Ruben and I were walking back into the Perk at the end of our walk when he opened the door for me and I leaned in close to him and whispered that he should drive me home. He grinned and I convinced Kat to leave a few minutes before me with her mother. The rest of the poetry read went as one would assume. I recall Kat reading a poem she had written about her older sister’s husband who once kissed her, a poem about hurting someone of your own blood. It was actually rather sad. Kat always had this mysterious seductive quality that one simply could not resist.
Anyway, Ruben and I were alone outside with two other poets whom I had just barely met that day waiting for my mother to come pick me up when he asked me if I would like a ride so that he wouldn’t have to wait outside with me all night. I accepted. As we walked away, I thought about how cheesy he had sounded but didn’t really dwell on the awkwardness of other people standing outside and watching me and Ruben.
Now, I’m going to point out that during this time, there was another girl interested in Ruben. I’m not going to say her name because I’m both too lazy to come up with a fitting pseudonym for her, and she’s not really all that relevant in this story. But she was a poet. She was also a lot closer to Ruben’s age than I was, in fact, I do believe she had one or two children somewhere between ages five and nine. Anyway, I hadn’t known her very long, but we were nevertheless pretty friendly toward each other. Not full on friends, or even Facebook friendly, but acquaintance friendly. She was interested, but Ruben wasn’t; she apparently wasn’t his type. His type was the 16 year old girl he was giving a ride home with the excuse that her mother wasn’t coming for her. No, that’s not fair. Not all of this is his fault. I was the one making the decisions for me, and nothing anyone else would’ve said to me about it would have stopped me. This is just the way things happened. As once put in a poem by Ruben: “We are all products of our own decisions.” And admittedly, he was right; of course, there would be quite a few things later on that he would say that would turn out to be completely true and right, but completely out of context of what he would say but that’s a different part of our story.
I lived in a fairly secluded part of the city, out in the desert away from civilization. The closest thing to my house was an empty stable from when an old man named Sid had died and his son had sold the horses. Ruben drove past my house to a dead end near those stables. I can’t necessarily say what happened before we got out of his car, but it probably wouldn’t have been as important as what happened after anyway. I recall looking up at the night sky with the song “Airplanes” from that summer playing through my head.
I kissed him. My lips trembled against his. We held each other close. I imagined the sun coming up and the night disintegrating before us to reveal nothing left of these moments, of anything we had just had. I didn’t believe Ruben was kissing me. His hands wandered, struggled to undo my bra, his mouth softly wrapping around my nipple…
I remember him struggling to undo the black capris I was wearing, and ripping the button completely off by accident. I remember hearing it hit the gravel and disappearing beneath our feet before he plunged his hand into me, gently sliding his fingers up and down. I remember holding his rod in my hand. And I remember pretending that he loved me, that I meant something to him during all of this.
I kissed him and imagined us somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t the gravel desert road near my house. I remember him once gently trying to push my head down. I told him no, no, I couldn’t give him so much on the first night…
I’m sorry; I can’t give much more than that except to say that he took me home when he was done. We didn’t have sex, and I enjoyed it at the time and would later miss that brief meeting terribly, but it’s one of the hardest things for me to go back to and admit that I did. This really isn’t so easy….
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