Hookup

College life at it's finest.

His words roll slick and smooth like oil over her skin.  He tells her things she’s always dreamed of hearing: that she’s beautiful and funny and sexy.  He tells her that from the minute he saw her he wanted to kiss her, and she knows that for once she had read a boy correctly, that he had been flirtatious and eager and interested back.  She thinks in some quiet corner of her mind that she must be dreaming, that it can’t be happening, that it’s too good to be true.  She’s dumpy and plain, fat and messily dressed.  But there is a much larger part of her that revels in his words like so much sunlight.  She feels the truth of those words inside her, knows that beyond the fat and the frump and the failure lies a beautiful girl just waiting for the light of love to cast her in it’s flattering glow.  She has longed for so long for someone to see it.  Twelve years easily, she thinks dully, gasping as his hands slither their way beneath her shirt and squeeze her breasts.  Excitement and a little fear trill through her, stiffening her spine and making her heart race. 

The drinks have made her feel fuzzy and warm, their sourness lying heavily in her throat.  He has had much more to drink, and it makes him more heavy-handed and messy than she knows he would normally be.  Quietly, another voice sternly admonishes you’ve only known him two days and he’s been drunk off his a*s the entire time, but she quickly hushes it, forgets it, because he’s cute and nice and funny and he wants her.  His hands have torn her shirt off, discarded the worn flannel on the filthy beer-soaked dorm floor, and are forcing the cups of her bra down.  She fumbles for his hands and pushes them away. 

They tangle on the bed, mouths and tongues hungry and searching.  For her it is all new, the kissing and the panting and the licking that he had spent all of high school perfecting.  She’s pleased to find that she’s a natural, that she falls easily and comfortably into the rhythms.  She plays that moment of her first kiss from an hour earlier over and over in her mind, sloppy and awkward and embarrassing;   her heart had started pounding and her mind had shrieked in surprise, and the most intoxicating feeling of floating and filled her whole body.  The taste of cigarettes and bourbon lay heavily on his tongue but by now she doesn’t even notice.  All she knows is sensation: hands and lips and sweat mingling, an electric bolt shooting through her when he nuzzles her neck and licks it, kisses it. 

His hands are getting more insistent, more pressing.  When she pushes his hands away and mumbles into his mouth not yet, not yet his hands return quickly, why not?  She has her speech ready about virginity and taking things slow, wanting to wait for love, but it gets mixed up and garbled in her head.  His arguments are convincing: you’re so hot, you’re so sexy, I want you and she feels her resolve weaken.  He fumbles with the dingy beige strap of her too-big bra and tears the hook off.  Oops, he mumbles, before peeling it off her hot moist skin and grabbing her breasts hungrily.  He squeezes them, and she almost cries out because he squeezes too hard and it’s painful, but then he lowers his head and suckles and there is fire and electricity coursing through her, igniting her between her legs.  After a time he resurfaces and kisses her some more, and tries to unbutton her pants, but this is the absolute line she will not redraw.  She breaks away and slaps his hand.  No. 

He must see something in her face, even through the fog of alcohol, that makes him pause.  Ok, alright.  I’ll stop.  She thanks him and kisses him again, to ease the sting of her refusal and let him know she is still interested.

 

The sky is pale gray-blue and beginning to flutter and dot with awakening life.  She stumbles into her bed and almost wakes her roommate as she digs her pajamas out of the bureau and accidentally slams the door.  The drink has long since worn off, but she is still giddy and clumsy, still warm and fuzzy.  She slips beneath the sheets and drifts off into contented sleep.

 

Two weeks later.  He still gorges on beer and bourbon and whiskey, pot and cigarettes and parties.  He’s getting sloppier and dirtier, constantly going to parties and having parties, not bothering to shower or change his clothes in between.  At first she goes with but she finds it exhausting, all the smoke and the music and the sex.  She worries when she’s not there but she’s gotten tired of the parties so quickly and can’t make herself go to watch him.  She stays in with her new friends instead and hangs around her phone in case he calls her, or texts her, but he never does.  At one point she asks why and he shrugs and says he doesn’t believe in being trapped by the need to call and text, he leaves his phone in his room.  The campus is small enough that people who need him can easily find him.  She doesn’t want to seem too clingy or needy, so she shrugs and tells him it makes sense, that maybe she’ll start leaving her phone behind too, when she knows she never will.

Then comes the night that he staggers into her room so drunk and out of his mind that he can’t stand and can’t talk.  He garbles her name and staggers to her bed, light from the hall glaring into the dark room where she and her roommate had been fast asleep.  She squints first at him framed in the bright light, than at the bedside table that reads 2:34 AM.  He’s mumbling something about how he cares about her and doesn’t want to do this to her but he’s locked out his room and his roommate’s gone and he needs a place to crash.  She is disgusted by his state but she gets up and shuffles over to him.  He falls as soon as he moves away from the wall and hits his head on the bed frame.  Oh my god!, she gasps, rushing to him.  He’s bleeding from his forehead, blood dripping on the carpet and into his squinting eyes. She rushes to the bathroom for toilet paper and when she gets back he’s crawled into her bed and splayed out on it.  She cleans up the wound and is glad to see it’s not deep or serious, had just bled heavily in the way that head wounds do.  She apologizes to her roommate, furious and deeply embarrassed, and closes the door.

His wet snores keep her up all night, and when she wakes up in the morning she discovers that he has wet himself.  The word alcoholic worms its way into her thoughts, but she shakes her head and dismisses it.  She thinks that even if he is, it is her job as his girlfriend to stick by him and help him.

Only, he won’t call her a girlfriend or let her call him a boyfriend.  He doesn’t believe in labels, he says, and isn’t it enough that they know they like each other?  She agreed with him, even though she really didn’t at all, because she didn’t want to scare him away by being too intense.  Besides, she hates conflict and she knows she can get him to see things her way.  She just has to keep being there for him and showing him how good she is for him.  Eventually he’ll be comfortable with holding hands in public, won’t jerk his hand away and shove in his pockets. 

 

When he tells her they need to talk she thinks it’s because she’s been hiding in her room a lot lately, not going to any parties at all.  She doesn’t believe it when he says, I think you’re a great girl, really sweet and awesome, but I just can’t be with you right now.  I’ve got a problem with addiction, and I don’t want to hurt you with it.  I still really like you though, I want to stay friends. I’m not just saying that either, I promise.  At first she’s numb, taking in his words and trying to force them into making sense.  He goes on, talking about how he doesn’t want to hurt her, to drag her any further into the darkness of his life, but she doesn’t believe it.  It’s because it’s been three weeks and I still haven’t put out.  She starts crying and crying and knows she’s making a spectacle of herself, but he’s nice and he pulls her in to hug her and hold her and rock her and she thinks she must be wrong, he does care for her after all, and she starts to beg.  She begs him not to leave her, begs him to let her help him, and eventually she begs him not to leave as he gets up and tells her he has to.  It’s late, he says, you should get some sleep.  Are we really done?  She whispers, suddenly cold and shivering. He nods and lets himself out.

The next she hears that a friend had seen him hooking up with another girl at a party.  In her mind she sees another version of herself, dazzled by his words and attention and the smoky light and the sour tingle of alcohol.