several months later, and they got married last year. Meanwhile, I just had some ridiculous rebounds that fall semester. A crazy redhead, Gummy, and the older man. Those tales are yet to come.
