Michael and I were the perfect couple. We had a perfect relationship. Both my father, and my stepmother loved him, and so did I. Carmilla, and his sister, Ana, were even ‘blood sisters’. His parents only spoke of what a delight it was to have me around their home, and admired very much how sophisticated, and cultured I was. I would make the perfect daughter in law, they’d say jokingly.
Michael was a tall, toughly built, teenager when I met him. He had big brown eyes, and thick, brown, masculine eyebrows. There wasn’t the slightest feminine thing about him, when it came to his physical appearance. He liked to style his hair like Dane Cook, in his Vicious Circle routine. We loved to watch Dane Cook. He didn’t even mind the cussing that much.
He was fifteen when I met him, though I personally thought he was eighteen, maybe nineteen. Everyone thought he was older than he looked. He’d started to shave at the age of thirteen, and his voice had started changing at the age of twelve. His parents loved to tell me anecdotes of his childhood, something he detested.
He was a very imposing young man. Tough, serious, and somewhat mean-looking. His face had always reminded me of a fox for some reason. He had the features. And he had the most charming smile. I liked to call it his ‘Cheshire cat smile’.
Since the moment I’d met him, I’d been was hopelessly attracted to him, but never really done anything about it. Guys didn’t really interest me back then. I just liked to look at him in his soccer uniform when he played. He was the captain of the team.
He came to my school at around seventh grade, after having supposedly spent all his life, in a Catholic school. He’d just moved in from the east coast, a couple blocks from me, with his family. It wasn’t until tenth grade, that I really started talking to him, and it wasn’t until eleventh grade, that we started dating.
He wasn’t like the rest of my classmates, whom in all honesty, I didn’t get along with. I’d always been the outcast, the outsider. I didn’t even limit myself to idle prattle. I didn’t believe in “small talk”. Such a waste of the English language.
It was his egoless openness, and his literary mind, which I found most attractive. Since the moment I saw him, I’d said to myself ‘This guy’s really going to be someone in life’. He was ambitious, and competitive, though not in a threatening way. He was very passive, and mellow, for the most part. He had his feet on the ground, and he knew where he was going.
Ana would always come to my house, to hang out with Carmilla, and Michael would always drop by to check up on her, and pick her up. We’d greet each other casually, but never really exchanged more than a couple words, before moving on with our own business. Then on the last semester of tenth grade, our English Literature teacher sat us together, and that was when things clicked. We hit it off right away, and became inseparable. We had the same ambitions, the same goals. The same tastes in films, movies, music— everything.
It was his receptiveness, and his passion, I also found very attractive. We could talk about absolutely everything. Well, it took a while for me to loosen him up. He was very shy, and that was the reason he didn’t really talk to anyone outside the soccer team. I just laughed, when he confessed his timid nature. “ Jeez, no wonder you kept on neglecting those girls who kept on literally throwing themselves at you.” I said. He laughed nervously, still somewhat hesitant. He had the looks, and the personality, but he didn’t really know how to deal with women. Especially not women our age. They were too sexually awakened for him, and he had a hard time dealing with that. Even though I was probably the same as them, I didn’t flaunt it around the way they did.
He had the bad habit of just treating women like ‘another one of the guys’, or simply withdrawing, when things became awkward. It took me a while to break that. It was all a matter of getting accustomed. He was a gentleman, no doubt about it. His parents expected as much of him. He was a good little catholic boy, with a ‘bad-boy’ charm to him.
By eleventh grade, we’d grown so used to, and comfortable with each other, that I couldn’t really recall a time when we weren’t together. It was just so natural for us! We were a couple, though we were completely oblivious to it. In the eyes of everyone, we were basically married. We went to the movies, and everyone knew the drill— Samantha likes the middle, and Michael’s bound to sit next to her, and serve as a pillow, so sit anywhere beside the two seats in the center of the row.
Michael and I had a perfect relationship. We could talk about absolutely anything, and be perfectly fine with it. The word ‘taboo’ didn’t exist in our vocabulary. We told each other everything. We were that close. I could go ahead and discuss my artistic preference for women, and my infatuation with androgyny, and he would tell me whatever was on his mind at the moment in such a way, that regardless of what he said, his words never hurt me, or made me bitter.
One night, while watching Pride and Prejudice (in spite of being a chick-flick, mind you), I felt like kissing him, so I did. We were lying on his bed, and I was curled up into a ball against him, arms wrapped around his chest, nuzzled against his neck. He was falling asleep.
The moment I pressed myself against him, and kissed him, he stared at me, brown eyes opened wide, in sheer shock. There was no resistance. He didn’t know how to react. He was paralyzed. I could feel his heart beat increase considerably, and there was an awkward silence. At that very instant, when our lips locked for those brief, yet seemingly endless moments, something stirred inside of me, that didn’t really give me a swoon, but gave me more of the equivalent of that sensation you feel when you stand up too quickly, after having been sitting, or laying down for a long while.
I pulled away immediately, though his arms were loosely wrapped around my waist. I didn’t know what to say, so I just chuckled gawkily, in order to kill the silence, and made some utterly stupid comment about how much I hated Lydia, and Mrs. Bennet because of their lack of common sense.
The movie kept running, and he just kept staring at me. Something had clicked, and I had officially tainted him. It had all been casual, oblivious dating until that moment, when I somewhat hid my face in shame for what I’d done, and he lifted my chin, and kissed me back. I’d corrupted an innocent catholic schoolboy, and his sister had come barging into the room with Carmilla, asking whether or not I’d be staying for dinner.
I quickly propped myself up from the bed, and grabbed my things. “No, I have something I need to finish at home.” I lied. “I’ll drive you” Michael said, getting up, stopping the film, and grabbing his keys from the nightstand. “Psh.. no.. there’s no need to. I’ll just walk, or whatever.” I said anxiously, as I waved goodbye, jumped out his bedroom window onto the yard, past the fence, and ran home.
