by Lisa Ferrari
“But you can squat six hundred pounds.”
“Yeah, now. After ten years of working at it. When I first started squatting in high school, I couldn’t even do one-thirty-five. You know what happened? Freshman year of high school, I was in the weight room with everyone else on the football team and all the coaches. Everyone was squatting one-thirty-five for warm up. I got under it, did two laughable half-reps, and fell over backward. I lost my balance and dropped the bar on the weight rack. It made a shitload of noise and everyone looked to see what was happening. I felt so stupid. The coach came over and said it was okay and that the rack saved me but next time to use less weight. I was the only one in the room who couldn’t squat one-thirty-five. Now, I warm up with that. Usually more.
“Furthermore, do you think anyone supported me when I said I was going to start a supplement company? You think anyone supported me when I said I was going to open my own gym? No. All they did was tell me how the market was saturated and how there was no way I could compete with the big corporate chain gyms and how I’d be bankrupt and out of business in a year.
“Well, guess what? That was nine years ago.
“Now I don’t even bother telling anyone what I’m going to do. I just do it. I don’t know why it is, but almost all people react with skepticism and negativity. I think it has to do with facing their own fear. It would be nice if they simply said, ‘That’s great, Kellan.’ ‘I can see you’re really excited about that, Kellan.’ ‘Go for it, Kellan.’ and then shut the hell up. Or, maybe, offer to help. But they don’t do that. They spout their fear-based words of warning that come from some antiquated, bullshit experience they had ten years ago when a friend of a friend of a friend of a cousin of an acquaintance’s uncle’s sister’s cousin’s brother said something about opening a gym but couldn’t get a business loan and never did it and so today he works in a call center selling Ginsu knives and a bunch of other late-night infomercial crap. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s to keep my mouth shut and let my actions and my success do the talking. Work hard in silence and let your success speak for you. Hard work always beats talent. And although it isn’t exactly a healthy thing to dwell on, it most definitely is one-hundred-percent true that success is the best revenge.
“So, forget about everything your parents or friends say about us. Okay? This isn’t their relationship. I’m not dating your mom or your sister or Denise. I’m not in love with your mom or your sister or Denise or that silly cocktail waitress. Okay?”
And that’s when it dawns on me.
Really, I think, for the first time.
“You’re in love with me?”
Kellan shakes his head and blinks several times and smiles a quirky smile at me. “Well, yeah. You think we’d be here if I weren’t? You think you’d have spent almost every night at my house for the past four months? You think we’d be taking trips together and I’d be buying you cars and introducing you to my friends and ejaculating rivers of semen inside you and telling you that I love you if I weren’t completely in love with you?”
“So I’m really not just some six-month pity project piece of ass to get you by until some new girl comes along?”
“Calire…”
“What is that you keep calling me?”
“Calire.”
“But my name is Claire. Just like from The Breakfast Club.”
“Okay, I’m going to forget you said that. And I know your name is Claire. But every time I texted it, I kept inverting the L and the A. So it became Calire. I think it’s cute. Calire. It rhymes with… Well, it doesn’t rhyme with anything. But it’s still cute. And it’s better than Clay Bar.”
He puts down his copy of Goblet and wraps his arms around me and pulls me close. It feels… wonderful. His warm body so soft against mine early in the morning.
“Look,” he continues, “you already know that I’ve, let’s say dabbled, in the dating scene, right? But I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you.”
Wow. I don’t know what to say. I feel… stupid.
“Okay,” I say. “I feel the same way about you.”
Kellan pulls me tight, kisses my head, and whispers, “Okay.”
“That thing you said about ejaculating rivers of semen inside me, which I love by the way, more than I can ever explain to you, but what happens if I get pregnant? I mean, we said we’d get me on the pill but we never did.”
“If you get pregnant, you get pregnant. Haven’t we already discussed this?”
“Yeah. We did. Once. Three months ago. I just want to make sure you haven’t changed your mind.”
“I haven’t.”
“So, what if I do get pregnant?”
“Then we’ll have a baby together. And if it looks anything like you, it’ll be gorgeous.”
“That’s sweet. But, we’ll have a baby.”
“I know.”
“So? Doesn’t that completely scare the crap out of you? I mean, it’s a baby. It’s another human being. And it’s ours. Yours and mine. We’re responsible for it.”
“I know.”
I feel like Kellan is not understanding me.
“Look, Claire, you’re right, of course. That is a big step. A huge step. Probably the biggest one there is. I agree. But if you got pregnant, I would love it. I would. Really. I would be so happy. It would accelerate our timeline a bit, obviously. We’d probably want to hurry up and get married before he or she was born so the little tyke wouldn’t have to grow up and go its whole life under the burden of being a bastard born out of wedlock, wondering if it were the only reason we stayed together. So, a wedding would be in order. But I know people in the industry,” he gives me a squeeze and a kiss on my head, “so that’s no big deal.”
“Us getting married is no big deal?”
“That’s not what I meant. Yes, of course us getting married would be a big deal. I’m simply saying the process for us to get married wouldn’t be a big deal. I think once we’ve gotten to that point, it will be something we both want and something we both knew we’ve always wanted. So it would be a foregone conclusion. It would simply come down to planning it and enjoying it. But if you want to, by all means we can look into some form of birth control.”
“Like me going on the pill?”
“I guess. I would take pills but they haven’t been invented yet. We’ll have to make sure it’s safe and healthy for you. It is hormones, after all. Is there any cancer or breast cancer in your family? Anyone ever had a hysterectomy?”
“Not that I’m aware of. But I’d have to ask my mom. Oh God.”
“What?”
“The last thing I want to do is ask my mom about our family health history.”
“Why? That’s a pretty standard question.”
“Yeah, for a girl to ask her mom when the girl is planning to go on the pill. That’s not a conversation I want to have.”
“I understand. Want me to come with you and we’ll talk to her together?”
“Oh Lord. Are you serious?”
“Sure. I’ll talk to her. You can just sit there and check email on your phone if you want. Or post pics on Instagram of mothers and daughters having The Talk.”
“God…”
“Look, to be totally honest, it would probably be a healthy exercise for you to have that conversation with your mom. Like, one of those rites of passage kinds of things where a mother is forced to realize that her little girl is growing up and becoming a woman and an adult, and that is a good, normal, natural, healthy thing and that her job as a mother is not to freak out and condemn and stifle and yell and scream and throw stuff. Her job is to support and nurture and offer as much guidance and help as the girl wants. Being open and honest and communicating is a heck of a lot better than keeping everything in the dark. That’s how girls get pregnant when they’re fourteen because their parents forbid them to have sex, forbid them to talk about birth control, forbid, forbid, forbid. And then human nature takes its course and the girl
meets a boy and he’s a horny little shit and he breaks her down and coerces her into having sex and they do it unprotected and he’s so excited that he shoots his load inside her in five seconds and two months later she’s late and she goes to the store and shoplifts a pregnancy test because she’s too embarrassed and ashamed to actually buy it and the next thing you know, it’s positive and she has to tell her mom that she’s pregnant when it would’ve been far, far better for her to go tell her mom that she was thinking about becoming sexually active and that she wanted to be mature about it and she needed some help with birth control. But that didn’t happen because the mom had her head in the sand and wanted to live in a fantasy world and now the girl has a baby to care for. But if you want to avoid that conversation, I understand completely. You’re not fourteen. You’re an adult. You don’t have to tell your mom anything. If you want, we can get a DNA test to check your genetic predisposition for any illnesses and if the pill isn’t safe for you then you won’t take it.”
“So what will we do then? Use condoms?”
“Do you want to use condoms?”
“Not really.”
“Me either. Like I said, if there were a pill for men that would inhibit sperm maturation or something, and sperm production would go back to normal when you stopped taking it, I would take it. They’ve been working on a pill like that for decades. Vasectomies aren’t a hundred percent reversible, so that’s not really an option. Plus the notion of a doctor prying my nutsack open and pulling my vas deferens out and cauterizing them with a hot scalpel makes me want to barf. So I’d rather not go that route.”
“You’re not worried about diseases or anything?”
“It’s probably a little late for this conversation, but no, I’m not. Are you?”
“No. You always used protection with your past partners, right? All seven-hundred thousand of them?”
“Yes. Always. And it wasn’t seven-hundred thousand. It was one-point-five million.”
I punch him in the arm and he falls over on the bed, pretending it actually hurt.
“So you never… like… um… came… in any of your one-point-five million slutty gold-digging party-girl sluts?”
Kellan laughs out loud hard. “No, I never did.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You think I wanted to have a baby with any of those girls? Yikes.”
“If you didn’t want to have a baby with them, why were you sleeping with them?”
“I wasn’t sleeping with them. I was having sex with them. I always went home to sleep.”
“You know what I mean.”
“What can I say? I was young, dumb, and full of come. I was stupid and horny and had all these girls throwing themselves at me and telling me they wanted me, so I did it. What can I say? I think that’s probably pretty normal. I don’t regret doing it. Maye I would regret it if I hadn’t done it. I certainly learned a lot from it. It made me who I am today.”
“What do you mean?”
“I learned about intimacy and what sex is supposed to be. It’s not just about putting meat inside meat and pounding away and getting your rocks off. It took me awhile to figure it out but a lot of those girls have sex the way they shake hands. Casually. Like, no big deal. Put your cock in me. Shove it down my throat. Shove it up my ass. Sure, I’ll let you go ass to mouth on me and then swallow your load even though I’m too drunk to remember your name or how we got wherever we are.”
“Did you do that?”
“Well, not really. But there were times in clubs when I got pretty wasted and let some girl drag me to the men’s room. See, it’s precisely this kind of stuff that made me say I don’t deserve you. You know how humiliating it is for me to have you find out all this stuff about me? I am so embarrassed right now. It’s not something I’m proud of.”
“But you just said you don’t regret it.”
Kellan is quiet and pensive for a moment. “I guess I’m glad it happened because I learned that it’s absolutely not what I want. But it would also be nice to be able to count my lovers on one hand. Or maybe two at the most.”
“But isn’t there a big difference, a big, big, big difference between a lover and a one-night-stand? Or even a ten-minute-stand in the men’s room?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“A lover is someone you’re in love with, right? Someone with whom you make love. That’s why they’re called a lover.”
“That’s true.”
“So how many lovers have you had? From what you’ve told me, I’d have to say two. The squirter in college… and me. Right?”
“Right. There was one other woman I knew only briefly. We worked together in the same office and I was madly in love with her. She used to wear boots to work. I have a thing for a woman in boots.”
Claire, note to self: BUY BOOTS!
Noted.
Seriously.
Okay.
Like, a gazillion of them.
I will!
“But she was about ten years older,” Kellan continues. “She was married and had five kids and was totally not interested in me so nothing ever happened. So I guess that doesn’t really count since we were never actually lovers in any way whatsoever. In fact, I don’t think we ever had a single conversation. She said ‘sorry’ to me once in the break room when we bumped into each other and she spilled coffee on my brand new white shirt I wore to try to impress her. But that was it.”
“Ah, unrequited love.”
“So how about you?”
“How about me what?”
“How many lovers have you had? Can you count them on one hand?”
“You really want to know?”
“Sure.”
“It doesn’t bother you to think of some other guy being all naked on top of me and putting his thing in me and slobbering all over me and stuff?”
“Well, since you put it that way in such a vivid, descriptive manner, yes, it does. A lot. But you don’t have to go into any great detail. I just think that our early sexual experiences are profound moments in our youth. They help make us who we are. In college, I knew a girl who had had sex with forty guys. Forty! And that was just in college. And we weren’t even seniors yet. So in three years she banged forty guys. That’s like twelve guys a year. That’s one a month. I guess going out and getting laid once a month doesn’t seem like a lot. But to do it month after month and year after year seems kinda…”
“Icky.”
“Yeah. I always preferred to meet someone I liked and date them for a while and have lots and lots of sex with just that one person. First-time sex is exciting, but it’s always a little awkward. It gets better over time. So I’ve never understood why people go out and have one-night stands.”
“Denise says you have to cast your nets far and wide. And you have to sow your wild oats. You need to get it out of your system. She’s full of platitudes. Even though she probably thinks a platitude is something I use to carry food at work.”
“So? How many?”
“Four.”
“That’s not that much. That’s reasonable. Who were they?”
“My first was a guy in high school. I was a junior and he was a sophomore. Which was kinda awkward because I had to drive us around everywhere because he didn’t have his license yet. Or a car. So we always fooled around in my car. I performed my first blowjob in the back seat after the Sadie Hawkins dance. It was his first, too. But then his dad got a job in Seattle and they moved away. The next guy was freshman year at college. He lived in my dorm and we were both new at school and totally terrified of living away from home for the first time. We ended up dating for a little over a year. Then he joined a fraternity and got all weird and stopped calling me.”
“Which fraternity?”
“Alpha Omega Chi, I think. They were a bunch of stoners at our school so everyone called them Alpha Omega High.”
“Did you join a sorority?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It all seemed kind of stupid. Kind of like a continuation of the popularity contest bullshit that went on in high school that I was never a part of. It’s probably just my own insecurities talking and I probably missed out on a wonderful experience but too late now. I guess a lot of girls made really good friends. But I had a small group of people I hung out with. Two were from the English department, one was a biology major. The other was her boyfriend Jason who didn’t go to school there but came and stayed with her on the weekend. We all had dinner together two or three nights a week and usually hung out on the weekends. But I had my own dorm room and I spent most of my time there. I had too much work to do. I had a mini-fridge and a microwave and I used to go over to the student union where the restaurant was so I could use my meal card twice a day to get chicken sandwiches because the dining hall food was terrible. I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, too. I usually read while I ate. I read while I brushed my teeth. I read every night in bed. Sometimes I even read on the toilet. Then I got a bucket and started peeing in it so I wouldn’t have to leave my room in the middle of the night to pee.”
“You peed in a bucket?”
“Heck yeah I peed in a bucket. You think I was going to put on my robe and flip flops and walk forty feet down the hall in the bright light to the bathroom at four o’clock in the morning? Hell no.”
“What did you do with the pee?”
“I had a sink in my room so I poured it down the sink.”