Free Golden State by Stephanie Kegan Page A

FIRST MET , our senior year of college, Eric was a football player, and the only sport that interested me was conversation. All we had in common was an evening class and the rides home he offered me. He drove a boxy Toyota with a stick shift rising from the floor. I’d never seen anyone drive like him—as if his hands and feet were part of the mechanism of the car. I told him as much because it was true. But I wasn’t flirting. I had a boyfriend.
    There was an out-of-fashion directness to Eric’s good looks. Cut off his shaggy blond hair, and I could see him going off to World War I. I enjoyed looking at him, studying him the way a child might.
    Our class ended on a cold night in spring. On the ride home we were more serious than usual—we had the specter of graduation hanging over us. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do. Eric had Vietnam and the draft to worry about.
    He parked the car on the curb opposite the house on Dana Street where my boyfriend and I shared an apartment on the first floor. The lights were on in our place and I could see into the living room. Ron would be inside waiting for me, our dishes from the past week piled high in the sink, a pot with burned brown rice on the stove.
    “Have you ever thrown out a perfectly good pot just because you didn’t want to wash it?” I asked.
    “Sure,” Eric said easily. “Everybody has.”
    His arms and legs were long and solid. He wore a corduroy jacket over a blue work shirt tucked into jeans. I was twenty-two and thoughtit seemed like a grown-up outfit, as if he were already halfway out in the world. I huddled in a pea coat, jeans, and a sweater. He reached his arm across the back of the seat, and I had the crazy idea that he was thinking of kissing me. I looked over his shoulder and saw Ron walking through our living room. I hadn’t realized how easy it was to see inside our house from the street.
    Eric asked about the paper I’d written for our class. As he listened, he absently fingered a wayward strand of my hair. Then his lips were softly on mine, and I was kissing him back. He unbuttoned my coat, and I slipped out of it because I was warm and there was nothing wrong with taking off a coat. His hand went under my sweater, and I thought, this is why I stopped wearing a bra. Not because everyone else was doing it, but for this moment. So that a hand under my sweater caressing my breast would be as easy, as casual, as a kiss.
    Could Ron see us? No, we’d just be shadows in a car parked across the street.
    I could kiss this guy and it would be okay because I wasn’t ever going to see him again. I knew I should stop, but I thought, what’s the harm in a few more minutes?
    His hands were against my bare back, pulling me into him. Mine pressed into the corduroy of his jacket. I wanted to lose myself, to forget, just for a little while longer, but I couldn’t. “We have to stop,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.” What I did not say was that I had a boyfriend I lived with and that he was just behind the window across the street.
    “Too bad,” he said.
    I thanked him for the ride.
    “Good-bye,” he said, reaching to kiss me once again. I kissed him as if I never expected to see him again, which I didn’t. Then I ran from the car.
    I had learned something new about myself that night. I was the kind of girl who could kiss another guy practically under her boyfriend’s nose, and do it easily.
    I hesitated on the porch, knowing that Eric was watching me, and then I stepped inside. Ron was lying on the couch with a book. I looked out the window. With the lights on, all I could see was a large pane of darkness.
    * * *
    F IVE YEARS LATER , Eric and I happened to stand in line together for the same plane out of Oakland. We hadn’t seen each other since that night in the car. Ron was long gone. I’d just spent four years in a European adventure of housecleaning, babysitting, and hitchhiking that had landed me penniless and back at my