I waited a half-hour at Brownies, before I decided to finally give up, call it a day, try to bum some change and get a ride home. I’ll just resign myself to being one of those guys who doesn’t go on dates, I thought self-pityingly, wiping a bead of rain from my nose. I’ll build ships in bottles or raise chinchillas or something else life affirming instead.
That’s when Darrell finally rolled up. He parked his truck in the side alley and left it running. He opened the door, looked up at the sky as though seeing the rain for the first time, and jogged over to where I was standing beneath the restaurant awning.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, crossing his arms and staring out at the bank across the street.
“Let me ask you this,” I said. “How do I look like I’m doing?”
“It was raining,” Darrell said, by way of explanation. “Lana and Shelly decided not to play tennis after all. So I had to pick them both up at home. That’s why we’re late.”
“I see,” I said.
When Darrell finally looked over at me, I could tell it was all he could do to keep from laughing. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t be pissed off. Shelly’s waiting. She’s here. We’ll drive you home to change around. Just get in the damn truck and try not to be mean.”
We drove back to my house and I put on dry clothes, and, instead of going out to lunch, we ordered a pizza and ate it in front of the television in my basement. That afternoon, right before they left, when Shelly and I were alone together, I leaned over and kissed her without warning. It was a short kiss. Her back stiffened, and I could tell I had caught her off guard. That night, I chided myself for acting so brazen. I was no Don Juan. What made me think I could pull off a kiss like that on our first date? I would go on thinking it had been a boneheaded move until the following afternoon when we went swimming at Lana’s house and Shelly pushed me against the side of the pool wall and kissed me hard on the mouth, her fingers knotted in my hair.
One night, a month later, I drove Shelly to the edge of a cornfield, less than a mile from her grandmother’s house. The moon was full as we both unbuckled our seat belts and she grabbed the shifter, kneeling on the center console as she crawled between the front seats to the back. We splayed awkwardly across the backseat of my Jeep, limbs entangled, my head bumping the dome light every time I leaned up. I caught glimpses of our dark silhouettes reflected in the rear view mirror, and I felt the shocks bouncing with the movement of our bodies. It was blistering hot and hard to breathe. The car smelled like strawberries from Shelly’s shampoo. Her skin tasted salty. I pressed my lips to the little bump along the bridge of her nose. She grabbed a fistful of my hair, and my heart accelerated. My nerves tingled. I felt lightheaded.
I brushed my fingers over Shelly’s legs, tracing them from her knobby bowed knees to her calves, feeling the bristly hairs respond beneath my fingertips. Then I ran my hands along her back. She sucked in her breath at those first touches, the first time surprise of new skin, the trembling anticipation.
“Oh, thank you,” she whispered, pressing her lips to my ear, and for a moment I didn’t know what to do. I wanted the speed, didn’t I?
Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
I fumbled with the buttons on her shirt. When she pressed her palm flat to my chest, I leaned back. A droplet of sweat fell from the tip of my nose, landing in the cleft between her breasts. She looked down, and then back up at me. Her wan smile registered a polite disgust, or was it pity, that made my stomach feel hollow.
Pump the brakes.
“Maybe we should slow down,” she said, shifting back toward the door too quickly. “My leg is falling asleep.”
“My back is starting to ache anyway,” I said, breathing heavily, arching up from where I had wedged myself between the seats, secretly relieved. I reached across and opened the door and we both spilled out.
That night, when I drove her home—still caught up in the rush of hormones and emotions—we both said we were in love.
♦◊♦
If speed is the ratio of distance traveled by an object to the time it takes to travel that distance, then I’ve been moving fast my whole life. When I was younger, my body craved speed, demanded it. But now I wonder what I’ve missed along the way.
No one in my peer group ever stressed safety—not emotional safety. Shelly and I were together for four years, our relationship accelerating out of control, and in that time, I never considered the possibility of a wreck—a twenty-car pileup, debris scattered across the crumbling four-lane that was my heart. In my young man’s mind, the road ahead seemed straight and smooth—we’d get degrees, get jobs, get married, settle down, start a family. The only question was how fast could we make all that happen?
When it came to ending things, we didn’t move fast enough. Our break-up should have happened much sooner. Before the crash. But when things started getting serious, I didn’t worry about the perils of romance, how it might change my life or hers, whether we had anything in common, whether we were good for one another, whether our futures were even compatible. She was headed to college, wanted to become a professional musician; I had no idea where I was headed. I just knew I needed to get there pronto.
Now, that all seems boneheaded and naïve. I have the burden of knowledge. I’ve had my emotional ass kicked. I’ve been through tough breakups. Tried long-distance romance. Got into dead-end flings for all the wrong reasons. Been cheated on. Been hurt. Hurt others. Discovered that the first two years of a relationship, while nice, aren’t worth a hill of beans when it comes to longevity. Heard every cliché in the book. Repeated most of them. Been lonely. Been in love. Been lonely in love. And everything in between.
I’ve also been happy—both inside of relationships and on my own—and I’ve discovered that speed does not equal happiness. It’s not that simple.
When it comes to love, sometimes you dance the dance and it feels effortless—you feel effortless, light and beautiful. And other times, you dance the dance only to end up mistrusting your footwork, your partner, even the dance itself. Sometimes we hurt one another in ways that cost us little bits of our ability to be open, to trust, and so we start stacking bricks, afraid to invest the time and effort, reluctant to share that much of ourselves ever again. Other times, we get out of our own way—we remember that people are amazing creatures, at once completely foreign and completely familiar, and we tear the walls back down because falling in love lets us experience another person’s life in ways we otherwise couldn’t.
I know all of that now. It took me a long time.
But back then, with Shelly, coming at it fresh, I never stopped to wonder, as I would today: what’s the big hurry?
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