Long Distance

I was the first high school girl I knew who had a college boyfriend. Only problem was, Scott went to RIT in Rochester and I lived in Youngstown, Ohio. For nearly a year, the four-hour trek and motherly interference kept the "no nookie" rule absolutely in effect. Just before starting a summer class that would take me further away, and about to enter even more distant NYU that fall, I sat complaining to him on the phone. It was midnight in mid July and all I could talk about was how we might never touch again. Afterward, I tossed the phone into a pile with my scrunched-up socks and fell asleep in the den.

Around five in the morning, I heard a tap at the back window. I woke to Scott's elfish grin and the thin dawn chill. We made love on the frumpy backroom couch in a fairy-tale sequence where euphoria and the full force of body-on-body met to form an ecstatic void. Hot but not raunchy, it was more about hands expressing than tweaking the get-off.

I remember clutching a blanket over us, shy that we would be found mid-buck, which would ruin the secret and break the spell. I distinctly recall lying there, worn afghans letting morning air in and exhales out, ready to die in post-coital nakedness next to my first real lover.

We came to, so to speak, just before Moms was due to awake. I walked him down the street to the church where his station wagon hid from my neighbors' watchful eyes. We had a long kiss in the parking lot and then he drove home; he had work later that afternoon. I crept back into the house, picked up my socks, hung up the phone, and went back to bed.

That, of course, was the last time we were together.