by Zane
I gave an exaggerated yawn. “Wow, I’m so impressed. Now I know I did the right thing when I dropped you like the plague. Sorry ass!”
Chandler yelled out, “BITCH!”
“Takes one to know one, trick ass,” I replied with a grin.
“Hold up, all of you step back. I got this,” Jason stated avidly. I was positive he would miss by a mile yet again.
Next thing I knew, my ass hit the cold water. I could hear them all falling out laughing before I even came up for air. Jason had his fists thrown up in the air and was prancing around like he had just put Ali down for the ten count. His boys gave him high fives and slapped him on the back while Chandler gave him a big fat hug.
“Forget you, Jason!” I was ashamed, upset, and hopelessly in love with the fool but scared to admit it.
“Forget you, too,” he bellowed while their posse moved away.
Snaggletooth and his buddies came walking past the booth while I was struggling to get back on the bench. Their hands were filled with everything from cotton candy to stuffed animals to corn dogs.
“HAAAAA! HAAAAA! He got your ass good, Youngen!”
I just ignored it and let them enjoy their laugh. I got back up on the bench, hunched my shoulders, covered my eyes with the palms of my hands, and listened to the annoying-ass carnival music.
A couple of hours later, Brina traded places with me. I never thought I would be so elated to put on a clown suit—anything but that damn dunking booth. After Jason dunked me, a chain reaction ensued, and I hit the cold water at least twenty more times before I lost count.
Ms. Rankin, who didn’t have the sniffles or any other vague symptom of a cold, gave me a quick lesson on making poodles and other cute characters out of oblong latex balloons and sent me on my way. I had a ball walking around and entertaining the little kids, who were strongly representing that day.
I had on a red, white, blue, and yellow suit with a white, red, blue, and purple wig, white powder makeup with red lipstick surrounding my lips, and huge red clown shoes. I was doing just fine until . . .
. . . I spotted the kissing booth. To say I was severely rattled to see all the hoochies lined up to kiss Jason would be the understatement of the year. There were just as many nuccas in line to kiss Chandler’s skank ass, for some unknown reason. Apparently the cheerleaders and the players were taking turns at the booth. Jason and Chandler were up at bat.
I was immediately jealous, even though I could see from my vantage point some thirty yards away that he was only giving up quick pecks. Some of the shy, problematic-as-in-uglematic girls looked like they were about to faint when his fine ass kissed them on the cheek.
My heart dropped. I contemplated going inside the school to call Mohammed from the pay phone and telling him to come get me, but I knew getting with him on the rebound wouldn’t suffice. It didn’t work the first time, and it wouldn’t work the second. Something had to be done. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
I bought a ticket for the kissing booth and got in the line behind all the other girls waiting to kiss Jason. What the hell! It made as much sense as anything else I had been doing lately. When my turn finally came, Chandler recognized me under the wig and makeup and grabbed for her man. “Come on, Jason. It’s Lisa and Deon’s turn now.”
Jason’s attention quickened when he realized it was me. Then he grinned from ear to ear. “You want me to kiss you?”
Chandler tried to pull him away by the arm, but he brushed her off, anxiously awaiting my reply. “Jason, let’s go. Now!”
He glared at her. “Chandler, let’s get something straight. You don’t own me, aight?” He gazed back at me. “I asked Zoe a question, and I’d like an answer.”
I cracked a mischievous smile and held my ticket up. “I bought a ticket, didn’t I?”
“Jason, you better not kiss that ho.” Chandler was near hysterics, and all her backup hussies were ready to pounce at a second’s notice.
“Back off,” he replied sourly. He looked deep into my eyes and bit his lower lip to suppress yet another smile. “So kiss me then.”
They had a card table separating the kissers and the kissees, probably Ms. Rankin’s idea to deter any feel-ups if someone got carried away. I couldn’t reach him without him leaning over it, and since he wasn’t budging, I climbed up on top of it on my knees and grabbed him by the collar of his jersey.
He gave me a peck. A freakin’ peck on the forehead like my grandmother used to give me. I had my eyes closed in anticipation of a deep, passionate kiss and opened them full of disappointment.
He grinned. “Okay, there’s your kiss. Now beat it.”
I let go of his collar, and they all guffawed at me. I was about to get down off the table and sulk away, but something came over me. I grabbed his collar again, pulled his face to mine, and slipped him the tongue. He refused it.
“Kiss me, Jason!” I pleaded with my eyes, and then I saw it. A flicker in his eyes that told me everything I needed to know to let the rest of the words escape from my lips. “I’m so sorry for the way I treated you. I want you back. I want us back, and I promise things will be different from now on.”
Chandler panicked and tried to pry my hands off him, but he knocked her hands away. “Jason, what is this shit? After the way she treated you, you’re just gonna take her back like that?”
Chandler must have been a psychic, because I was still waiting for a final decision on the matter.
Jason’s eyes and voice softened. “What makes you think things could be different?”
I took the plunge. Right there in front of the whole world. I took a quick survey and noticed all eyes were on me. Even Ms. Rankin was standing over against one of the other booths, smiling at me and raising her eyebrows in encouragement.
I took a short, restorative breath and blurted it out. “Because I love you, Jason. I always have. I want to marry you and make a son named Peter and look at our star every night while I lie in your arms.” I couldn’t gauge the expression on his face, but I had to get it all out. “I’ve always loved you, even when we acted like we hated each other. I’m sorry for all the things I’ve done, but nobody’s perfect. I don’t know what else to say. I just—”
He put his finger on my lips and whispered, “Shhhh, it’s okay, Boo. I never expected you to be perfect. I never expected you to be anything but you, because it’s you, the real Zoe, that I’m so in love with.”
He grabbed the back of my head and started kissing me, really kissing me, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I could hear people applauding and cheering and Chandler cussing and stomping off, but none of that mattered. Jason was showing me some affection, and I knew everything would be perfect from that moment on.
chapter
seven
Our senior year in high school rolled around, and still no sex. Jason and I had been boyfriend and girlfriend for over three years, and it was killing me. We did a lot of making out; kissing, caressing, and things like that. He sucked my breasts and fingered me quite often, but refused to stick it in. He kept saying he wanted to wait until we were married. We planned to get married as soon as we graduated, attend the same university, and live happily ever after.
All my friends were jealous, thinking I was getting my freak on all the time, but truth be known, I was jealous as hell of them. They were getting sexed better than me. Brina was still knocking boots with Cordell. Hell, even my mother was getting some. She had a new man, Aubrey, that I had mixed feelings about. I missed my daddy terribly. No one and nothing could ever replace him but at the same time, my mother deserved to be happy, so I accepted it.
Looking back, all the signs of sexual incompatibility between Jason and I were there from day one. I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Love is indeed blind, and it makes you imagine qualities in a person that don’t exist. I used to tell myself that things would change in time. I convinced myself once we became sexually active, our sex life would be the bomb. I was more th
an ready to spring into action, reading any book or manual about pleasing a man sexually I could find.
Part of me wonders whether marrying Jason was the right thing. Then I think about how much fun he and I had together, how loving he was to me when my father died, how romantic he was during the years we dated, and it makes it all seem worthwhile. Besides, my love for him is real and it was the night of our senior prom when I realized that love would never die.
I was all decked out in a sexy, strapless red gown with a split going all the way up the back, showing off my welldefined legs. Jason looked too sexy for words in his black tux. My mother had taken some pictures of the two of us in our living room before she rushed off to work.
“I have something for you!” Jason handed me a long round tube, capped at both ends. Color me stupid, but I was expecting a wrist corsage or some typical gift like that. Instead, I got a tube.
“What’s this, baby?” I tried to hide my dismay. He saw right through me.
“Let’s sit down for a sec, Zoe.” He took my hand, led me to the big, fluffy armchair my daddy used to read to me in as a child, sat down, and then pulled me down onto his lap. “Now, Boo, open it and see what you got.”
I popped the cap off the end of the long cardboard tube, becoming more curious by the second. I reached in and pulled out several sheets of paper. It took me a moment to realize they were blueprints. Jason had taken quite an interest in architecture and planned to major in it.
“Blueprints, baby?”
He put his arm around my waist, pulled me closer into him and lightly kissed me on my bare shoulder. “Not just any blueprints. Spread them open.” He helped me to open them up and added, “I wanted to do something very special for you.”
“For me? Ooooh, the plot thickens!” I slipped my tongue into his mouth and gave him a long, passionate kiss. “Baby, I didn’t realize you actually knew how to draw blueprints already.”
“Well, they’re not perfect, nor totally to scale, but yes, I know how to.”
“What are they plans of?” I could make out the basic shapes and rooms but understood blueprints at the time about as much as I understood Japanese.
“Zoe, these are the plans for our dream house.”
“Word?” My smile was hanging so wide open, I looked like I had more teeth than a set of triplets.
“Word, Boo. One day, after we’re married, I’m going to build you this house so we can raise Peter in it and live happily ever after.” I threw my arms around his shoulders and hugged him with all the strength I could muster. He started pointing out certain things to me on the blueprints. “These are all skylights. Practically the whole house will have a glass ceiling, so we can see the stars from every room. So we can see our star.”
That was it! The moment I knew it was forever. Three significant things happened after that. We never made it to the restaurant to meet our friends for dinner; we never made it to the prom; and we made love for the very first time. The plans we had for waiting until after marriage became nothing more than a memory.
I was so overwhelmed by the blueprints, my heart started jumping out my chest. It was the single most romantic thing in the world to me. The mere fact Jason had spent so many hours designing the place where he wanted to build a life together made my love and admiration for him even stronger, made my desire to do something just as special for him flourish, made my pussy wet.
“Jason—” I started tugging at his bow tie, trying to get it unfastened.
“Yes, Boo?” He grabbed hold of my wrist, trying to get me to stop. “What are you doing? We have to meet Brina, Cordell, and the others at the restaurant in twenty minutes.”
I got up off his lap and stood in between his legs, carefully placing the blueprints on the coffee table. “Fuck them.” After grabbing both his hands and pulling him up off the chair, I added, “Better yet, fuck me.”
Jason took a double take at me, trying to come up with a response. “Zoe, you’re trippin’.” He slightly pushed me aside with his chest so he could make a path to the door. “Come on, baby. Let’s go! We’re going to be mad late!”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I finally got up the nerve to stand my ground. “I’m not leaving this house until you make love to me.”
He turned to face me, a perplexed look on his face. “Zoe, why are you doing this? We agreed we would wait until after we got married to make love.”
I walked over to him, reached my hands into the opened jacket of his tux, and placed them around his waist so I was pressed as close against him as I could possibly get. His body was so incredibly warm, and I craved to feel him inside me. “Don’t you want me, Jason?”
I didn’t look at him, afraid I might see a look of rejection in his eyes. Instead, I rested my head against his chest, taking special care not to get lipstick on his crisp white shirt. “Baby, you know I want you. Don’t be ridiculous.”
As I began to run my fingertips up and down his spine, I lowered my voice to almost a whisper for no other reason than it seemed appropriate at that moment. “Then why can’t we make love right here? Right now? We’ve waited so long. It’s driving me crazy.”
“I know, Boo, but it won’t be that much longer. We graduate in a few months.”
I felt his dick growing in his pants and started hoping he was fighting a losing battle. I still didn’t look at him. I could feel his cool breath on the nape of my neck and was just glad he was holding me back. “I think about being with you all the time, Jason. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”
“I tell you what. Why don’t we go to dinner and to the prom and see what happens after that? Your mother won’t be home until morning, so it gives us plenty of time to be together.”
That’s when I looked him dead in the eyes. “You promise we’ll make love later tonight?”
Then the dreaded words escaped his lips. “We’ll see, Boo.”
I hate the words we’ll see: they almost always mean no. My parents spoke those words to me as a child when I asked for a new, extravagant toy or dress. They said them when I asked to do something we all knew I had no business doing. Thus, when Jason said them, they cut like a knife.
I started crying, and the tears were far from fake. My fragile and oversensitive nature, which had always been present but tripled after the death of my father, came out. I let go of Jason and used my hands to gather up the bottom of my tight dress so I could run up the stairs faster in my high heels. I ran into my bedroom, slammed the door, and flung myself on the bedspread, burying my head into a pillow to catch the tears. He was right behind me. I could hear his footsteps coming down the hall.
Jason opened the door, and I could feel my mattress sink farther as he sat down on the bed beside me, seconds before he began caressing my back with his strong, warm hands. “Baby, look, if it really means that much to you and you don’t want to wait, then sure we can make love. We can make love right now. I don’t want to see you upset like this. It breaks my heart.”
I turned my head away from him, letting my lipstick smear all over my pillow when I changed positions. “Jason, you just don’t get it. I shouldn’t have to beg you to make love to me. This is supposed to be something we both want.”
He started running his fingertips through my hair. “We do both want this. I was just trying to do right by you and wait, but make no mistake about it, I do want you. I’m not even going to fake the funk about that.”
After that, we were both silent for what seemed like an eternity. He was running his hands from my hair down to the small of my back, and I was trying to control my sobs, which were eventually replaced with shallow breathing. “Zoe, are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I turned over onto my back so I could look at him. He took the tip of his thumb and cleared the smudged mascara away from my eyes. All of my lipstick had been transferred to my pillowcase. “You ready to go to the prom?”
He didn’t answer but got up and walked over to my bookcase instead, putting on a cassette of slow j
ams that he’d made for me to remember him by when his parents once took him out of town for a week. He was always such a romantic—making me tapes of love songs, carving our names inside a heart on every tree in his yard and mine, calling me late at night so he could hear me breathe after falling asleep on the phone, letting me wear his varsity basketball jacket.
At six-five, he’d finally stopped growing and was the captain of the basketball team, taking them all the way to the state finals two years in a row. He had the smoothest skin for a man, and he still does to this very day. My husband has always been fine, but he’s never been finer than the night we first made love.
“Dance with me, Zoe.” He reached out his hand for me, looking so sexy and debonair, as the first song started playing. I took it and let him pull me up off the bed into his arms. We danced, our bodies swaying back and forth slowly in the moonlight invading my bedroom through the windows.
Before the first song concluded, Jason traced the contour of my lips with his fingertips, and then our kiss began. We had kissed hundreds of times before, but this one was different. It was as if there was an exchange of souls. We became one entity as our tongues intertwined in a dance of their own.
Jason scooped me up into his arms, carried me over to the bed, and laid me down gently. He climbed on top of me, and I pushed his jacket down over his shoulders and off. “I love you, Jason.”
“I love you too, Zoe.” He took my hand and kissed my palm while I turned on my side so he could easily unzip my dress and slide it over the curves of my body until it was completely removed.
The way he undressed me was so provocative. He was so gentle and took so much care with me, like I was a newborn baby. When he was done, I returned the favor. Once we were both nude, we sat on my bed face to face and placed a hand over each other’s hearts, feeling the rhythm of our heartbeats coincide. It was the most intense, arousing experience.
We started kissing again as he laid on top of me, and for the first time our private parts brushed up against one another with no clothes in between them. The warmth of his body made my heart flutter and my skin tingle.