Seattle Girl (20 page)

But he was just a few weeks from graduation, so even though we went out practically every night for weeks, laughed and kissed a lot, when he graduated from college a few weeks later I pretty much figured I’d never see him again.

* * *

Now here it was, three years after our first inauspicious meeting over the Heimlich, still recovering from my crazy summer in Harborside. I was walking across campus when I heard someone yelling my name.

I turned and saw him right as he was closing in on me with a huge smile on his face. “Georgia! I thought it was you. How’s it going?” He folded me in a warm hug.

“Great!”
 
I tried to get over my shock at seeing him again. “Weren’t you off hiking in the Himilayah’s or something?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I blew almost a year over there. It was pretty sweet. Except for the part where I almost died of an intestinal parasite, that is.”

I held up my hands and shoved him away from me. “Okay, that is way too much information. Although, come to think of it, shouldn’t you be standing a little farther away from me now that you are severely diseased?”

“If I promised you that I wasn’t contagious, would you go get a cup of coffee with me?”

I gestured to the stack of books I was carrying. “Can’t you see I’ve got tons of studying to do?” I said and then broke into a huge smile. “Of course I want to go get coffee. I’d do anything to delay reading about supply and demand curves. Is there anyone out there who actually gives a shit about economics? I’d say no.”

Instead of answering me, he put his hands on my shoulders and carefully looked me up and down. “Wow. You really look amazing, Georgia.”

I blushed and mumbled, “Thanks,” kicking myself for not owning it more. Wishing I weren’t such a nerd, as we turned and headed towards the campus underground coffee house, I asked, “So, what are you doing back at UW?
 
Aren’t you gainfully employed by now?”

“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “I convinced the Business School to let me in, so I guess I’ll be goofing off for another couple of years.”

“Hmm.” I looked at him consideringly. “So then, if you’re getting an MBA, you just might be the kind of person who does give a shit about economics, right?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I can proudly say I’m just in it for the money.”

I laughed, pleased by how quickly the two of us slid into a comfortable banter. It was as if three years had never passed.

Except for the fact that I was a new and improved Georgia now. And based on his wonderful compliment, Brian had already noticed.

“You remind me of my friend Diane. Do you remember her?” I was, of course, getting ready to gauge his answer for lustful leanings towards my best friend.

“The stacked blonde?”

I nodded. “That’s her.”

“How am I like her?” He must have been slightly incredulous at being compared to a Baywatch extra.

I shrugged. “You have that same ‘I’m going to be rich and then I’m going to spend all my money on lavish, useless things’ insouciance that I like so much about her.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “So you like me, then?”

I scratched my chin as if trying to work out the answer. “Yeah. It’s nice to know exactly where things stand with both of you. Plus it’s better than being with someone who has to lie about being so sensitive and politically correct.”

When I mentioned the word ‘lie’ I noticed Brian went sort of stiff. But by then we were just ordering our drinks at the coffee house so I didn’t get a chance to hassle him at all.

We found an empty table outside on the patio and sat down. Suddenly, Brian grew strangely quiet. He seemed sort of nervous, which kind of made me nervous. I had nothing to be nervous about, of course, but I could tell he had something he wanted to say.

“Hey!” I waved my hand in front of his face. “What’s going on up in that big brain of yours?”

He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts and re-focused on me. Then he stared hard at me.

“I’ve only been in love once, you know.”

I was about to take a sip of my mocha and I had to quickly put it down. Good thing I did, because I had obviously forgotten how to swallow. My mouth went totally dry and I tried to form enough saliva to make an appropriate response. That is if I could possibly think of an appropriate response.

That was the most random comment I had ever heard.

And then it hit me: He wasn’t talking about me, was he?

No, he couldn’t be. We had barely even dated. Barely even kissed.

I had hacked out a piece of chicken onto the wall the first time we met, for god’s sake!

Love was impossible. Completely ridiculous.

But then again, why else would he have brought up the subject of falling in love at all if he wasn’t talking about me?
 

It wasn’t possible that I could have totally misread him back then, was it?
  
I hadn’t been that clueless. I know I hadn’t.

It wasn’t as if I was Molly Ringwald’s character in
Pretty in Pink
and he was Ducky - except less nerdy, of course - was it?

But then again...what if I was?

I started to say something that was coming out like, “Uh, so, um…” when he said, “It completely knocked me out for a couple of years.”

My heart started racing and somewhere in my scrambled brain I managed to form words. “Did you ever tell her?”

He half smiled in a sort of serious way. “I always thought she knew.”

Not only was there no saliva in my mouth, but there was no moisture left on my lips either. No use licking them with a dry tongue.

I noticed him focus on my lips right at that moment when my tongue peeked out and suddenly I got mad.

How dare he drop into my life with shit like this from out of nowhere?
 

Okay, clearly I had to face up to the fact that I read him totally wrong three years ago. Maybe I was too wrapped up in myself back then to see that he wanted more from me than I was giving him. But hey, maybe he should have just gotten up the nerve to tell me how he felt and we could have dealt with it in real time, not years later.

I burst out with, “Are you talking about me, Brian?”

Almost before I realized it, he was up from his chair and out the front door of the coffee shop. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. Seemed like I should at least have seen it coming, don’t you think?

I sat there in a daze for a few seconds and then I thought what the hell; I’d better get to the bottom of this. So I got up and chased him out the door.

Close on his heels I said, “So now you’re just going to run away from me?”

He turned his head to look at me for a moment and then went back to fumble with his key. “You didn’t even know, so what does it matter?”

I lightly touched his arm. “I know now.” He spun around as if I had burned him. “Maybe we should talk about it?”

In the blink of an eye, I was pressed between the wall and his body and we were kissing like, well, long lost lovers, hungry for each other after too long.

It happened just like that Celine Dion song where she sings, “It’s all coming back to me now.” You know, with kiss like this and touches like that.

You don't listen to Celine, do you?

Me neither.

Really.

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that no one else had ever touched me just right like he did. There really was something magical that happened when we touched.

“Please,” he said as we came up for air. “I need to be with you.”

We hurried, holding hands, to my apartment. And as I unlocked the door and we were inside, we started ripping off our clothes heedlessly. I hoped Diane wasn’t going to be home for the next couple of hours, or she was bound to be in for a surprise.

* * *

Later, after the clothes had come off, and the sheets were tangled, and we were panting beside each other in post-orgasmic glows, I found myself looking into his blue eyes wondering what I should say to him. Would, “Thanks for taking my virginity,” be okay?
 
Or what about, “Please lick me between my legs again?”

But he didn’t give me a chance to make a fool out of myself. Instead, he spoke first. “We’re soul mates,” he said, and I didn’t think about it, I just nodded.

Something about that felt so right all of a sudden. It was as if I had been searching for my partner for so long, and now, he had found me.

There on my bed it didn’t matter that I had misunderstood him so many years ago. It didn’t matter that it had never once occurred to me, until we were naked and panting, that Brian was the one for me. All that mattered was the taste of him on my lips and the feel of him in my body. It was so right, so easy.

Finally, I had lost my virginity. I had just turned the corner from girl to woman.

That evening, I lay on his shoulder on my bed, listening to his breathing, and thought about how perfect my life had just become.

* * *

We stayed in bed for the rest of the day and it wasn't hard at all to convince myself that he was everything I ever wanted in a guy. Cute, funny, sensitive. But the thing about Brian that really floored me was how deep he seemed.

And how he really seemed to care about every single word that came out of my mouth.

I felt like I could have talked to Brian about anything, and I basically spilled my guts on everything from the story of how Seth was trying to get the nerve up to officially come out of the closet with his parents, to how I was sometimes jealous of Diane for being so incredibly beautiful, to how much I loved being on the radio.

Well, truthfully, he didn’t sound that impressed with my radio gig, but how could I blame him for that? I still remembered my awful reaction when Bill had asked me to come with him to the studio. Once Brian heard a couple of my shows, he would see how wonderful talk radio was.

The next morning he had an 8 a.m. class at the business school, so at 7 a.m. we took a shower together and made love again.

I was plopped down on the couch, staring blankly into space when Diane peeked her head out from her bedroom down the hall. When she saw the coast was clear, she ran into the living room.

“You screwed someone’s brains out all night, didn’t you?” she asked gleefully.

I looked up at her, a permanent smile etched into my face. “I sure did.”

“Oh my god.” She practically sat on my lap, and curled her French manicured toes up under herself on the couch. “Who is he? How’d you meet?”

“Do you remember Brian?”

She scrunched her face up. “From the end of freshman year? The guy who gave you the Heimlich and you hurled chicken across the room.”

“That’s the guy,” I said. “And thanks for the memory. God forbid I ever manage to forget how embarrassing that was.”

“But I didn’t even think you thought he was all that cute back then.”

“True.” I shrugged, even as I mentally relived the wondrous night we’d had together and got a really goofy look on my face. “But a lot of things can change in three years.”

“So, he’s changed?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Well, maybe it’s not that he’s changed so much. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not the innocent little girl who was dating him before.”

I blinked hard a couple of times and realized that I had hit on what the difference was.

Me
. I was different.

“Anyway,” I said, turning to her with all of the juicy details, “he bumped into me on campus and told me he was in love with me. He says we’re soul mates.”

“He what?” she exclaimed, nearly knocking me onto the floor.

“We bumped into each other, ‘cause he’s getting his MBA now, and he asked me to coffee, so I went, but then all of sudden he was like, ‘I used to love this girl but she never knew it,’ and I was like, ‘Who me?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah you.’”

Diane sighed and snuggled her head onto my shoulders. “That is the most romantic story I’ve ever heard.” Then she thought about it and corrected herself. “Actually, your real life is almost as good as the story I was reading last night about how Lady Withers and the dragon-slayer made passionate love after being on the run from her evil step-father.”

“Tell me about it.” I was in complete agreement with her assessment of the situation. Finally, I had found real romance.

Then, from out of the blue she said, “I, uh, also met someone too last night.”

I immediately wondered why she sounded so hesitant about it. Diane was definitely not the hesitant type.

“Oh no, not another one of your perfect assholes,” I groaned.

She bit her lip, which was another weird giveaway to how confused she was. Diane never fidgeted, or blushed, or chewed on body parts. But here she was, doing all of the above. “Maybe he is...” she began.

I sat up straighter. “But maybe he’s not?”

She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“Is he a doctor?”

“No.”

“Lawyer?”

“No.”

I nodded sagely. “Independently wealthy?”

Diane took a deep breath and said, “He’s in construction.”

“Construction?” I said, confused by what she meant for just a second until it dawned on me. “Oh, you mean he runs a construction firm. Great business to be in. He must be loaded.”

Diane shook her head and snapped, “No, you idiot, he doesn’t own the firm. He’s just...he’s just a carpenter.”

I didn’t mean to look as shocked as I did, but dating a carpenter was quite possibly the most out of character thing Diane had ever done.

Ever.

“Wow,” I said. Realizing that I wasn’t being the supportive best friend I was supposed to be I added, “Cool.” But that wasn’t good enough either, so I said, “He must have some awesome arm muscles, huh?”

Ah ha! I hit it with that one, because Diane smiled and got a really dreaming look. “Oh yeah. He does.”

Seth walked in just then, using the key we had made for him when we moved in three years ago. “Hello ladies. I’ve got mochas for everyone.”

I immediately noticed that everything about Seth’s face was bright and full of joy. He didn’t make me wonder for long, because the minute he sat down he said, “I’m in love.”

“Wow, that’s amazing,” I said. “With who?”