Because You're the Love of My Life

by Sarah Kleck

  I felt pressure between my legs and Seth slowly pushed forward. A tearing sting followed. I bit my teeth together to suppress a gasp. Then it really hurt. He couldn’t have entered me more than an inch or two. I couldn’t anymore.

  “Stop! Just stop,” I heard myself say.

  He immediately withdrew, sat on his heels, and looked at me.

  I sat up, pulled my legs against my chest, and buried my face in my hands.

  “I can’t do it,” I finally said and began to cry. It was supposed to be totally different.

  Seth was silent. “It’s OK,” he said after a while, his voice sounding incredibly gentle but also very sad. “It’s alright.” He really couldn’t have imagined it would be like this. He moved beside me and took me in his arms. I laid my head on his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered and let my tears drop on his bare skin.

  “It’s OK.” He stroked my hair.

  “Can we just cuddle?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  In his arms, we finally were ourselves again.

  Chapter 3

  We did not make love that night. After Seth drove off honking the next morning, I barricaded myself in my room and cried all day long. Corinne called in the evening and invited me over for dinner. I wasn’t hungry, but figured it’d do me good to get out a little.

  Corinne’s dad opened the door.

  “Hey, Annie,” he greeted me, grinning broadly. “What did the salmon say to the beaver when it swam upstream to spawn?” Carl had an inexhaustible repertoire of groaners. Every time I visited, he had another one ready.

  I pretended to be interested, as always. “I don’t know, Carl, what?”

  “Dam,” he burst out laughing. “Dam, get it, Annie?”

  I chuckled politely. “Good one, Carl.”

  “Is that Annie?” Corinne shouted from the top of the stairs.

  “Ye-es!” Carl shouted back.

  “I’m coming.” A second later, she charged down the stairs and hugged me. “How are you?”

  “Could be better,” I admitted, hoping that I didn’t look too much like I’d been crying for hours.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Corinne’s mom, Charlotte, shouted from the kitchen—there’s constant shouting in this house—and then Corinne’s older brother, Colin, showed up. Yes, that’s right, all their names start with a C. Charlotte thought that would make for some family bonding. Maybe she was right.

  “Hey, old crybaby,” Colin greeted me, patting me on the shoulder. He was more than a year older than Corinne and me, but he was in our grade because he was held back in grade nine. The football coach wasn’t the least bit unhappy about that. At every opportunity, Coach said Colin was the best quarterback in the history of Clover Park High. All the better if he got to keep Colin a year longer.

  “How’s it going?” he continued. “Now Seth’s gone, you can finally date me. What are you up to tomorrow?” He winked to underline the intention of his invitation.

  “Oh, shut up!” Corinne snarked at her brother.

  “Hi, Annie.” Charlotte wiped her hands on a kitchen towel as we walked into the dining room. “We’re having lasagna. Corinne says it’s your favorite.”

  “Oh, wonderful.” I forced myself to smile. It was true, but Charlotte was a miserable cook. Usually, the Masons had oven-ready meals from the grocery store or Charlotte picked up take-out food on the way home from work. Unfortunately, she’d decided to make something herself that day.

  “You outdid yourself, Mom,” Colin comment with undisguised sarcasm, chewing with his mouth open.

  I couldn’t suppress a grin, so I lowered my head and continued to poke at the so-called lasagna. Carl seemed to be the only one who liked Charlotte’s home cooking. Proof that love doesn’t just make you blind but also deadens your taste buds.

  “What’s new?” Carl asked no one in particular. Presumably to distract from the culinary artistry of his beloved wife.

  “Colin bought a curler yesterday,” Corinne opened, smiling ever so sweetly at her brother, who blushed deep red.

  “It’s not a curler,” he justified himself on the spot. “It’s a brush with soft bristles that . . .”

  “Is the brush round and turns?” I asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Then it’s a curler.”

  “It is not a curler,” he insisted while his father looked over his hair.

  “Right. Now that you mention it, Corinne, he definitely has more volume than normally.”

  Colin quickly ran his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it down.

  “Don’t,” Charlotte said with a giggle, “you must have spent hours in front of the mirror to get that look right, dearest.”

  “How dare you talk to me like that in front of my future wife,” Colin replied, feigning outrage. “I will not have it!”

  Corinne’s brother made no secret of finding me pretty and hit on me at every opportunity. But it was just show, and he only did it with an audience. I’d been alone with him just once. I got sick at school, and he drove me home. He didn’t say peep the whole ride.

  “How was last night?” Corinne asked in a whisper, at which point all heads turned to me. That’s what happens when you whisper. The quieter and more secretive something is said, the more attention it grabs.

  “Nothing new,” I said as a short answer.

  “Oh.” Corinne’s expression asked what had happened. Seeing my disaster face she only said, “Got it.”

  “I don’t,” Colin said, sizing me up.

  Before I could get embarrassed, Carl came to my rescue by patting his belly. “I should really get around to a bit more exercise.”

  “You’re right about that,” Charlotte confirmed with a grin.

  “You can come on my run before school with me,” Colin offered. “But I start at seven on the dot. Make sure you’re ready.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Carl shot back, “I’ll be ready, but you’ll still be curling your hair.”

  The Masons had a strict no-cell-phone-during-meals policy, so I didn’t know if Seth had called. He had promised he would the minute he’d unpacked in his dorm. When dinner was over, I checked my phone, and the display showed he had called. I thanked them for the invitation to stay and hang out longer, but I hurried out so I could be alone when I talked to Seth, just in case I cried again. My hands were moist with excitement when I called back. It rang a couple of times, then voice mail came on. Great!

  “Um . . . hi,” I said to the voice mail. “It’s me. I missed your call. I was at Corinne’s for supper. I . . . um . . . hope you got there and everything is OK . . . so, call back when you can. I’m at home now . . . bye.”

  I hated leaving voice mail. So, my message sounded suitably dumb. I waited half the night for Seth to call me back, but he didn’t. My eyes only fell shut long after my parents had returned from their wellness weekend.

  I was dead tired the next day—the first day of my senior year. It was going to be an intense year. I was taking additional courses to increase my chances of getting into UW. I also volunteered as a tutor in biology and chemistry at the junior high. My teachers promised to write glowing letters of recommendation in return.

  My cell phone rang shortly after the lunch break had started. It was Seth. Finally. I ran out of the cafeteria and ducked into a quiet corner between some lockers.

  “Seth!” I greeted him a little too exuberantly. Oh, man. I wanted to sound cool and relaxed. Second attempt: “How are you?” That was a little better.

  “Hi, Annie. Good. It all worked out yesterday. Sorry about only calling now. I wanted to call last night, but I didn’t get home until pretty late and didn’t want to wake you.”

  Home he said. Not the dorm or my room. Well, that was fast.

  I quickly cleared my throat because I was afraid my voice sounded concerned. “How do you like it?”

  “So far, so good. My roommate is also playing for the Vikings. We were out fo
r a bit last night, and he introduced me to some of the other guys on the team.”

  “Great, I’m happy to hear that.” Oh man, how dumb did that sound?

  “Thanks . . . ,” he replied, sounding a little baffled, then there was a brief uncomfortable silence. “How are you?”

  “I . . . I miss you,” I confessed.

  He sighed. “I miss you, too.”

  Again, we spent several seconds in silence. We still hadn’t talked about what had happened the night before.

  I cleared my throat again. The lump in it was growing to a worrisome size. “We’ll see each other on the weekend?”

  “Yeeaah. Uh. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “There’ll be a freshman party in the dorm hall on Saturday. Everyone’s going . . .”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t hide my disappointment.

  “But, you know, I’ll come if it’s important to you.”

  “No, no,” I quickly answered. “Just go. We’ll see each other the weekend after.”

  “Are you really OK with that?”

  “Of course.” I waved my hand in the air, which was stupid because he couldn’t see it. “Sure.”

  “I can’t wait to see you.” He sounded relieved. “Want to Skype later?”

  I nodded because I was about to cry. Of course, he couldn’t see me nod either, so he was still waiting for my answer. “Yeah,” I squeaked out. “I’ll be home at seven.”

  “I’ll still be out then. Does eight thirty work for you?”

  “Yes, that works. I have to hang up now.”

  I clasped my hand on my mouth to suffocate the sobbing as tears streamed down my face.

  “Is everything OK, Annie?” Seth asked.

  I couldn’t hold myself together anymore, so I acted like I hadn’t heard his last question and hung up.

  I hate how I cry. In movies, women always cry in such a dignified way. They wear proud expressions in their faces while tears silently roll down their cheeks. I’m not like that. I contort my face into an undignified grimace and sob while my nose runs. And, when I blow my nose, it’s so loud that it sounds like half my brain will wind up in the tissue.

  I didn’t want him to hear any of that. Plus, I was at school and lunch break would be over soon. Any moment now, hundreds of students would see me sobbing. I disappeared into the closest bathroom and stayed there until I stopped crying.

  When I got home around seven, my mother was in the kitchen making supper. She knew Seth had left for college, but she didn’t ask me about that, let alone how I felt.

  “You’re late.”

  “I’m tutoring on Mondays now.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you focus on your own grades instead of tutoring others?”

  “Colleges like this kind of extracurricular. It ups my chances of being accepted by UW,” I explained. “And it’s a good review of the material for me.”

  “Are they at least paying you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you plan to pay for college when you’re accepted?”

  I stared at her for a moment. Why ask? Since she wasn’t going to support me, what did it matter to her how I managed to pay for it? Knowing my mother, she’d probably be happy if I didn’t get it together to pay for school and was forced to look for a job instead of going to college.

  “Let me worry about that,” I said before going upstairs to my room.

  When I heard Dad come home, I went downstairs and sat at the table. We had sloppy joes. I hate sloppy joes. Everybody knows that. Sometimes, I believed my mother made them on purpose. Once we even had that greasy, dog-poop-looking junk on a bun for my birthday.

  “It’s the easiest thing to make for all these people,” she said. All these people were Grandma and Aunt Jane, who had come for my eighth birthday. I ate almost nothing then, and I ate almost nothing now. When we were done, I cleared the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher. My mother believed that if she cooked, someone else would clean the kitchen. But that was a special rule that only applied to her. When I cooked, which happened about three days a week, I was told to “damn well clean up the mess” I had made in the kitchen myself. So, guess who always cleaned the kitchen?

  “Good night,” I said when I was done and headed upstairs.

  “Off to bed already?” Dad asked, sounding surprised.

  “I want to Skype Seth.”

  “Oh, right,” he remembered. “He’s at college now, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say hello from me.”

  “I will.”

  “Good night, sweetie.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  It was almost nine when Seth called. I hit “Accept” and broke into a smile when his face appeared on the screen.

  “Hi,” he said, also smiling.

  “Hi.”

  “Sorry, it turned out later again than I thought it would.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, catching myself in the second lie today. I quickly followed up with a question before he noticed. “How was your first day?”

  “Really good,” he said as he leaned back and stretched his neck. “But pretty exhausting. The first training session was wild. High-school basketball doesn’t compare.”

  “I expected as much. When’s the first game?”

  “Thursday. I’m going to be on the bench, but Coach said I might be able to play next week or the week after if I do well at practice.”

  “That’d be great.” Again, as during the telephone call at noon, this uncomfortable silence happened.

  “How’s the weather?” Seth then asked. “Mom says it really cooled down overnight.”

  Was he serious? Sports and the weather. We were talking like two strangers making small talk at the bus stop.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. Better to talk about the weather than to be silent. “It’s gotten pretty cold.”

  “Um.” This topic was exhausted.

  I worked up my courage. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Seth lowered his eyes. He knew right away what I meant. “No,” he answered after a while.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I quietly suggested.

  “We really don’t need to talk about it, Annie.” Since he addressed me by my name, I knew he meant it. He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply. “How’s tutoring?” he asked in a lighthearted tone.

  I was irritated at first but then I was grateful and picked up the topic. “Good. Good.” I grinned. “When I was talking about illnesses, a sixth grader asked what Bactrians are, you know, like the camels.”

  Seth laughed.

  “When I explained to him that they’re called bac-te-ri-a and not Bactrians, you could see a light come on. Bacteria meant something to him, he’d just misread the word for years and didn’t dare ask because he didn’t want to look stupid in class.”

  Seth laughed out loud. “Smart call.”

  “Well, sort of. If he’d asked sooner, he might not need tutoring now.”

  We Skyped until almost eleven. I told him about the rest of my day, and he told me about his. We laughed a lot, and it was good to talk to him. Over the next couple of weeks, we Skyped every evening, usually around the same time.

  I used the Seth-less weekend to finish writing my college application essay. I was more than pleased with it. Somehow, I had managed to put the feelings of the last few days and the thoughts running around in my head into words. It was about growing up, the desperate search for maternal recognition, and missed opportunities.

  Finally, the next weekend came. I was so excited about Seth coming home my hands were sweaty. I changed clothes three times before I was happy with my choice. This was the longest we’d been separated since we’d been a couple. Despite all our Skyping, I missed Seth terribly. I missed his scent, his warmth, and the feeling he stirred up in me when he took me into his arms.

  “Hi, baby.” He opened the door with a smile and fiercely pulled me to hi
m. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you even more.”

  “Hi Annie,” Seth’s fourteen-year-old sister Lynn interrupted from the hallway.

  “Hey, Lynnie, everything cool?”

  “Always,” she answered with the incomparable attitude of an adolescent girl. Seth’s grandmother and his aunt and uncle with the two-year old twins who were impossibly cute came for dinner. Holly put on a particularly extravagant spread. After dinner, I helped her and Lynn clean up. Then, Seth and I slipped off to his room. Alone. Finally. We talked and held hands, and, when there was no more to say, we kissed and held each other tight until we both fell asleep. We spent Saturday with Corinne and Taylor in Tacoma.

  The weekend went by much too fast. Suddenly, it was time for Seth to drive back to Bellingham. Saying goodbye was almost harder this time than last. Seth had a game the next Saturday, so it’d be another two weeks before we’d see each other again.

  It became our pattern. Seth stayed one weekend in Bellingham and came home the next, but our time together was limited because I wasn’t the only one who wanted to see him. On the weekends that he also visited his grandmother or helped his parents clean out the garage or watched a game with Taylor, we saw very little of each other. And, so, September turned into October and the leaves began to change color and fall. We’d both known it would be different when Seth went to college, but I’d thought it’d be simpler. Even when we were alone, he didn’t try to sleep with me. I couldn’t hold it against him. After all, our first attempt had been a disaster. Still, I was waiting for a second chance.

  Chapter 4

  My mother has always been particularly susceptible to what I will cautiously call spiritual advice. Simply put, she was always on the lookout for a guru who promised to lead the way to a better, more satisfying life. She consulted spiritual guides who earned their money by promising to put people who participated in their seminars or meditation and transformation workshops in touch with their true nature, their inner child, or whatever they longed for at any given moment. My mother would practice with one for a while, frantically driving from one weekend seminar to the next until her mood switched. Then, she would demonize those she had blindly followed and been slavishly devoted to. This inevitably happened when she was supposed to apply what she’d learned with the guru to real life. The exalted guru was suddenly unmasked as a charlatan whose seminars were simply a cash grab. My mother was ready to change everything and everyone—just not herself. Dad and I watched her spiritual journey take her from tarot card readings to primal scream therapy to systemic family constellation workshops in which entanglements from previous generations are resolved to make peace with the ancestors. Behind her back, Dad called all of it exorcism.