Never Loved

by Charlotte Stein

  That really does me in.

  “Not even slightly. Not even a little bit,” I say, my own voice wavering like a sapling in a rainstorm. I’m glad it does, though. It underlines everything for him.

  And it makes it easier to do what I ask him to.

  He shakes himself after a second—like a dog getting rid of the excess emotional rain—and then tells me, “Come on, then, come on up here if this is what you want.” All business now, I think, but not exactly in a bad way. Not in a Now I need to be manly way. More in a Did I almost tear up over no longer feeling like a dangerous thing? kind of way.

  Which is completely understandable—if a little nerve-racking right now. He even slaps the basin like I’m just going to climb up there and sit down, and when it becomes clear that I can’t quite manage that, he puts one arm around my waist. Scoops me up like a sack of laundry and sets me between two old-world taps with these enormous spouts.

  I will admit: It still makes me breathless. I think it always will, and probably for some very ridiculous reasons like me feeling all small and him seeming all enormous and powerful. It barely fazes him to do it. By the time I gather my wits again, he’s already on to the next thing: fiddling with the electric clipper and doling out instructions.

  “You got to keep real still, all right?” he says, and I nod. Of course I nod. I asked him for this. I got all excited and had big ideas about being like him and now have to face the consequences—though I honestly had no idea the consequences would be potentially having my ear shaved off. Or getting it done in a wonky line.

  Or having to endure someone manhandling my head.

  Yeah, I didn’t really think about that one. He’s going to be touching my hair an awful lot, and not in the manner I have recently become accustomed to. This might be bad, I think, though I’ll be damned if I’m going to back out now. I barely even let my bracing show. The most I do is close my eyes, and even then I do it gently and slowly.

  And I’m glad I do, too.

  Because instead of the buzz I expect, I get one of the most amazing sensations of my whole life. More amazing than the orgasms. More amazing than his orgasm. So amazing that my eyes pop open the second I feel something stroking through my hair, just to see how he achieved the amazingness. He must have a brush, I think. A really good brush with fancy bristles and a wooden handle.

  But when I look, there’s just a comb in his hand. A stupid old-man comb that he pushes and pushes through the thick strands, over and over until my scalp starts to feel all warm, and everything goes soft and slow. Like the kind of thing a head massage probably does to you, I imagine, though naturally I would never know.

  I’ve never let anyone do anything like this to me before. One time Sam tried to plait my hair, and I almost took her out with the book I was reading. I had to explain that my scalp is very sensitive, which at the time had seemed like a clever lie but actually could well be the truth, if this is anything to go by.

  I almost fall asleep before he even gets to the clippers.

  When he says ready in this half-laughing voice I say, “Oh yeah, so ready. Take me now.” He puts a hand against one side of my head, and I press into it like an eager puppy—and I’m right to do it, too. The first buzz is nowhere near scary. My ear does not come off in his hands. Instead, I watch and feel my hair fall away like a heavy bandage unraveling from a wound I didn’t know I had.

  Once the whole thing is done, I am around twenty pounds lighter. Lighter than that, in fact. I nearly drift down from the sink, onto feet that seem air-filled. The only thing that dampens the moment is his expression—so still and sort of stunned that I get a little jolt of fear. I have to quickly turn and check in the mirror to see just how I look, and when I do I get no comfort from it. On the contrary, I think I wind up with the same expression he has.

  I seem so much like a different person.

  And that person could well be ugly to him. I thought it would be an act of cool hair solidarity, but it may actually be something else. A daily reminder, I think, of the violent stuff he hates. Oh, God, what if I just look like the violent thing he hates? What if all the innocence is gone out of me, and now there is just this: a punk girl with too bright eyes and stubble on either side of her head?

  I shouldn’t be bothered by that, but I am.

  I still seek that approval, no matter how light I get inside.

  “What do you think?” I ask, then wait for the hammer to fall.

  With him, though, I would probably have to wait a thousand years.

  “I think I need to kiss you now,” he says, about a second before his mouth finds mine.

  Chapter 11

  I follow him out to the truck with his kiss still on my lips, so sweet I can hardly think of anything else. I stumble into daylight half drunk on the taste and feel and smell of him, and only partially come around when the cool morning hits the newly naked parts of me. I put a hand up and feel them all bristly and odd, like I’ve grown a man’s face on the sides of my head.

  It’s the middle part that really gets my attention, though. The middle part isn’t like his middle part. His lays flat, and mine is this enormous bouffant, way thicker than I ever knew my hair was. It flows back from my forehead in a big wave, and feels amazing to the touch. So amazing that I can’t stop doing it.

  And nor can he.

  Halfway across his makeshift yard he stops and looks and looks with all of his eyes, then puts a hand back to run his fingers through it. The only thing that seems to stop him is knowing what he knows about me. “If you’d rather I keep off, just say,” he tells me, but before his hand can drop I push right into it. I let him stroke through, yearning for that warm brushing sensation again.

  Which I get in full force—along with another kiss. “I can’t help myself,” he says, and I have no idea what he’s referring to, yet do not care at all. He can fail at being able to help himself with any of this. Just go right ahead and love my new hair and hold me like that and put your mouth on mine.

  I’m okay with all of it.

  I’m okay with everything—including asking for things I would never have dared to before. “Can we go on the bike?” I ask, and he laughs all big and sort of rueful.

  “Feeling bolder, huh?” he laughs.

  And I suppose you could put it that way. If by that way you mean I am not the same person coming out of that house as I was going in. Going in, I was timid and too worried about doing the wrong thing. Coming out, I kind of don’t care if I do. Not entirely and not completely—I still blush at his question, and my shrug is a touch sheepish. But I no longer want to shy away from asking for anything at all. Or from saying that I like something.

  I want to be this girl—the one who requests the bike and tells him No, I can ride behind you and then climbs on without worrying about looking clumsy. In fact, this girl is more concerned with what he will feel like between my legs and how much of him I’ll be able to feel when I wrap my arms around him.

  And he knows it.

  “Never gonna get enough of you being so fucking into my body, I swear,” he says, sort of laughing as he does but sort of shaking a little, too. I can hear a quaver in his voice, and it hits just as I let my hand slide under the split of yet another jumpsuit and over the bare skin beneath. Really, though, how can I help doing anything but? He feels so warm and alive.

  Not to mention firm.

  Plus, when I rub down I can almost get all the way inside and over—

  “Okay, okay, I gotta stop you there before I reconsider my decision to do anything but be in a bed with you for the rest of my days.”

  “That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.”

  “Exactly why I’m saying. Too tempting to try, so hands up top. Unless you want to die of sex exhaustion or perish in a flaming fireball when I run right off the road,” he says—a thing that would probably have embarrassed me or made me feel bad a few days ago. But now it just makes me answer with this:

  “All right, here they are, nice
and safe on your boobs.”

  It makes me say boobs. And he likes it.

  “Is it weird if it turns me on when you say that?”

  “I think everything might turn you on.”

  “Everything you do, at least.”

  “Including this?” I ask, then just give him the slightest squeeze.

  Like honking a horn, I think. Like I am the boy and he is the girl and oh, my stars, I love that. I love that he laughs all startled at me and calls me a tease. I love that I can be this way with someone. I love all of it so much that I barely think about what I am going back to, and what people might think of me when I do. For once in my life I lived in the moment, neither mired in the past nor gazing forward into a future I desperately hoped for.

  I let him form a bubble of acceptance around my body.

  And I think that might be about to cost me.

  After all, green jackets and old movies cost me. My accent cost me. Every tiny thing about me has always come with a price tag, setting me apart in ways I am barely aware of until I see that look in someone’s eyes. The one that says I am odd, and not in that sharp, hip manner that people secretly aspire to.

  More like being a redundant limb that someone cut off from the main body of life, and that everyone now looks at with pity and relief. I will never take my glasses off and reveal I was pretty all along, or parlay my brilliant weirdness into a glittering existence. In reality, being different is not cool or exciting or something to tell a story about.

  Being different is seeing the lovely thing you did with someone just like you.

  And then having to watch as it gets slowly smashed into a thousand pieces.

  —

  At first I tell myself that I’m not going to let it bother me. I no longer care what Sam or anyone else thinks. They can stare at my new hair all they like. It won’t matter to me in the slightest. I even put on the green jacket that Sam hates for extra emphasis—but that only makes it more disappointing when I hear her at the door and jam a hat down over my head.

  All the things I shared with Serge so easily and I can’t even let her know that I got a slight trim. And okay, yeah, maybe it’s more than a slight trim. But is it really so wild? Is any of this so wild? It must be, because for some ungodly reason, I wait until she heads to her modern dance class a whole day later to do what I’ve been dying to since I read those lyrics on his back. Then and only then do I Google them, like some sex criminal furtively researching perverted things.

  Instead of absolutely incredible fucking songs.

  Because they are. Of course they are.

  They are so incredible it kind of pains me to know I put this off. I should have blared them out of the speakers on my laptop the second I got in, rather than waiting to do it in the dark with my earphones in.

  Though the earphones do have one advantage. They make the music eleven thousand times more electric. I look up one of the bands and figure I’m finally going to get something loud and ferocious. The lead singer is so cool and tough-looking I kind of feel embarrassed about my probably poseur hair, and they’re called of all things Skunk Anansie. I’m not wrong to expect thrash metal.

  But instead I get a voice that runs a rasp down the insides of my spine. It sounds like someone concentrated yearning into liquid form and then poured it down her throat. My heart starts thumping the second I hear that first long note reverberating out of her, and it doesn’t stop until at least five minutes after the song ends. I have to just sit there in the dark calming myself down, half thrilled by this revelation and half furious that I never knew it existed.

  That I still feel the need to pretend it doesn’t.

  The very second Sam walks in the door I stop listening, despite being midway through a song that sounded like aural sex. Her voice rolled and tumbled through the whole thing and then reached so high and so rough I almost started singing myself, but somehow now that my friend is here, the laptop has to be closed.

  Why does the laptop have to be closed?

  It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem normal.

  And even more so when I get a message from him on day two. It says that he wanted to be patient and cool, but would rather be uncool than be without me for any longer. He says that—and yet my first reaction is not So fly to me, then. It is: When will Sam not be around? When will nobody be around? How can I sneak out with no one seeing?

  All of which sounds terrible in my head.

  But worse, when I get a text that tells me to go to my window.

  And I go and see him there in the dying light, like something from a dream I never actually dared to have. All my hopes were so small; all my fantasies of the life I would lead were so weak. They cannot match what this is—so why am I hesitating? Why am I holding back? It seems insane until it suddenly hits me.

  It isn’t normality that I want.

  It’s obedience that I’m used to.

  Oh my God, I still have to obey, only now I’m doing it for someone who might not even care if I do or not and is most definitely never going to lock me in the basement for refusing to do things exactly right. The worst that could happen is that Sam decides I’m not quite right as a friend, or in need of an amused lecture, or worthy of a puzzled frown.

  Why am I letting my life be run by puzzled frowns? She probably doesn’t even know the effect they have on me.

  She probably thinks this is all just helpfulness.

  I’m standing here waiting for my ship to come in because of possible helpfulness—an idea that is so horrendous I almost hurl myself out of the room and down the stairs the very second it occurs. I don’t even stop to put on shoes or change out of my pajamas. I go to him barefoot and in a flannel set with ducks all over the front, and do not care one whit. My only real regret is that my body is not a bullet that I can fire at him, though God knows I make a good attempt at it.

  I see him turn toward the sound of me through the glass doors, face shifting from patiently waiting to something like longing or joy, arms lifting toward me like he knows what I’m going to do, and I just launch myself at him. My feet might actually leave the ground. Somehow my arms are around his neck, even though his neck should be impossible for me to reach.

  It should be, but he makes sure it isn’t.

  He leans down at just the right moment—right when I might be embarrassed.

  And he catches me.

  He catches me.

  Chapter 12

  It takes a while to persuade him to come in. At first he will only list reasons as to why that could be a bad idea, including People might think I’m trying to kidnap children and I have no college ID in my twenty-nine-year-old-man pants. I have to tell him that the woman one room down from us is seventy-nine years old just to get him through the door—though after that it gets a little easier. He manages the stairs fine, and is able to successfully get past the poster on the communal notice board offering free sex-education classes with very little face palming and/or existential crises.

  But then we get to my room.

  And even I will admit things become a little weird. I shut the door behind us and turn around and basically all there seems to be anywhere is him. He nearly fills the space. If he put his two arms out he could probably touch every wall at once, and every bit of furniture in here suddenly looks as though it belongs in a dollhouse. I’m almost afraid to invite him to sit in case whatever he sits on splinters into a million pieces—a thought that should probably make me feel bad but doesn’t.

  How can it, when he is clearly thinking the same thing? He eyes my bed as if he can hardly believe a human person can fit in it. His hand looks bigger than my entire pillow. When he puts his boot up to test the resiliency of the frame, the whole thing creaks and groans. I have to reassure him that it will not collapse if he wants to have a seat, but he just shakes his head.

  “I can’t believe two people live in here,” he says, half bemused and half fond.

  Which is kind of a nice combination for someone to have as
they explore your space. I think I probably had the same reaction to some of his stuff. I know I did for the candles, so I can’t really feel bad about it. I just sit at my doll desk on my doll chair and watch him examining our two-by-four bathroom while chuckling to himself. Then, gradually, the chuckling subsides and is replaced by other things.

  Like the kind of curiosity that gives me tingles.

  I mean, I knew he would probably look. But I had no idea how intently he would do it. His eyes busily search over each of the things tacked to my wall, sometimes commenting on a particular image and other times silent. He finds my postcards from places I’ve never been to and tells me he will take me there; traces his finger over my girl with her tattooed biceps curled; asks me if I like these words or that band or this painting.

  And when he finds the book mountain at the foot of my bed, he doesn’t just shake his head over it. He goes through it until one strikes his fancy, then seems to search for a part of the story. More than seems, in fact—he absolutely searches, and when he finds it he decides the best thing to do to my already overtaxed heart is read aloud. “Once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities I was capable of” he says, and I know immediately what it is. We read it last semester for Eighteenth-Century English Literature, though even if we hadn’t, I think I would have guessed.

  Frankenstein, I think, and then get this great ache right in the middle of my chest.

  One that deepens when he decides to explain.

  “Yeah, I know, kind of on the nose, right?” he says, and he doesn’t stop there. Oh, no. There is a ton more and all of it amazing. “But man I loved that book as a kid. The old man thought reading was for weaklings and weirdos, which only made me want to do it more. One time I actually stole a mobile library van and drove it into a lake, just so it would look like I was a destructive little shit—you know, instead of a thief who hid a hundred books under the garden shed.”

  I’m not quite sure which part I like best about this story: that he read like a rebel stealing secrets from the government or that his true criminal act was hoarding literature. My man hoards eighteenth-century novels about thinly veiled representations of himself. He reads as an act of defiance and looks utterly sheepish about it, and when I tell him that might well be the best story I’ve ever heard, he says: