Or, he’s actually being nice.
“Let me at least try,” he says to me, all earnestness, and suddenly I’m so irritated. Worse than irritated—I’m all-out-of-proportion enraged, my body in fight-or-flight mode.
“Not you,” I snap at Boris. “Not about this.”
Everyone gapes at me and Emma says, “Libby!”
“Sorry. I just.” I stand up, shaking all of a sudden, wanting to kick something, wanting to run. “Can’t.”
And then, making it fight-and-flight, I grab my stuff and take off.
* * *
—
Emma follows me, as does the charming sound of barking once I get inside. The new video has obviously spread like wildfire during the lunch hour.
Fun.
I seriously consider barking back. Maybe howling.
“Libby, what the hell?” Emma says, catching up with me just in time to foil my excellent plan of spending the duration of lunch slumped in the same bathroom stall I hid in yesterday.
“Give me some space, Emma,” I say, continuing forward.
“No,” she says. “Talk to me.”
“You don’t want to hear what I have to say right now.”
“What if I do?”
“You don’t. And even if you do, I don’t want you to.”
“Why not? Is this about Boris? You’re so weird about him. Talk to me.”
“I . . .” Crap. Suddenly I’m about to cry. What is wrong with me? “I can’t.”
“Why?” she demands again.
“Because I can’t handle any more . . . stuff. I don’t want to fight and I don’t want you to be upset with me. I can’t lose you.”
“Lose me?” she says, incredulous. “A little faith here, please. That’s not how this best friend business works.”
“Look, I just need a break from Boris sometimes,” I say, deciding to be blunt, if not thorough. “He annoys me, okay? I know I acted brokenhearted when we broke up but honestly I was sick to death of him. I stayed in the relationship far too long because I just . . . couldn’t find the words to end it. I thought he might get mad, or be hurt, and any thought of conflict just . . . freezes me.”
Emma looks confused and I know I’m not explaining this well. I’m only starting to figure it out myself—how literally impossible it feels for me to speak up in certain circumstances. I do freeze but that’s not all. It’s as if, as things got worse at home, I started to submerge myself—to see trouble coming and slowly sink down into an existential swamp, with only my nose and eyes above the water line, safe but incapable of speaking or taking action. Maybe that’s why half of my relationship with Boris feels like it occurred underwater.
“The point is, Em, I was a coward. And I care about Boris, but I needed a break from him.”
“And you never got it because of me.”
“Yes.”
“You should have told me,” Emma says, eyes suddenly flashing.
“You said you wouldn’t be mad.”
“I said you wouldn’t lose me, not that I wouldn’t be mad. I can be mad.”
“Fine,” I say, folding my arms together across my chest and squeezing like I can physically hold myself together.
“Why didn’t you at least tell me when he and I started falling for each other?”
“What could you have done about it at that point?”
This gives her pause.
“Plus I would have been a hypocrite to tell you not to go out with him given that I didn’t want him. I’m sorry, though.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Her shoulders sag. “I’ll try to limit your Boris exposure.”
“No. We have, what, two months of school left? We’re all friends and I don’t want that ruined right at the end of high school after all these years. It’s my issue to deal with, and most of the time I’m fine. Let’s just go to Geography.”
She looks at me for a long moment, then says, “Sure, okay.”
All things considered, this didn’t go as badly as I feared. Then again, I haven’t told her everything about Boris and me. Nor do I plan to.
13
MERCY SHAG
Speaking of Boris exposure, I find him waiting by my locker after school.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry about earlier. I’m a little on edge, I guess.”
“No big deal,” he says, and steps out of the way so I can get my stuff. “It’s been a rough few days for you.”
“Thanks.”
“So,” he says, as I’m shoving books into my backpack and grabbing my sunglasses, “I told Emma I was going to offer to walk you home, since she and Yaz have basketball, and Noah has to work, but she got a weird look on her face and told me not to. She said you might need some space.”
Shit.
“It’s fine, Boris,” I say, and inwardly roll my eyes at myself because now I’m going to end up overcompensating and spending more time with Boris instead of less, because I feel badly that he might feel badly . . . even though he actually should feel badly, but not about the thing he thinks he should feel badly about. If he actually thinks that, which he probably doesn’t.
Ugh—someone please save me from my overthinking brain.
Rod Catena walks by and barks, and Boris starts to turn toward him, but I grab his bony arm.
“Steady there, tough guy,” I say while tugging him in the opposite direction from Rod. “A walk home would be lovely.”
I make some efforts at small talk, lobbing subjects toward Boris, which he lobs feebly back, but pretty soon we’re out of conversation and the short walk to my house starts to feel really long.
It got like this when we were together, too—nothing to say.
Once in a while he would go heavy into physics, composition theory, or the many odd things he knows about geology, and I would do my best to keep up. Or I would try to talk about art, tell a funny-but-dark story, or dive into something deep, and the result would be either blank confusion from him, or worse, he would start laughing nervously, and then literally pat me on the head, and be like, “Hey, whoa, calm down.”
In other words, Boris and I are not soul mates.
“I always think of you when I pass here,” he says out of the blue as we’re walking by the tiny park where he turns left to go to his house, and I continue straight on to mine. When we were dating, we’d stop and play on the teeter-totter, or sit on the grass and smooch.
“You want to sit?” he asks, and points to an empty bench.
I don’t want to be guilty of being mean to Boris twice in one day, so I say “Sure” and follow him over.
It’s only when we sit—me on one side, him about midway, that I notice his hands are shaking. It’s chilly in the shade, and we’re both a little underdressed, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I look up at his face then and see him looking at me with a very serious, very nervous expression.
“I have to talk to you about something,” he says.
“Listen, if it’s about you and Emma don’t worry about it. Seriously.”
“It’s not that,” he says. Jeez, he looks like he might cry or something. “It’s . . . Libby, I wanted to ask you about . . .”
Oh God. Everything in me goes rigid and I stare fixedly at the kids on the play structure, suddenly wishing I could switch places with one of them.
Because I think he wants to talk about that.
And I can’t. I can’t do it. I won’t.
But no. Boris is so clueless, it can’t be that.
Still, if it is, could talking about it possibly make me feel any worse? Well, given that it feels like my every muscle has tensed and my organs are turning to stone, yes. Much worse. In the short term. But in the long term?
“About what . . . ?” I manage to say without keeling over and dying.
“About the mercy shag.”
&nb
sp; Submerge, submerge, my brain is screaming.
But I can’t. Won’t.
* * *
—
Boris and I were together for almost a year, and he seemed the right boy to lose my virginity to. He was sweet and thoughtful and did all the romantic things high school boys are supposed to do—flowers, good night texts, hand-holding, declarations of devotion, et cetera.
We spent a lot of time making out, then rolling around and making out, then fooling around and making out in various levels of undress. I wanted to have sex. I was curious. Still, we didn’t rush, and the not rushing activities were quite interesting and fun.
When we finally did the deed, though, it was distinctly less fun than everything that came before. Still, I knew the first time wasn’t necessarily going to be the best, so I didn’t panic. And it did get a little better after that—less awkward at least. But I soon realized that none of it was really doing it for me. I didn’t hate it, but given a choice between sex with Boris and a really good plate of waffles, I’d have chosen the waffles.
Boris, though, was having the time of his life. I swear he was glowing, and he looked like he’d grown a foot. He would probably have given up waffles for life in order to keep having sex.
Meanwhile, I felt progressively worse—like a fraud and a failure. Because if he was having such a great time and I was only moderately into it, it must be my fault. He was a perfectly nice, considerate, cute, clean boyfriend, and instead of being ecstatic, I found myself sighing every time I saw him walking toward me.
Boris wasn’t doing anything wrong from a technical standpoint, at least not that I could think of. He wasn’t “bad” at sex. He was enthusiastic, bursting with love and gratitude, and had lots of energy. After our first time, he composed an almost-good trumpet solo and named it after me.
And, to be fair, Boris didn’t know I wasn’t having a good time, because I didn’t tell him. For one thing, I’d been pretending to like it in anticipation of eventually liking it, so I would’ve had to start out by explaining that my moans of ecstasy were exaggerated and/or outright fake, which did not put me in a good light and was frankly too embarrassing. Plus male egos are famously fragile about this stuff, and I didn’t want to be responsible for scarring Boris for life.
So I started making excuses not to do the deed. At first he was understanding. Then he got whiny. Then he started in with “a man’s got needs!” and “have mercy on your poor, neglected, horny boyfriend.”
Mostly as a joke.
Except he made the jokes too often for them to be actual jokes.
One day when we were alone at his house after school and I was studying for a test I had the next day, he made another one of these mercy comments.
My inner censor must have been sleeping, because I said, “Oh, so you want a mercy fuck?”
He blanched. Boris was a “make love” kind of guy.
“Mercy shag, then?” I amended.
“Um. Well . . .” he stammered.
“What?” I said, getting up from his desk, where I was set up to study, and coming toward where he was sitting on the bed. “Are you saying you don’t?”
“Well,” he said. “It sounds . . . I mean . . .”
I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it over the back of a chair, then undid my pants, took off my bra, underwear, and socks, and lay down on the bed.
“Let’s go,” I said. “But make it fast—I really need to study.”
Boris did, at least, hesitate, and take a moment to look confused. But then he laughed, and muttered, “Mercy shag, huh? You sure?”
“God forbid we fail to meet your needs,” I said, but I said it with affection, with humor. “C’mon. But don’t expect much from me.”
“You’re hilarious,” he said. But he took me at my word and reached for the condom box, and thus was born the mercy shag.
I found I could give a mercy shag without too much distress, maybe because I kept my real self somewhere deeper than Boris ever got to anyway.
After that Boris made a lot of winking jokes about mercy shagging, and it was clear he’d convinced himself that I actually enjoyed them, and was only toying with him by pretending not to.
From then on, they were all mercy shags.
It’s only now that I’m starting to realize I put myself under Boris in a way that I couldn’t undo, in a way that made me feel I was always under him, his breath in my face, his sweat dripping on me, trying so hard to detach from my body and burrow deeper into myself. Every time I saw him, even months after we broke up, that’s how I felt. That’s, I guess, how I still feel—not all the time, but in unexpected flashes that sneak up on me and leave me feeling gross and violated.
And now there’s Kyle, which was (confusingly) both a better and a worse experience than I ever had with Boris. Maybe if I hadn’t allowed all those mercy shags, I would have known how to say no more forcefully to Kyle. Or I wouldn’t have been so twisted as to have a body that responded to Kyle at all. Through everything, too, is the feeling that I did this to myself.
But that’s not true either. Well, it is and it isn’t.
Regardless, Boris has said the words and now the subject is out in the open and I have to deal with it.
* * *
—
“What about the mercy shag, Boris?” I manage to say.
“That assembly last week made me think about it. All those times we did it, you basically . . .” he takes a gasping breath then continues. “You told me you didn’t want to. It sure wasn’t enthusiastic consent.”
I’m dying here. Tense and sick and wishing I could somehow vacate myself. Take the real me and exit, leaving just the shell here to get through this conversation. I did it during every mercy shag, why can’t I do it for this?
“Am I wrong?” Boris asks, and I can hear the wishful thinking in his voice. “I would love to be wrong.”
“No, you’re not wrong,” I say, the words coming out in a ragged whisper.
Boris crumples backward on the bench like someone just punched him.
“Okay, let’s just get it out,” he says, seeming to gasp between each word. “Was it worse than not being enthusiastic? Because I . . . did . . . a whole bunch of the things she listed. Whining. Pushing you. Bugging you, pressuring you, trying to make you feel guilty.”
“Yeah, you did,” I say, my hands gripping the bench.
He lets out a low moan.
“But,” I concede, the words starting to come easier, “it’s not like you were threatening me or anything. And no offense, but it’s not like you, yourself, are threatening, physically speaking.”
“That’s gotta be the first time it’s ever been conveyed as a plus,” Boris says. “Uh. Not trying to make light of anything.”
“It’s fine.”
“People do ‘quickies’ and I told myself it was the same thing. I told myself you were only acting like you weren’t into it to tease me. But you weren’t teasing me, were you.”
His expression is stark, and he doesn’t state it as a question, but I’ve made a start, managed to get this far in the conversation, and so I need to answer. It’s hideous and awkward, but I have to answer. And yet, I am amazed and horrified to observe in myself, still, the urge to smooth this over, to make it better for him, the urge to tell him that I didn’t lie there under him hating it and just waiting for it to be over, to tell him that it didn’t mess me up and make me hate us both.
I still somehow feel badly for him. I still feel guilty and gross and sad.
Because what he did was ugly, but what I did feels ugly to me, too. I didn’t just lie to him about the mercy shags, I started lying way before that—pretending to be enjoying sex when I wasn’t. And that was on me. Yes, I did it to protect his ego, and not hurt his feelings, but it was also because I was a coward and, like always, because I just could not speak
.
“I wasn’t teasing,” I say.
He nods, then drops his head and says, “I’m so sorry. I have no excuse. I have reasons—like I didn’t have any experience, and I was partially blinded by just wanting you, and I thought part of the whole deal was, you know, that you sometimes had to convince somebody, seduce them . . .”
“By whining?”
“Ouch. But fair. Whining is not a legitimate tool of seduction.”
“It’s not the hottest.”
Boris gives a pained chuckle, and then winces like he thinks he shouldn’t be laughing.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about this, too,” I say, turning to face him. “It’s true that you shouldn’t have taken me up on the mercy shag offers. But I did offer. I offered, which means in some way I consented—not enthusiastically, but still, you can’t take all the blame for your confusion. I could have said no. I could have stopped offering. I should have, but I didn’t.”
“But I still did what I did.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” he says after a too-long silence, “this is truly awful.”
I don’t know why, but this makes me laugh—another one of those pained laughs, which causes Boris to give me the most wounded of looks.
I press my lips together and try to channel a more serious demeanor.
“How do I make this right, Libby? Is there something I can do? Do you want me to . . . take a break from Emma?”
“No, you cannot dump Emma. Are you kidding?”
“Well, I’d rather not but . . . I’m trying to show you I’m serious.”
“Short of turning yourself in to the police . . .” I say, and he blanches. “Oh, come on, we both know that you’d get laughed right out of the station.”
“Still. What can I do? Uh, ideally besides that. I can make myself scarce for a while—give you space. Would that help?”
“Actually, yes. Not in an extreme way, though. I don’t want any drama and I don’t want to have to hash this out with our friends. But some space would be lovely.”
He Must Like You Page 11