Free I Wish I Had a Red Dress by Pearl Cleage

could without removing a single article of clothing. A week later, I arrived a Baldwin High, lonely, heartbroken and convinced the best part of my life was over. Then I met Mitch and realized how wrong a person could be.
    I opened the big double doors to the boys’ gym and Tupac Shakur’s voice brought me up short with its unique combination of rage and defiance and love and confusion and a sensuality sospecifically black and male that he still stands alone, all these years after the tragedy of his death.
    At the far end of the room, Nate was doing sit-ups on an incline bench with his hands behind his head. He was wearing black sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt that said pistons on the back and, even at this distance, gave me an unobstructed view of his huge arms and gigantic shoulders. From where I was standing, they looked to be sculpted of dark mahogany. Still unaware of my presence, he stood up and stretched to his full height. His massive size, plus the macho music and the smell of generations of young male bodies, bathed in sweat and ruled by raging hormones, joined forces to make me feel like a female interloper in an environment geared to another sensibility altogether.
    That’s when he turned around and saw me, waved and headed in my direction, stopping to turn down the boom box so Tupac was a whisper not a shout, and we could greet each other without shouting.
    “Hey,” he said, smiling, seeming to get bigger and bigger the closer he got until I realized I actually had to look up if I didn’t want to spend our conversation gazing at his nipple line. “How long have you been here?”
    “I just walked in,” I said. “I didn’t want to stop you. . . .”
    Up close, he was so beautiful and alive that I wanted to touch his skin, stroke his shoulders, tug that earring in his ear. I could practically feel the heat coming off of him in waves. How old was he anyway? If I could establish once and for all that he was out of the range of age acceptability, maybe I could stop this involuntary lusting after him before it got completely out of hand.
    “I was almost finished,” he said, wiping the sweat off hisforehead with a massive forearm. “Takes a little longer to keep everything together once you get past forty.”
    Past forty? Well, that eliminates the old enough to be his mother defense. I was on my own, staring temptation in the face, or, more accurately, in the chest.
    “Of course, you don’t know anything about that,” he said, endearing himself to me forever, even if he was teasing, maybe flirting just a little.
    “Right,” I said, laughing and handing him an envelope that contained the keys, the alarm codes and directions to the house. “That’s everything.”
    “Great,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go by there on my way home tonight.” He grimaced slightly.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” he shook his head ruefully. “I don’t want to start thinking of the Motel 6 as home.”
    I nodded sympathetically. “I understand. It’s kind of like thinking of McDonald’s as dinner.”
    “Exactly!” He looked pleased that I understood.
    “I think you’ll like this house.”
    “Have you been in it?”
    He still doesn’t understand how small this town is.
    “The owners are friends of mine.”
    “How tall are the ceilings?”
    I shrugged, trying to remember. “Just regular, I guess. About like Sister and Bill’s.”
    He looked relieved. “Good. I looked at a place when I first got here and I swear the ceiling was less than eight feet. I felt like it was resting on top of my head.”
    Here was my opening. He’d brought it up without any prompting from me, so a follow-up comment was not out of line.
    “How tall are you?”
    “Six eight.”
    Why did that make me blush? Maybe because he was standing there, sweating and looking so effortlessly sexy that my brain couldn’t help going back to the question we would have had to ask each other if he had shown up when we were sixteen-year-old