You are sitting on my bed and I am staring at you from my desk chair.
You’ve just told me, with lots of pauses and fugitive grins—shy and conspiratorial in the dim light of my lamp—that you want me to take your virginity.
That you don’t want to go to college a virgin.
That you were planning on getting me drunk to ask me this.
But I am not drunk and you are probably not drunk and it is quiet and there is a wild sledgehammer in my chest hitting me from the inside and I am scared.
Me, sitting here, in my desk chair, staring at you, my laptop, open, behind me, the cursor, blinking, to an essay, for Princeton, abandoned now, about my mom, how she, for my fifth birthday, quit smoking.
You, sitting there, on my bed, rubbing it, like a dog, grinning,
You’ve just told me, with lots of pauses and fugitive grins—shy and conspiratorial in the dim light of my lamp—that you want me to take your virginity.
That you don’t want to go to college a virgin.
That you were planning on getting me drunk to ask me this.
But I am not drunk and you are probably not drunk and it is quiet and there is a wild sledgehammer in my chest hitting me from the inside and I am scared.
Me, sitting here, in my desk chair, staring at you, my laptop, open, behind me, the cursor, blinking, to an essay, for Princeton, abandoned now, about my mom, how she, for my fifth birthday, quit smoking.
You, sitting there, on my bed, rubbing it, like a dog, grinning,