“Man, what are you laughing about?” he asked and rolled over to watch me, smiling. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. By the time I got myself under control, I had forgotten what had set me off in the first place.
In the silence that followed, we lay on our sides staring at each other, and I noticed for the first time how green his eyes were. My breathing had become ragged, and so had his. I looked at his half-open mouth. It occurred to me that Miguel wanted to sleep with me, and then it occurred to me that I wanted to sleep with him. Before touching him, I had never thought of Miguel sexually; he wasn’t my type. He was as far from being a blond jock as I could imagine. But here we both were, and I was turned on. My mouth was parched. I was very high. I licked my lips, wishing I had thought to bring something in from the kitchen to drink. “Do you want to have sex with me?” I asked. I wasn’t even nervous, just curious.
He reached out and touched my breast through my shirt, covering it with his palm. “I didn’t think you wanted to. You never seemed interested.”
“Like the other girls at school?”
“Shit.” He looked away, embarrassed. “Maybe I’m kind of dense that way.”
“No, you were reading me right.” I wanted to put my hand in his thick, wavy black hair. Then I realized that I could. I stroked it back behind his ear. His hair was almost as long as mine and curled around like the earpiece to glasses. “Besides,” I added, smiling, “Asian girls are much more subtle than white girls, you know. You could even say inscrutable.”
The sides of his mouth pulled up. “Then what you need is a hot-blooded Chicano lover to spark your fires of passion.” I rolled my eyes and we both burst into laughter again.
And then we fucked. We didn’t spend a lot of time working up to it. He undressed, then took off my clothes, kneeling beside me, kissing the places he uncovered. Because I was high, each action seemed slowed down and deliberate. I could almost taste my own skin. When Miguel entered me, he rested on one elbow and guided his penis in with his own hand. It hurt; when I made a small grunting noise, he looked up at me, confused.
“I’ve never done this before,” I told him apologetically.
He raised his eyebrows, then nodded and slowly pushed in farther. He stayed still inside me until I was used to him, propping himself above me and looking into my face for encouragement. “Okay,” I said, a little breathlessly, not sure whether it really was.
He began fucking me in earnest. It was still uncomfortable, but I thought about how long I had been waiting to do this and now I was doing it. Then he shifted his position slightly, and the angle changed or something, because then I liked it, him filling up the space inside me like waves rushing in and the way it made me feel liquid and vast and sort of greedy. I wondered if I could come this way. I wondered why Laura always stopped short of fucking. Didn’t she have any idea how good it would feel after all her experience of foreplay? Miguel increased his tempo, his eyes closed, a look of concentration on his face. I was trying to catch my breath, wanting the slippery greedy feeling to last. When he came, silently but unmistakeably, I imagined Laura lying on her hot and sunny beach two thousand miles away as her freckled boyfriend slipped his hand into the bottom half of her bikini. Except the image changed, and it was my hand feeling the wetness there. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the solidity of Miguel’s body against mine.
Miguel lay on top of me, breathing hard, while I moved my hand across his back and smelled his ripe smell. I was still excited and a little afraid that he would fall asleep now. I was happy too, pleased with myself. I listened to the birds calling outside for what seemed like an hour before realizing that the record had ended. A trickle of fluid ran out of my body. I remembered that we hadn’t used any birth control, but I was feeling far too diffuse to care. Miguel lifted his head and then rolled us both over so that I was on top. This took a little maneuvering on my twin bed. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked down at him.
“You didn’t come, did you?” he asked. He pulled lightly on a fistful of my hair. I felt it fall, the edges grazing my chin.
I shook my head. “I didn’t think I would.”
“Do you want to now?”
“Sure.”
“Come up here.” He started to pull me up.
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“Just come up here, I’ll show you. Hey, slowly, my pecker’s still attached to me, you know. Okay, kneel over my face. Just sink down. Yeah, like that.”
What he did felt so different from anything I had been able to do for myself that I knew I would never be able to describe it to Laura. I was aware of wetness, and coolness, and the pointed end of his tongue. When my legs started to tremble, I held on to the bedboard. In the end, the pressure he used was too hard, and then I was afraid I was smothering him, and then I couldn’t think about him because I was coming and it was so much better than it had ever been alone.
Afterwards we lay unmoving on the bed, exactly as we had been an hour earlier except that we had no clothes on. I was lying on a large wet spot. I wondered what Laura would say now that I had finally gone and done it. I wondered if she’d be surprised. I was relieved. This proved I wasn’t a lesbian after all. How could I be if sex with a guy was so easy and fun? Maybe all my feelings about Laura during the last months only meant that I was horny. I was glad that I didn’t have to go through that anymore, channeling my frustration toward the person closest at hand. She and I could resume our old friendship, only now instead of talking about the boys we had crushes on, we would talk about the ones we were sleeping with. It wouldn’t have to be me asking her questions all the time, or me trying to figure out when I could touch her so it would seem casual, like a friend would. I swallowed, drawing saliva into my dry mouth. For some reason, I felt disappointed. I realized the pot had worn off.
Miguel shifted beside me and opened his eyes. He moved his arm, resting it palm up on my stomach. I could smell sex and sweat mingled. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Fine?” He seemed amused. “In my book, that was great.”
“It isn’t always like that?”
He smiled, closed his eyes, then opened them. “Well, for one thing, not every girl lets me do what you just did.”
“Really?” That had been my favorite part.
“No way. Girls can be real uptight.”
I wondered why that was. Everything Miguel and I had done had felt great. I couldn’t wait to do it the next day. Again, I felt a wash of relief. Then I looked at the clock and saw how late it was. My mother would be arriving home from work soon. We took turns in the shower, got dressed, and I hurried him out the door. After his car was out of sight, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat. By then I was starving.
That night, after my mother went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table, drinking the last of the coffee in the pot, and tried to write Laura. It was harder than I expected.
“Dear Laura,” I finally wrote. “You’ll never guess what happened today. Miguel and I DID IT. As you know, I really wasn’t thinking about him that way. It just happened. And guess what? I liked it. A lot. Remember my favorite word, cunnilingus? He did that too. The whole thing seems like too much to tell you about in a letter, unless you really want me to. I wanted you to know right away. Write me soon. I miss you. Bunches of love, Min.”
I read my letter over and over again, not liking it at all but not sure how to fix it. For some reason, I was afraid of sending it. I wasn’t sure, really, how Laura would react. At the same time, I urgently wanted her to know. And she would hate me if I didn’t tell her immediately. At least I hadn’t told her I thought I was gay, only to take it back as soon as a boy touched me. I thought again of how horny I had been for so long. Then I thought of the afternoon with Miguel and grinned. In the end, I addressed the envelope, licked it closed, wrote S.W.A.K. across the back, and left it on the table for my mother to mail in the morning.
Laura didn’t write back.
I started waiting for the mail in the morning, but there was no envelope addressed to me in Laura’s large, squared-off handwriting. At first I thought she hadn’t gotten the letter; I thought maybe her mother had intercepted it. Then I realized that was ridiculous, that she had received the letter and she disapproved. Of all the things I’d done that she thought were wrong, sleeping with Miguel probably topped the list. I knew she had a set of requirements in her head about the first time. She thought it had to be with the right kind of guy, and you had to be going steady, and you had to lead up to it slowly. She was punishing me by not writing back. Realizing this was what had happened, I was furious. Laura had no right to judge me. I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules. Rules were for fools. I didn’t try writing her again. She would have to make the next move. But I still missed her.
The last weeks of summer were winding down. In the time we had left, Miguel and I would meet at my house while my mother worked and screw until I had to go in to San Francisco to my job. I was learning things from him I could never have gotten from books or my teachers. When Miguel stroked my breasts, and when he showed me how he liked his balls fondled, and when we watched each other masturbate, and when we took each other’s fingers, tongues, nipples, and genitals into our mouths, I discovered that sex was more than fucking. It was more, even, than running the bases, progressing from point A to point Z. Sometimes it was much less than that. Sometimes it was holding still, and sometimes it wasn’t even touching. I never knew exactly if Miguel felt this way, because at the end of everything we did, he wanted to come, wanted the waiting and the building frustration to resolve into a spurting orgasm. But I could remain waiting. I could stop and do something utterly different—go for a drive, scavenge in the kitchen, watch TV—and then come back to what we were doing and it would be as if we had never stopped. Or we could not come back, and I would take the feeling with me into the rest of the day or through the night. I liked that feeling of suspension. I liked the exhilaration of being aroused and not knowing when or if or why I would leave that state.
At the same time, I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I was a lesbian after all. Miguel would have been surprised to learn it during those days our sweating bodies ground themselves against each other, fierce in their pursuit of pleasure. He would have laughed at the suggestion as I kissed his back, slowly licking from end to end the indentation his spine made, then starting on the other side. But when I touched his flat chest, I wanted to cup rounded breasts; when I ran my hand over the front of his shorts, I became impatient with the blatant presence of his erection. The more familiar I became with his body, the more it startled me. The truth was I wished he were a woman.
For a while I reasoned with myself that I didn’t really know whether it was a girl’s body I craved, because I had never been with a girl, if I didn’t count Laura’s and my experimental kissing in seventh grade. And I didn’t, exactly. It had been a stupid experiment, and Laura had been more anxious than curious, more interested in kissing Nick than in kissing for its own sake. Sometimes when we spent the night at the other’s house, we put ourselves to sleep by touching ourselves simultaneously, under our separate bed covers, our hushed voices slowing down as we pretended to keep up the conversation. When we heard the other coming, we tried to come at the same time. This, too, had never struck me as a sexual interchange. It was something Laura and I occasionally did together. But as the summer weeks passed, I finally admitted to myself that when I gazed, aroused, at Miguel, it was Laura that I wanted to see, her skin I imagined touching. That didn’t make me want to stop fucking him while she was gone.
A couple of days before I knew Laura would be getting back from Michigan, I sat with Miguel on my favorite rock, staring out at the flat gray ocean, which was mostly covered by mist. I was not in a talkative mood, and that seemed to suit him. We hadn’t smoked any pot, but even so I felt myself shift into and out of the landscape around me; I was unsure if I was part of it or only watching it from a distance. The sea and the sky were almost the same color. The waves sprayed us as they broke on the rocks below. I smoked a cigarette. Eventually the fog lifted, and the sun fell warm on our faces. I shivered in the wind.
When Miguel put his arm around my shoulder, I was thinking of how soon I would see Laura’s bright face again, of the grounding sensation I got when I leaned into her. I said, still looking out at the dark, choppy water, “Miguel, I think we should just be friends.”
“Why?” He sounded surprised. And hurt.
Everything with him had been easy, natural, up to this moment. “Well, I’ve really liked being with you, and we have a lot of fun, but I just don’t feel like I want to keep doing this.”
“Why, are you embarrassed to be seen at school with me?” His tone was accusing.
“No,” I said. And that wasn’t why. But I also knew I was lying. Right then I hated myself, because I realized it was true that I didn’t want to be seen as his girlfriend at school. I thought of Miguel exactly the way the kids in our class thought of me. I felt my face get hot, realizing the unspoken rules had insinuated their way inside me too. I despised Nick, the well-rounded, all-American asshole, but I wouldn’t have been ashamed of him. Miguel took his arm away. I felt cold.
“I should have known you were just like the other girls,” he said. “You never wanted to hang out downtown or even introduce me to your mom. You never asked me to stay for dinner. You just wanted to keep me hidden, your dirty secret.” He had my lighter in his hand and started flicking it on and off.
I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to tell my mother that I even knew Miguel. I was certain she would have forbidden me to spend time with any boy in the house alone, and lying was easier than trying to negotiate with her. Being with Miguel, I realized, had been a very separate part of my life. I had never asked him to meet me in the city either, or introduced him to Alison, or even talked about Laura. Most of the pieces of my life never overlapped. I wondered why this was. At the same time, it seemed absolutely necessary. Even the thought of doing it differently made me nervous. It occurred to me that I was a different person with everyone I knew. I couldn’t risk changing that. I sat looking out over the roiling ocean made bright by the glare of the sun, and I squinted, my eyes stinging. But I couldn’t blame the salt spray. And now I had cut myself off from Miguel, the only person who had any idea what it was like to live that way.
I said, “You can think whatever you want, but that’s not the reason I want to break up.”
“I thought you were happy.” He flicked the lighter. “We’re good together.” Flick. The lighter’s flame was barely visible.
I looked sideways at him. His face was sullen, angry. I liked him so much, I almost couldn’t understand myself why it was so impossible for me to go on being with him. I just knew I couldn’t. I wanted to be with girls. “We’re good, but maybe we’re not right together,” I said. He wouldn’t look at me. I tried again. “I really do still want to be friends.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” He brought his arm back and threw my lighter as far as he could out into the water. I watched his face twist with the effort. I wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, but I had given up that right. I felt terrible.
He didn’t speak to me the whole drive home.
Three days after Laura was supposed to get back, I still hadn’t heard from her. I had assumed she would call me immediately, as she did every year. I thought she’d want to get away from her family, and that now that she could see me face to face, either we would talk about whatever was bothering her or it would dissipate, like fog on a hot afternoon. As each day passed, I started jumping up for the phone whenever it rang, but it was never for me. My mother got exasperated and told me to just call Laura myself. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t tell my mother why, and I couldn’t even bike down to the beach and hang out on my favorite rock because I might see Miguel there.
By mid-morning of the fourth day I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was one
of my days off from work, and I was going nuts with restlessness. Every other thought was about Laura. I needed to hear her voice; I had to find out what was wrong, why she still wouldn’t talk to me weeks after I had sent the letter. I tossed my book onto the bed and pulled on my high-tops. I grabbed my bike from the narrow front hall, wheeling it through the kitchen.
“What’s the rush?” my mother called from the living room, where she was reading a history of the New Deal.
“I’m going to Laura’s,” I answered.
“Good. Give her my love.”
By then I was out of the house and didn’t answer. I remembered to turn back to catch the door before it closed just as it slammed shut. “Sorry!” I yelled over my shoulder, already coasting out onto the street as I swung my leg back over the bicycle seat.
The sun was hot and bright, and every shiny surface—cars, windows—reflected back into my eyes, dazzling me. Now that I was on my way to see Laura, I was happy. I put my face up to the sun and felt my hair fall away from my neck. I coasted down the road, past my old elementary school, and veered into the square downtown. A high wind pushed at the languidly waving fronds of the palm trees surrounding the depot. Then I stood and pumped the pedals until I got up some momentum on Miller, before swerving left across traffic to Laura’s house. I swung the bike around in a wide circle on the empty road before letting it fall with a clatter in the driveway beside her mother’s car.
Now that I was there, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have come. I didn’t want to run into her parents and have to make polite conversation. And what if Laura still refused to speak to me? I glanced at the sprawling house, all dark wood and glass, hoping to catch sight of her in a window. And if she did speak to me, would I tell her about myself? I heard birds, no human voices. I walked around to the back and climbed the steps to the large wooden deck. Laura was lying on her back on the bench built along the deck’s perimeter. She was wearing a t-shirt and cut-offs, and her hair was loose, spilling off the edge of the bench. She was very brown from the sun. She looked wonderful. I stood still, watching her, thinking she might be asleep.
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