The Secret One
I don’t know when we crossed the threshold of our inappropriate relationship. Was it the first time we hung out alone, the first time one of us looked at the other a little too long, the first time we went to dinner, the first time we kissed? It’s difficult to point to the beginning of an affair which remained our own private secret throughout its existence.
He was completely different than I. Other than the age gap, he was white in that wholesome, almost corn-fed way, a healthy athlete who would have been entirely boring to my dissident teenage self were it not for a mischief in his eyes which most people mistook for innocent charm. He was in the middle of a divorce, while I was still a virgin.
Despite the constraints of sneaking around, we spent endless hours playing cards, watching movies, fooling around, and drinking wine on his rooftop. It was the first relationship in which I’d had the freedom and time to fully explore another person’s body. It was with his pretty, circumcised dick that I developed a more nuanced approach to oral sex. (Although, after the first time I went down on him, he said “You’re good at that. I didn’t think you would be so good.” I’m still not sure what he meant by that.) Prior to him, it hadn’t occurred to me to be thoughtful about blow jobs – most teenage boys are so happy to have a mouth down there they don’t really care what happens.
At the time I didn’t marvel at his maturity, or at how much cooler and more human he was than the idiotic boys around me. I simply went along with it, glad to have found someone I lusted after who was also comfortable with himself and whose conversation wasn’t predictable or mind-blowingly shallow.
Because he’s not an asshole and also, probably, because I seem unmalleable, he never pressured me into have sex. Sure, there were lots of heated moments where we had done everything but, and there was aching weight and wetness and he was almost inside me and he would say something desirous, but I held my ground pretty firmly. There was a time when I showed up and announced that I wanted to have sex, but then right before it happened it just didn’t feel right, I was too nervous and sober and I didn’t want to deal the complicated question of whether I should have waited for someone who wasn’t almost twice my age.
Of course, he ruined the first half-dozen boys who followed him for me. They really didn’t stand a chance. The most intelligent and interesting amongst them still behaved in puzzlingly juvenile ways. Their communication was stunted and their desire a being of its own, one which they seemed almost afraid of, or at least embarrassed and unsure about. I would, for a long time, regret not making him my first, fume over how much better it would have been with him.
I often wonder how his memories of me are colored. We were together during one of the hardest periods of his life. I am sure that part of what he valued in me (other than my body which was rather fit at the time) was the simple comfort and companionship of another intimate human being at a time when he was left alone to deal with the shattered remains of his marriage. Sometimes, when I was alone at his house, I would dig through albums and notebooks, curious about this woman who had broken him, and about what he had been like with her, in love with her. I saw pictures, her in the street, looking away from the camera, beautiful in a stark kind of way. I read emails, incriminating ones. I never told him about my illicit investigations, I always pretended I knew only what he told me. I hope he has found someone else – he’s one of the good ones.
