Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  “I’m Justin,” he said with this giddy, vulnerable smile.

  “Hi,” I said. “I saw you the other day. Your dorm is across from the DUC, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling huge.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “No, nothing. I’ve just seen you around and… now here you are. I’m finally talking to you.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “Yeah me too. Talking to you.”

  “People always think I’m Puerto Rican. The hair, I guess.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I can see that.”

  But the first thing I noticed about Justin was his body. The second thing I noticed was his hang-up about it. Not a hang-up, I corrected myself, just a health nut. There was a difference.

  At our first lunch date, he wrapped his chicken tenders, well, tenderly in paper napkins and then balled his fist around them and squeezed. Set 1: tight, tighter, tightest, then rest and chew. It was a death blot for grease, he explained, and also an exercise to build the forearm!

  “I’m trying to get cut,” he said as he fisted them for three more sets, until they were devoid of all saturated fat, color, and shape. All this I watched, slightly uneasy, while eating mine as is and with extra sauce.

  But the wedding bells didn’t go off like fire alarms until Justin paused over his uneaten tenders, bowed his head, and pinched his eyes closed. Just two seconds was all it took.

  “Oh, you pray?” I asked, wondering how to broach the topic. “Are you… religious?”

  Justin chewed slowly, thoughtfully, as if he wanted to phrase his answer in the wisest way possible.

  “I am… spiritual,” he said finally.

  “Oh!” I brightened. “Me too!”

  “I’m Jewish, but I believe there is a seed of truth in all religions.

  That’s what I seek. Truth.”

  “That is so neat!” I bubbled, falling over myself. “I like that!”

  “The prayer is more for the animals. To thank them for their sacrifice.”

  “Oh, my gosh!” I said, trying to control my minicoronary. I nodded, squinting at him, showing him that I was in complete and calm solidarity with thanking all the chickens of the world before defiling them with honey mustard. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I hoped my hair looked okay. I hoped I wasn’t too pudgy. I hoped I was as spiritual as he was. Justin smiled back at me with a big white grin and warm brown eyes.

  I looked down at my Chick-fil-A box and realized I had wolfed down all my food. Only a few blots of grease and some crumbs remained.

  “Sorry,” I said, for some reason. “I just totally pigged.”

  “I eat slowly,” he explained, his patient smile unwavering. “It’s important to chew the correct number of times to increase protein absorption and, um, reduce flatulence.”

  When we were done, he tucked the rest of his chicken back into its cardboard house and toted them home where he’d hoard them and no doubt abuse them again later. I had so much to learn.

  Meanwhile, the buzz on the floor back at my dorm was all about upcoming sorority rush. Like coveted crystals on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, there were sororities of nerds, sororities of sluts, and sororities of power—but which did I have to defeat? Eager to not repeat any mistakes of the past, I asked around until a consensus emerged: all roads led to the house of Tri Delt, the Thunderdome of the Blond Skinny Bitches. That was the bull’s-eye to shoot for in order to achieve the life I’d always dreamed of.

  “It’s about who you know there,” one of my hall mates fretted. “That’s why you have to go to the parties. You have to meet them, you have to stand with the right people, get them to like you.”

  My panic grew. How could I possibly win a battle I had just spent ten years losing? “They dig into your records,” she warned. “They call your old high school and find out who you were friends with.”

  “Seriously?” I said, almost laughing but not quite.

  “Seriously!” she said. “If you were a loser or a dork, trust me, they will find out.”

  I looked right at her and realized: she had no idea who I really was. Otherwise she wouldn’t have said that. Which was good. And also really, really bad.

  It was easier being with Justin. Being his love interest had instantly earned me a ready-made center stage spot in the middle of a tight-knit crew of homies. They definitely didn’t care about my shitty high school status. I soaked up their admiring looks in the hallways of the Pit, their smelly, damp, all-male basement dorm, where the walls vibrated with Snoop and Rage Against the Machine.

  The second best thing about Justin was his roommate, Joe. He’d gone to Justin’s high school, and they’d come to college as a kind of package deal, representing opposite ends of the male spectrum. Joe was pale, tall, and physically softer; Justin short, dark, and hard. As native Palm Beachians, being cut and ripped were their primary obsessions, but they had very different approaches. While Justin walked all day on the balls of his feet to achieve leg tone, Joe hoarded the latest in soft-core steroids. While Justin blotted and blessed his salad, Joe’s shelves contained equal parts corn chips and powdered performance drinks declared illegal by the FDA. They had names like Turbo Rip-up and Studulated Oxygen MegaMass, with complicated windows of ingestion. Like ¼ cup thirty minutes before working out, then two cups five minutes after, or else your quads would shrivel up like raisins.

  It didn’t matter that Justin had a tight budget and no car—we had Joe, who pulled up in a brand-new black Bronco with custom oversize wheels and a Dukes of Hazzard horn that blasted at window-shattering decibels.

  When Justin got bored, he read The Art of War. When Joe got bored, he chucked CDs out of his sunroof, three or four at a time, while speeding down the highway. He convinced every guy who was shorter than him to help fill the RA’s room with six feet of shaving cream and move the Pit’s lounge furniture out into the parking lot.

  At parties, Joe chugged gallon jugs of vodka and cranberry, while Justin sipped a Zima with me and got cuddly and weird, preaching to complete strangers about how young women needed to be treated with more respect. Meanwhile Joe slumped over the shoulder of an obliging frat ho and puked down her back.

  He laughed. “I need a refill.”

  “You are so fucked up!” screamed his date, wiping off puke with a paper towel, her lit cigarette nearly catching Joe in the eye.

  That could be me, I thought, both recoiling and admiring at the same time. There was an undeniable charm in being a total hobag. But I didn’t tell Justin that. He was standing by my side, sadly shaking his head.

  “So lost,” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. But the next day, I attended my first sorority rush meet ’n’ greet.

  A few of my female hall mates and I got dressed up and walked over to the sorority lodges in the crisp fall air. We lined up obediently and waited for the front door to open. Then we filed in, examined by the unsmiling, sharp-eyed sorority bitches inside. They broke up and filtered among us, all under the cheery guise of “getting to know you better!” But I knew what this was—military-style interrogation with an annoying pink bow on top. They were culling the herd based on any slight or imagined misstep. I chatted with some strange senior, reading her face while I talked about where I was from and what I liked to do, wondering if what I said was right and if I looked right while saying it. She nodded and smiled. Which I was pretty sure was the kiss of death.

  That night at their 90210 viewing party, which was Not to Be Missed, I sat on the couch flanked by excited, sweet-smelling girls. I watched their pretty faces in the bluish light of the TV, happy finally to belong. But the thing I didn’t know yet was that sorority girls do not love clever sardonic commentary inserted into their serious teen dramas. They did not want Mystery Science Theater 3000. When the dialogue was sweet, you went awww. When it was exciting, you squealed. What you couldn’t do, however, was make high-pitched mewing sounds while Kelly was talking, or ask Brandon out loud if his vagina was hurting. I was met w
ith shut-ups and threats.

  “If you don’t like it, just leave,” someone said. I turned to see who said it, and it was my very own hall mate, the girl I came with. She did not look back. She was trying to hear what Dylan was saying to Brenda.

  I withdrew into hurt silence, trying to regroup. How could I make it up to them, show them I was safe to hang with? While I tried to think of a way, I called Justin to complain about how stupid girls were.

  When he picked up, I recoiled at the syrupy female laughter in the background.

  “Oh, that’s just… Joe’s friends,” said Justin.

  “Oh, we’re not your friends now, Justin?” I heard a girl say. Justin muffled the phone.

  “I’m sorry, yes, I’m your friend.” He laughed. “Stop that.”

  “Who are they?” I pouted.

  “Oh, um, Katherine and Carrie.”

  The girl: “Cara!”

  “Sorry, Cara and Katherine.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Wait. What’s wrong?”

  “You’re busy. Call me later.”

  “Wait,” he demanded, tone changed. He slipped away from the noise. “What’s wrong? Why did you go quiet?”

  “I’m not quiet.”

  “Why would I be too busy to talk to you?”

  “You’re not. I just thought, you know. Cara and Katherine.”

  A long, brooding silence.

  “Don’t move,” he said, apparently mobilizing for an intervention. “I’ll be right over.”

  The phone clicked. My pouting had worked! He was coming over! He must really really like me. I preened myself in the mirror and dabbed on perfume as my roommate watched with dull-eyed curiosity.

  But when the knock came, I found a very different Justin at the door. He strode in, seizing my head in both hands, backing me up against the wall. My roommate scuttled into her corner.

  “What is wrong with you?” he growled, voice low.

  “What?”

  “Why are you so weak?”

  “Weak?”

  “Yes! WEAK.” He seemed on the verge of tears. I tried to follow along.

  “Well, I… I… guess I was… jealous?”

  “No. You don’t know this guy. That’s. Not. Me.”

  I tried to calm him by nodding.

  “When I love someone, I mean it. What happened to you? Why don’t you trust?”

  “Wait, you love me?”

  Then we kissed hard, and my roommate’s sunken eyes sank deeper.

  Justin and I pulled out of lip-lock, breathing hard. I gestured toward the corner.

  “Oh, hey,” Justin said, walking over to her bedside and extending his hand. “My name’s Justin.”

  It wasn’t just me who got roughly psychoanalyzed. The problematic relationships of all people of the world were fair game. Within a half hour of meeting someone, he’d get right to why it was Mom or Dad never loved them. It pissed people off.

  “Shut the fuck up about my mother,” Joe would say, with a half smile on his face.

  “It’s because I’m right.” Justin would shrug and back off. Then he’d look at me like, why can’t they see? The truth will set them free.

  When he wasn’t being meaningful, or outlecturing his professors, or trying to flesh out why I was so dysfunctional, we would pass the time by making out.

  Touching his chiseled body was both exciting and slightly troubling. When I lifted his shirt, it was like a Calvin Klein ad. No excess fat bulging around the waist of his jeans like I had. Just tan, hairless muscles. It was like touching a mannequin. Even his nails were flawlessly trimmed. I looked down at my own and saw gnawed, uneven nubs, chipped polish, hangnails. I slipped them behind his head and kissed harder.

  Since we were both virgins, we spent a lot of time practicing all the foreplay we’d been dying to do. Especially oral sex. As usual, Justin was overprepared. He showed up at my dorm with hard candies, toothpaste, and Bengay.

  “It’s ugly,” I stalled, gesturing apologetically to my nether regions. “Are you sure?”

  “Let me shave it,” he said. “Totally bare.”

  “Oh, weird,” I said. “The whole thing?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’d be so sexy.”

  “Okay, but I have to go take a shower then,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “No, let me do it. We can do it here.”

  “You wanna shave me? Here?”

  “Yeah. Please?”

  His begging convinced me that it would get him off, which made sense, since it involved improving my body.

  He sat my naked ass on a desk chair, pointing the warm glow of my roommate’s desk light where I was sure she never intended it to shine.

  He prepped like a surgeon, scrubbing up, preparing a tray with a bowl of warm water and a can of shaving foam. Face twisted with concentration, he knelt between my knees to lather up. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he said.

  “Careful,” I said, breathing through my teeth. He began to clear-cut the area, revealing contours I had not seen since childhood. It began to look less frightening, more like a Palm Beach golf course than a Connecticut swamp.

  “Rest one leg up on my shoulder,” he said, dipping the razor in the water. He used his thumbs to pull the skin taut, brushing the razor up and down with extreme care. I watched his face and relaxed, then started getting turned on.

  Justin was too. When he was done, he calmly wiped off the foam, inspected my sanitized form, readjusted the tent in his shorts, and dove headfirst into his masterpiece.

  I reveled for a moment in the stunning heat from his mouth. Looking down, his nose atop my hairless pubic bone, I resembled a gazelle, my white flank seized in his jaws. He devoured me with psychotic intensity, sucking and licking until my knees opened, and I grabbed the now familiar Sonny Crockett burn that would shoot me out of the universe.

  But I looked down at my white thighs, the rolls of my belly, the alarming signposts of my imperfect body, and froze up.

  What did it taste like down there? What did it smell like? He probably hated it.

  “I love it,” Justin assured me, on cue. I tried to breathe.

  What would Mom think? She would be SO horrified.

  Stop stop stop. She’s twelve hundred miles away.

  I lay back, scrolling through my list of fantasies. Maybe if I pretended he wasn’t there at all, or that I wasn’t there, or that I was watching him going down on some other girl. Or that I was someone else, someone more beautiful. Or: that I was Justin—Justin doing it to a supermodel whose pussy tasted like peaches with whipped cream. Okay, that kinda worked. My body and I were erased from the screen, and it was just Peaches the Supermodel getting tied up and there’s a line of guys fighting to go down on her. Safe in that thought, I lost it, exploding into a brief arc of pleasure, a shooting star that blazed up and out into darkness, before returning me to the desk chair with an abrupt thud, right where it’d found me.

  While the girls back at my dorm attended parties and awaited their new Greek assignments, I was walking around campus amazed at the sensation of a completely bare twat. It was like being five years old again, only with tits and a boyfriend. And a sex drive. I went to classes in a short skirt and a thong, sat down with my legs uncrossed. I had the overpowering sensation that if I bent over to pick up my pen, everything in a two-mile radius would fuck me from behind. I slipped into a bathroom stall just to feel it, the softest, most naughty body part imaginable. I was wet for my own pussy. I rushed back to Justin’s dorm to sit on his face before the stubble set in.

  “That felt amazing,” Justin sighed, after we’d completed the second 69 of the day. We were sprawled together in his bunk, drifting off into a deep sleep, when:

  “Can I ask you something?”

  My eyes flew open.

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “Have you ever done that before?”

  “What?” Uh-oh. Oh no. I knew what was about to happen. Remain calm. Breathe. Redirect.

&nbs
p; “Like, gone down on a guy before?” he asked.

  “Have you?” I asked quickly. “I mean, on a girl?”

  But Justin of course had taken the high road, obsessing over many a girl but never touching, treating his crushes instead like asexual princesses, vowing to protect them while he channeled his libido into martial arts and weight lifting and squeezing the grease out of salad croutons, and beating the crap out of his penis with alternating hands, to ensure muscular symmetry in both forearms.

  I propped up to look lovingly into his eyes, explaining how important it had been for me to wait until marriage. To wait until my soul mate came along.

  Dissatisfied, Justin prodded, and so I told him a little about Alex, briefly outlining that we did some stuff, but he wasn’t special to me like this. Not like Justin.

  “What kind of stuff?” Justin asked, his jaw jutting slightly, his eyes unhappy.

  “Third-base stuff.”

  “Third-base stuff,” Justin kidded nervously. “What, did you suck his dick?”

  “What?” I laughed, a little too hard. “Oh, my gosh, are you kidding?”

  “No.” Justin pouted. “Did you?”

  I said nothing, fearing he had the ability to read my mind.

  Justin’s lip began to tremble. “Oh, no,” he managed.

  “Fine, yes, once,” I scolded. “But we never had sex!”

  “Oh, God.” Justin’s voice cracked and he crumpled like he’d just been stabbed. “Once?”

  “Once,” I assured him. “Or twice.”

  “Oh, God,” Justin repeated, his eyes tearing up. “So, a lot. Okay. Did he do it back to you? Did he at least give you pleasure?”

  “Um,” I said. “Justin.”

  “What?” he persisted, slightly crazed. “Did he make you come?”

  “No, he didn’t. He tried. So I kinda faked it. But look!” I brightened. “It’s okay now! I finally learned to masturbate and have real orgasms so I will never fake again!”

  “You sucked his DICK,” Justin roared, then covered his face, quaking with abrupt little sobs. “And you… oh, God…”

  Oh, shit, I thought. This was so not going as planned.

  “Oh, God,” he said, muffled. “Why?”