Tripp Reade
Before the Plunge
He opened the refrigerator for the third time since coming downstairs. Mr. Lambert certainly liked his beer dark and pricey and for a moment Zack wanted to chug one, just to relax, which he needed to do in the worst way, but he also needed to think clearly. Focus, that's what the situation called for.
Brie. Grapes. Upscale veggie dip. Upscale veggies. No imperfectly sealed Tupperware full of leftovers. The Lamberts ate well, this he knew from dinners here at Tabitha's house. Back home, Zack's fridge groaned with Oscar Meyer boloney, American cheese, pudding cups. He liked eating with the Lamberts.
The hell was he doing? Promised Tabitha he'd be right back and here he was rummaging through the fridge. He was stalling, that's what. Panicking.
Though by no means an old hand, this was not her first time: there'd been Darius Green last summer. Zack tried not to think about it, but never managed the trick. Darius lived right here in Tabitha's neighborhood and drove a Beemer. Zack drove a Chevy Cavalier, the cockroach of the road. Comparisons were inevitable.
He stood on the cool Italian tiles of Mrs. Lambert's sprawling kitchen floor and pulled his shaggy hair back tight against his skull. Last month when Tabitha messaged him that her parents planned to spend this weekend at their mountain house -- not the beach house and not the B&B in Virginia they owned half of, but the more remote mountain house -- right after he peered at the tiny green screen of his cell phone, cupping a hand against the overhead glare of the Footlocker where he'd been trying on fresh kicks, he let out a whoop that made the sales clerk drop the mid-cut trainers she'd been holding. Visions of hanging out, watching movies, and fooling around instantly possessed him, a sugar plum two-step in his head.
He always thought too small. Tabitha had bigger plans, though he didn't know what those were until today.
"Zack, you okay," she called from the master bedroom.
"Great." His voice cracked, God, he was coming unglued here. "Just --" He searched the countertops and appliances for legitimacy. "Just locking the door."
Her laugh filled him like helium. "Don't want to be interrupted," she said. "Good idea. But hurry."
He pledged speed, right after he -- what? Calmed his galloping heart? Got his mind right? Took control of his treacherous nerves? -- right after he opened a bottle of wine, yeah, that sounded plausible.
"I like the way you think, gorgeous." She had a voice he wanted to listen to all his waking hours and then have it lullaby him to sleep.
He found a good bottle of white wine -- all the wine here was good -- but had to place bottle and opener on the breakfast table when his hands lost all strength. He felt like crying. Any other guy would be going back for seconds by now.
In the downstairs bathroom, just off the mudroom, he splashed water on his face and realized, from a look in the mirror, that he'd been parading through kitchen and breakfast nook, complete with French doors, in his underwear. Wonderful. With his luck some neighbor was making notes for a triplicate report to the Lamberts upon their return.
He cupped himself in his bicycle briefs: still rocket ready. His recent switch from boxer shorts was a Tabitha change. Not that she asked him to or anything. He hated conversations that began with the girl saying, "Is that what you're wearing?" just before a date, as if the guy was no longer allowed to dress himself. He'd seen this happen to buddies: the girlfriend gradually takes control of wardrobe, taste in music and movies, and before long you don't even recognize the guy, he's got his shirt tucked in all the time and watches anything starring Mandy Moore or Hilary Duff. Tabitha never did this, though. She wanted him as he was, not some version "improved" by her suggestions. Hopelessly in love with her, that's what he was, which he knew to be dangerous, knew that it left him wide-open and vulnerable, but he couldn't help himself.
And that, along with garden-variety lust, was part of why he now wore bicycle briefs: when they first started dating he always got so screamingly hard that it became impossible to appear with her in public -- like the time he couldn't even stand up to leave a movie theatre, had to sit there for ten minutes thinking unappealing thoughts, anything to douse his woody.
He straightened, water dripping off his chin. Two-a-day football practices in a North Carolina August translated to glowing skin and chiseled muscles here in October. He should be grateful but instead felt like a fraud. All through Pop Warner and junior high he played with the fervor of boys who have no other outlets for their passion, but here in high school, one month into the season, he realized he no longer craved the game. The sweet crunch of a cherry hit just didn't thrill him anymore and, as if shrugging his way out of a hypnotic trance, he understood how little he had in common with his teammates, how positively, in fact, he disliked both them and the locker room vibe. "Drop trou and begin to plow," "swat the twat," and "burrow in the furrow" were just a few of the milder slogans he'd heard after a game when his teammates bragged about what they planned to do to their girlfriends that night. Always to, never with. He wondered if they sensed his fading devotion to the cause. But he hadn't quit, because he wasn't the quitting type, though he for damn sure wasn't giving the illogical 110% demanded by Coach Rankle. He was giving about 46%, on a good day.
A woven-twig basket full of unquents, creams, and exfoliants by the sink marked Mrs. Lambert as a woman who believed in the rejuvenative properties of colloidal oatmeal and extracts of blue and green algae. At his house they had a pump bottle of Jergen's, the nozzle crusted with dried lotion. He loved his parents but sometimes wished for a tad more sophistication. Visiting Tabitha and her polished family made him feel backward, and it surprised him, at first meeting, that they weren't stuck-up and snobby.
Time to give the wine bottle another try. He drove the corkscrew deep into the cork, but it seemed such a thinly veiled allusion to sex -- as pretty much everything was for him these days -- that he started hyperventilating, just like he did right after arriving barely a half hour ago.
He'd ridden his bike -- far easier to conceal his presence from neighbors that way -- and bounded inside the unlocked house. When he found Tabitha, upstairs in the master bedroom, the preparations had all been made.
Candles and matches. Condoms. A small glass bottle of olive oil. Lingerie sporting thousands of tiny stitches around sheer silk and lace, bought red-faced and hot-cheeked by him at the mall after he finally deciphered her birthday hints and through which he saw the pulse-destroying shadow of her pubic mound. One leg bent behind her and resting on the bed, lips blushed with color, hair glossy as the pelt of some far northern mammal, she cast a spell that rooted him to the spot.
"I think it's time," she said, walking toward him, something playful and wild in her voice. She ordered him to remove his shirt, pants, made appreciative noises at the appearance of shoulders, abdomen, and thighs. "Now, if this were a job interview, here's what I'd say: I have three openings I need you to fill." Stepping close so that he smelled only apricot soap and sex, her mouth right by his ear, she whispered, "Use your imagination."
That's when he headed back downstairs. He wasn't completely untutored -- thanks to Tabitha -- but there existed this permanent gap between what he knew and what she knew, and he never felt in control, or even on equal terms. And now she wanted to...the olive oil, the reference to three openings. He was playing sexual catch-up, always had been.
Take seventh grade. Please. Pat Selfer, a booger-mining, loogy-hawking lout of a boy, brought in his dad's copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and six of them crowded around in the minutes before Mrs. Couch called the class to order. The model on the page had her back to the camera and seemed to be wearing, not a suit, but a string that hugged the crevice of her butt and hips. Nothing else. Zack wrinkled his brow at the stirring in his Tuffskins. Selfer, his nail yellowed with recent nasal explorations, put his finger on the page, positioned it between her legs, and made a repeated scooping motion while saying, "Yeah baby, you like that, huh?" Zack wondered what that was all about, what Pat was referring to, but knew it would be reputation suicide to ask.
Well, now he knew, but why'd he have to find out from his girlfriend? Wasn't his dad supposed to clue him in at some point, wasn't there supposed to have been at least a halting, fumbling attempt to explain about birds and bees? They were parked at Jordan Lake, Tabitha nestled between his legs, her back against his chest, when she taught him the velvet geometry of -- well, of pussy. Jeez, what a prude he was: guys in the locker room used that word five hundred times a day without breaking a sweat. She slicked his finger with her mouth and then guided his hand beneath her jeans. "Put it there," she said. "No, up a little farther, yeah, there, feel that? Now move it in slow circles. Mmmm, nice."
Embarrassing at first, this constant instruction, but also exciting, which made it scary, somehow.
Three openings. His mind reeled. He wasn't up to this. She wanted James Bond, not Zack Higgins. Sure, he was hard now, had been all day it seemed, but what if at the moment of truth...?
Music began upstairs. blink-182, his favorite band. She loved him. He knew because the blink boys rarely made her playlist, and then only after he burned her a greatest hits CD. She was more of a Tift Merritt, Mindy Smith kind of gal, but understood, by some benevolent intuition, that he was a little freaked, and more than a little ashamed of being freaked, and wanted to put him at ease. Most girls would've been furious at this long, inexplicable delay.
Let's go, don't wait, this night's almost over.
He grabbed the wine bottle and corkscrew. Quirky SoCal skatepunk, as good a soundtrack to lose his virginity to as anything he could think of. The cork popped out, no problem, and the world opened up to him for a moment, one brief glimpse of ribboning time. This was his first love, unlikely to last forever. It just didn't happen that way very often: one of them would do something or say something or they'd grow bored or grow apart or glaring incompatibilities would assert themselves. Eventually they'd split, and the knowledge saddened him.
Honest, let's make this night last forever.
Sunlight collected on fluttering leaves out in the yard. Stop thinking so much, he told himself. Life's good right now. Just do your best, maybe you'll last. And if not, if for whatever reason it does end, remember that you love her and she loves you and that you may meet years and years from now and find each other perfect once more.
He picked up the bottle and two glasses. It didn't matter who had more experience, this wasn't a competition. He simply wanted to know all about her, who she was, and to that end decided to place himself in her hands. Stepping on the first stair that led to where she waited, he could think of no place he'd rather be.
©2005 by Tripp Reade
