LJ Idol - Week 17 - Open Topic
I’d like to tell you a love story. It isn’t really mine to share, although I was certainly involved. The majority of it took place while I was backstage, long after my scene had ended. But one day I was pulled into the spotlight again, in just a chorus role really, when I’d always fancied myself a lead character.
I met Brand when I was 14. Tall and blonde, a JV basketball player and honors student, he started dating one of my acquaintances and I quickly asserted myself into their relationship, causing trouble at first and at last, soundly stealing him from her. A precocious little eighth grader who liked boys as much as books, I thought nothing of my artifice at the time, only the thrill of the hunt, the joy of beating out the competition for his affection.
I certainly loved him, in that all-consuming teenage obsession breed of love. He was just 15, a very “good” boy, but I wouldn’t let him stay that way for long. On Christmas Eve, at dusk, we had sex for the first time in my guest bedroom, the purple daylight falling lower and lower until, by the time he was through, the room was completely dark. I went to the bathroom afterwards and returned to find him, his pants back on, quietly crying into his hands at the foot of the bed.
That was awkward. Awkward and awful.
First times are rarely magic. This was no different. I thought I had given him a gift, but his was not a response of appreciation! He felt really guilty. His parents were terribly Baptist, the lead performers in a gospel singing troupe, no less, and I had just screwed the choir boy right out of him. I didn’t know what would happen with us next.
I shouldn’t have worried. It turns out hormones can be stronger than theology and the next time he came over, just before New Years, it was his suggestion that we walk down to the lake and take my old rowboat across the cove. There floated a covered dock abandoned for the winter by seasonal owners.
The lake was still and grey that afternoon, reflecting a steely winter sky. The sound of the oars slapping on water startled a Canada goose into flight and I watched it careen skyward as we slipped across the water. It was a short trip but fraught with tension - were we to be seen, and caught, our parents would have both our heads.
Coasting up to the front of the dock, we both looked behind us for an instant to see that we weren’t being watched, then ducked forward in silence, coasting beneath the door into the empty boat slip and a dusky darkness.
He tied us off and helped me out soundlessly. I inhaled the scent of wet wood, musty life jackets, decay and damp, and then his hands were on my shoulders, pulling me to him, and reaching for the button of my jeans before my eyes had even adjusted to the dark.
We made love all afternoon, silly, unsophisticated, sweet fumbling sex on a bed of cushy lifejackets and boat bumpers. It wasn’t my first time, but it was the first time I felt comfortable enough with someone to actually enjoy the sex, discover what made me feel good instead of just giving pleasure. So for that, Brand will always have a place in my heart.
And I dumped him. I was 14! We dated until the following summer, when we could only see each other once a week instead of every day at school. I got restless and started flirting it up with an older actor from the King and I, who I saw daily, and broke it off with Brand before I cheated on him. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d been a silly, stupid girl, but, that’s how we learn our lessons isn’t it? The hard way.
Over the next four years we stayed friends in the loosest sense of the word. He became a super jock, playing football and basketball and running track in the spring. I turned to the arts and hung out with the drama club and literary society. Our cliques rarely mixed and frequently looked down on each other.
We had a flirty disdain for each other then, and for each other’s love interests. He’d hear I had a new boyfriend and would sit possessively on the bleachers next to me at a pep rally… “Hey, you give him any of that awesome head yet?” he’d ask quietly, looking both pained and curious.
I’d see him at a school dance and grab him for a slow song, tucking my head into his neck, even if he was there with some preppy girl…
I’d whisper, “So, does she know what I used to do to you in my basement?”
After he graduated, my senior year, he came back to our school during his Christmas break and asked me out. He told me he’d wanted me for years, but never felt like he was “allowed” to go on dates with me because of the people he hung out with. But, now that he was in college, he realized it was all bullshit and we should go out again. I had to turn him down. I had another boyfriend!
I graduated, started college. There was something about the holidays though. Just before New Years my sophomore year, he stopped by my parent’s house, said he was out driving and the road led him to my door. I grabbed my coat and we wandered up into the mountains and made out for hours, kissing, touching, listening to country music while a quiet snow blanketed the car.
Then we lost touch. For five years. Just when I think I will never hear from someone again, I discover that, just as Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, in fact, it’s not even past."
He called a few of our old friends to get my number and said he was back in town for spring break and wanted to hang out. Hang out, ha! I was really naïve. We met up at a bookstore in Atlanta, talked, shared dinner at a little Mexican restaurant and talked some more. Then he said “I really don’t want this to end - I just want to get a room and stay up all night hearing about what you’ve been up to.” So I agreed.
You know I am not some innocent flower, but I am an idealist and a romantic. When he told me he just wanted to talk...I really thought he just wanted to talk! So, when he started tickling me, the most adolescent way to try and get your hands on a girl, I thought ‘Oh wait! Did he just bring me here to have sex?’ and then ‘Well, that wouldn’t be so bad.’
We did have sex. And he was rough - really rough - like bruise me and leave me sore rough. Afterwards, when he asked if I’d enjoyed it, I was honest. “Well, it was a little...harder than I’d expected. Are you always like that?” And he said “I thought that was how you liked it.”
Did I? When I was younger? I couldn’t remember, but I think not.
I went into the bathroom and walked back out, stepping into complete déjà vu. He was sitting on the end of the bed, his pants back on, his face in his hands.
This was still awkward, a decade later.
“Are you ok?” I asked him, gently placing a hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me with eyes both huge and horrible and said “I can’t believe we just did that. I have to tell you something.”
He had a girlfriend. More like a great love, which didn’t really speak to why he was there with me. But now that he was spent, he needed to vent, and I was too kind to tell him to get the hell out.
When he was a junior in college, 21 years old, he was dating a girl from his chemistry class. He often went to her house to hang out and there he met her adorable little sister, Kelly, who was only 15. The little sis was smart and funny and always very friendly, sometimes bordering on flirty. He really liked her but knew she was too young for him.
He and the older sister were getting really involved and decided to have sex. It would be her first time, so she went through the process of getting on the pill, secretly, because her daddy was a preacher. The day they slept together she was scared out of her mind and, while they consummated their relationship, it was nothing to write home about.
The very next day her little sister called Brand and said “I love you. I have loved you from the first day you came in my house. I don’t care that you are six years older than me, I want to be with you.”
The big sister? The one who’d just given up her virginity? He dumped her. Soundly and on the spot.
And he continued to go to her house to see Kelly when big sis wasn’t home!
The preacher-dad was furious and told Brand he was not welcome in his home, nor was he allowed to date either of his daughters. He told him he was a cad and practically a pedophile, a college student coming on to a 15-year-old! So, they did what any young lovers would do. They took their relationship underground.
It was summer and Brand would drive to her house after midnight, while everyone was asleep. He’d park two streets over and cut through the woods to her back porch, where she always left the door unlocked. Like a burglar, he’d creep to her room where she was often asleep and wake her with a kiss. Then they’d stay together till dawn, talking in whispered tones, watching movies. He said more than once he fell asleep and woke to the sun coming in her window, terrified he wouldn’t be able to get out the door before her mom was up making coffee.
They got away with this for months, but they should have kept their relationship under the cover of darkness. They just got too desperate to see one another. One sunny Saturday afternoon she called him and said her mom and sister had gone shopping in Atlanta - Come over now!
She wanted to watch a naughty DVD and fool around and the DVD player was in her parent’s bedroom. The both stripped nude in her room and headed down the hall. I wonder now if they look back on how careless all this was?
They were wrapped in an embrace when they heard voices on the stairs. Her mother and sister were calling for her “Kelly, why didn’t you open the door? We’ve got tons of bags!” I can only imagine the abject panic that fell over those two, naked in mama and daddy’s bed with no chance for escape.
His girlfriend froze in terror, pulling the covers up to her neck, but Brand leaped off the bed and frantically searched for clothing - his own pants abandoned back in her room. He couldn’t find anything but her dad’s work clothes hanging on the hook in the bathroom, five sizes too big but all he had. As he slipped them on, her mother and sister stormed in.
What must they have thought? A half naked man, a nude little girl, rumpled bedsheets and porno on the t.v.. They went nuts! The mother started to hit his girlfriend, pummeling her daughter with her shopping bags while screaming “Whore! Little slut! Whore!”
The older sister stood frozen for one moment before announcing, “I’m calling the police!”
When she stalked across the room to the phone, Brand ran.
This was not his lucky day. As he dashed barefoot back to his car, hopping hedges and crashing through people’s yards in pants that wouldn’t stay up, a state forester that was in the area got the call on his radio to be on the lookout for a sexual predator on the run. Brand practically crashed into the guy’s truck as he crossed a street. The guy grabbed him by his baggy clothing and dragged him in to jail with no shoes on.
He got off light. The family decided not to press charges, as long as Brand would sign a letter promising to never see Kelly again, and that he would go to counseling. He did it, with a broken heart, but he never attended that counseling…maybe he should have.
Five lonely months passed and one day one of his coworkers at Office Depot said “My girlfriend works at Red Lobster and the hostess there…Kelly?...asked me to tell you hello.”
Brand's heart practically exploded. He sent her a sealed note through the guy’s girlfriend and they agreed to meet the next weekend.
In the night, they left their cars on opposite sides of the parking lot and met at picnic shelter by the lake.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” she whispered. “I thought you’d never want to see me.”
“They made me sign a letter,” he replied “I didn’t want to get you in any more trouble.”
“I didn’t want you to be in trouble either,” she answered, and then they were kissing.
Sitting on a picnic table in the moonlight, they made a pact, as lovers often do, that they would not allow fate to keep them apart again.
Brand bought her a secret cell phone so she could talk to him whenever she liked, unfettered. They met only after work when she would have an excuse as to why she was out late. Every few months she told her parents she was going to Savannah with one of her friends from youth group, her one confidante about her secret love. There she would meet Brand and for 48 hours they could be together without constantly looking over their shoulders.
The night Brand asked me to get a hotel room with him, she was a senior in high school, three months from graduating. He was a grad student at Duke, working on his PhD in nuclear physics. Her parents still had no clue that they were together and she had been accepted at a little college in North Carolina. She'd soon be living minutes from him. Once she was 18 and out of their house, they would be free to be together whenever they wanted.
After he had spilled that monster of a confession, he looked at me hopefully. Then he ended with “I shouldn’t have slept with you tonight.”
He’d told me his story like he needed absolution, acceptance, for someone else to understand why he’d been breaking laws and living in secrecy for years. I think he needed another person to tell him he wasn’t crazy and that everything would soon be alright. So I did. And I did understand. Maybe that is why he chose me as his confessor, because he knew if anyone could see the beauty in the love he’d been sheltering it would be me. I know Romeo and Juliet, I believed in star-crossed lovers. I wouldn’t judge.
However…I also understood he’d just fucked me, and used me, and made me feel both cheap and stupid for not realizing what he’d really wanted out of the evening.
After saying all the right things, the comforting, friendly words he needed to hear, I gave him a little back rub and suggested we get some sleep. As he turned the light off beside the bed, I quickly slipped off my pants and snuggled my silky, bikini-bottomed ass against him when he lay beside me to sleep.
My back to him, I didn’t even have to roll over to know this would be easy. He started to get hard, so I pushed back just a tiny bit, and reached behind me to rub his chest. His hand roved upwards to my breasts, then rolled me towards him and we were kissing.
“You shouldn’t have have slept with me, huh?” I was thinking angrily. I waited until he was begging me to screw him before I climbed on top. With every stroke I watched his face in fury and thought “You may love her, but you’re fucking me...fucking me…fucking me!” He didn’t want to do it - knew he shouldn't be doing it -but he couldn’t resist me either.
A few days later I got an email from him telling me what a “special girl,” I was and that he’d keep in touch. I wanted to gag. When I’d driven away the morning after, I’d hoped I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time. I’d have preferred he didn’t write me at all!
Are you wondering what happened to our charming couple? Well, they’ve been married for five years now. Life happened just as they’d planned. She moved to North Carolina, went to college, they got engaged when she was 19 and married at 20. When they told their parents they'd met up again at Duke, they were incredulous, but accepting. In their recent pics on Facebook they look happy and settled.
It’s an amazing love story. How often do we actually discover the person we are meant to spend the rest of our lives with and fight for them against all odds? How wonderful that they were right about finding their soul mates! It gives me hope that true love really exists.
But, I had to wonder, when I met her at our high school reunion last year, did she have any idea about my walk-on role in the show that was her life? Remember that old line about there being no small roles, only small actors?
I smiled sweetly when Brand introduced us, looked deep in her eyes and politely shook her hand, but I couldn’t help thinking
“Sure he loves you, honey, but he still couldn’t resist me.”