Free Loner by Teddy Wayne Page A

can use this.”
    In the dark, I didn’t know what it was or what its utility would be.
    â€œIt’s lotion,” she clarified. “Don’t guys do that? On themselves?”
    I took off my boxers and applied the lotion to my erection as I straddled her lower body. With my left hand on her breast, my right took care of myself. I’d never done this in the presence of anyone, but it felt oddly natural.
    Then she did something that surprised me: she rubbed under her shorts, her eyes shut, her breaths quickening. As she continued to worry her clitoris, I stayed silent until my denouement, when I startled myself with a squelched grunt. The seed that had been buried in innumerable shrouds of Kleenex now, for once, ended up on another human being.
    Sara kept going until her own climax, a small affair that seized up her core muscles before releasing them like a bout of pleasurable indigestion. She reached on top of her bedside table for the white T-shirt she’d worn that day and mopped up her stomach and rib cage. Dropping it on the floor, she put her RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW ! shirt back on, then curled her back against my chest. I slung an arm around her.
    â€œConfession,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”
    I didn’t say anything, just breathed on her neck.
    â€œHave you?” she asked.
    â€œMmhuh,” I said.
    Her heartbeat was palpable to my cradling arm. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re not intimidated by my extensive erotic record.”
    A humble, self-deprecating remark that, a couple of weeks earlier, would have made me banter back with wordplay, maybe compel me to recant my statement and tell her the truth. But now, after I’d captured you pre- and post-shower, Sara’s inexperience only reminded me that we were two virgins and that you were adventuring elsewhere on campus. People like you didn’t mutually masturbate—you had sex. No, even that was putting too chaste a spin on it. You fucked.
    Citore drocer, I thought.
    â€œThat’s all right,” I said, offering neither any real assurance nor a lighthearted follow-up to put her at ease. My arm remained around her, but it suddenly felt like it wasn’t mine anymore, a prosthetic limb.
    Another silence as her wheels turned for the phrasing of her next question. “Did you have a girlfriend in high school?”
    â€œHeidi,” I answered.
    â€œWhen were you together?”
    â€œTenth grade on.”
    â€œWhen’d you break up?”
    â€œThis summer,” I said. “She wanted to stay together for college. I didn’t.”
    Sara processed that revelation for some time. “What was she like?”
    â€œShe was nice.”
    â€œWas she pretty?”
    â€œWell, she was the lead in most plays. I guess that says something.”
    â€œWho’s prettier, me or her?” Sara asked, then quickly laughed. “Just kidding.”
    I yawned loudly. “I’m actually kind of tired. Mind if we go to sleep?”
    â€œOf course,” she said.
    As I dozed off to the white-noise machine, I stroked Sara’s arm, mentally elongating it until it reached your lithe proportions.

    The one way to guarantee I sat by you in Prufrock would be to wait for you to enter the room first, tricky to engineer, since you were consistently late to class. The next Tuesday I stood outside the door in Harvard Hall, pecking at my phone. As the students trickled in and you still hadn’t shown, I grew anxious; I’d yet to be tardy for any classes, and though they didn’t take attendance at the lectures, I didn’t want to blemish my self-monitored perfect record.
    When I heard, through the door, Samuelson begin his lecture, I gave myself a deadline: three more minutes.
    Five minutes later I was about to go in, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I stole a look down the hallway to confirm it was you, pocketed my phone