Free If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go by Judy Chicurel

a point. That night that me and Bennie had walked down to the abandoned lifeguard chair, I was after experience; seeing if I could feel something for another guy even while I was so into Luke. We’d climbed up on the chair and had gotten all cozy and I was actually a little turned on. Bennie had a great body for a junkie, and those beautiful eyes. But it turned out he hadn’t gotten his stash until late in theevening, so he’d taken his nightly dosage of ludes later than usual, and as a result, it was like his tongue went to sleep in my mouth. I’d left him sprawled and snoring in the moonlight, alerted Voodoo and Billy so they could find him and carry him to his aunt’s house on Sister Street, and caught the last bus home. By the time I was in my room smoking my last cigarette before going to sleep, I was more relieved than anything else.
    “Some guys are always going to go for that pure-as-the-driven-snow stuff,” Mitch was saying. “But there are others, more enlightened, shall we say, who prefer someone knows her way around the sheets just a little.” He took another cigarette from the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket, lit it, and exhaled, long and slow. The smoke mingled with the dusty sunlight slanting through the porthole windows behind the bar. “Six of one, half dozen of the other, really,” he said, squinting through the smoke. “But Goddamn, where do all these myths come from? Like women being the weaker sex. Bah! That’s a good one. Think the Pill liberated you, and that had nothing to do with it.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and pointed it toward me, the ashes falling on the bar. “Women always got the power, they just don’t know how to use it. Too ready to hand over the reins to any asshole with a pecker. Shit, all the scars I carry inside me—and a few on the outside, come to think of it—I got from a woman. Lot of truth to that old saying, ‘One hair off a pussy can pull a freight train.’” He raised his glass and drained it. I stared into Mitch’s face. His eyes still looked okay. I was about to ask another question, but then he said, “Besides, virginity is the least of your problems with that cat—what’s his name again?”
    “Luke?” I asked.
    “Yeah, him,” Mitch said. “I don’t know, darlin’. You might want to shine it on with that enterprise, maybe reconsider.”
    I felt cold inside, like a piece of ice was rubbing against my bones. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
    Mitch shrugged. “At the very least, you got to give it time,” he said. “He’s back, what? A month, maybe?”
    “How much time?” I asked, and even I could hear the anxiety in my voice.
    Mitch looked at me sharply. “What’s the rush?”
    “No rush,” I said. “It’s just that—” I closed up. I didn’t want to tell him about the years of waiting, the years of watching Luke like I was watching a movie over and over, hoping the ending would be different.
    “Listen, things happen over there,” Mitch said. His voice dipped a shade, as though something was weighing it down. “War does things to a cat.”
    “Like what things?” I asked. “I mean, I know it must have been horrible, but—”
    “Darlin’,” Mitch said gently, “you’re a beautiful kid, but you don’t know shit. Now, don’t take it personally. Because neither does anyone else who hasn’t had the pleasure.”
    “I read the papers,” I said, though this was only partially true. “And I saw on TV—”
    “Doesn’t mean shit,” he said. “Don’t mean shit to a tree. There’s shit over there, is what I’m saying. Bad shit. Scary shit. And the Vietcong are the least of it. At least you know they’re the enemy.” Mitch drank long and greedily. “Minefields everywhere you look. Tiny little whores, so beautiful they could make your heart stop, packing razor blades. Vietnamese birth control, cut you right where it hurts. Had a buddy killed one of ’em for what she done to him.”
    I shuddered just