Page 28 of Guy's Girl
His face darkened.
In the six weeks that followed, the two fought more than they had in all the previous year combined. She went around andaround on what to do, decided to go through with it, took it back, and then, one rainy afternoon beside the soccer field, they broke up.
“Were you in love?” Adrian asks.
Were they in love? For a long time, Ginny thought so. That first year—she remembers long walks by Lake Michigan, making out in the spiny grass of the dunes; long summer days in the pool in his backyard, sneaking beers from his dad’s fridge; long summer nights atop his shoulders at Lollapalooza, body caked with glitter, fake ID tucked into the pocket of her cutoffs.
“You’re not like other girls, Ginny,” he used to tell her. “You’re magic.”
When Andy dumped her, Ginny spent an entire weekend in bed. She told her brothers she was sick. She told her guy friends she needed time. Then she set her phone on the bedside table and stared at it for forty-eight hours straight, waiting to see Andy’s name appear.
It never did.
With every hour that passed, Ginny’s depression deepened. She felt like a hole was slowly widening in her chest. Like a hole was slowly widening in her life.
I love him, she realized.I always loved him.
Sunday night, she picked up her phone and sent him a message.
GINNY:We need to talk
ANDY:When?
GINNY:Now
Ginny stole her parents’ Volvo and drove to his house. She snuck into his basement through the door in the garage. Ginny motioned him over to the closet, afraid his parents would walk down.
Inside, a single light bulb hung from a string on the ceiling. Whiskey and cigars lined the shelves.
“Well?” Andy asked.
Ginny inhaled. “I want to have sex with you.”
“What?”
“I want to have sex,” she repeated. “With you.”
So they did. She let him have clunky, unpolished sex with her in the broom closet where his dad kept the whiskey and cigars.
She thinks back to that night. The way her spine scraped up against the shelves. The way it drew blood, leaving long red streaks that eventually turned to scars. Ginny never told him she was in pain. She never evennoticed. Because there was another pain, stronger, more acute, more alien, happening between her legs.
It went on like this for months. Ginny would sneak over to his house, they would have sex, and then she would leave. Whenever she brought up the idea of them getting back together, he said he wasn’t ready.
It was strange, stealing like a thief into a home in which she had, for so long, entered as a welcome guest. On the way there, knowing that she would soon be in his arms, the hole in her chest would fill in with a porous, temporary putty. On the way home, it all spilled back out. She cried. She hated herself. But she couldn’t stop. She loved him. And because she loved him, she needed to be around him, and sex was the only way she could.
“No,” she says finally, answering Adrian’s question. “No, that wasn’t love. I thought it was, at the time, but now...”
Adrian lets her trail off. Lets the silence fill in the rest.
***
They spend two hours on that bench. Ginny peppers Adrian with question after question, knee jiggling up and down as she listens to his responses. The coffee has her blood rushing at double its normal pace. Or maybe it’s simply how near Adrian is to her. Barely an inch separates their legs, and that inch feels pregnant with buzzing electricity, begging her to close it entirely.
Eventually, Adrian turns the spotlight onto Ginny. “What were the summers like in Michigan?” he asks. “Similar to Indiana?”
Ginny smiles. There’s nothing quite like Michigan in the summertime. The drone of cicadas. The flash of fireflies. The air, obese with humidity, having sucked the Great Lakes up like soda through a straw. During the summers, Ginny and her brothers loaded the whole neighborhood into the back of their Dodge Ram and trucked out to one of Lake Huron’s sandy beaches. On the rare occasion that Heather joined them, she always took shotgun, forcing Ginny, Willie, and Crash to squeeze into the Ram’s back seat. They brought footballs and bags of Franzia rosé. Everyone got drunk; everyone played in the waves. Ginny wore purple bikinis. Most boys knew that she was off-limits; those who didn’t learned their lesson quickly. Despite being both the youngest and smallest of the group, Crash was rather good with his fists.
Ginny does her best to explain all this to Adrian. He listens intently, eyes screwed up into little slits. When she finishes, he says, “Tell me more about your brothers.”
