I met her in freshman English, almost three years ago. She was late then, too. There had been two empty seats in the classroom that day: one about three feet from the door, next to some guy who looked like he just stepped out of an Abercrombie ad, and one next to me by the windows. She scanned the room and flashed me a quick grin, and I knew she’d be taking the seat next to mine. I moved my bag out of the way for her and tried to pretend I didn’t think she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
“I’m Jenna,” she whispered to me. When she leaned down to put her backpack on the floor, her hair brushed my knee, and I caught the scent of vanilla mixed with something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Paul,” I whispered back.
Outside. She smelled like a field outside on a sunny day.
She smiled at me, put a finger to her lips. The professor was glaring at us from the front of the room while he passed out copies of the syllabus.
A minute later, Jenna lobbed a crumpled piece of paper onto the corner of my desk. I looked at her and raised an eyebrow, which she later confessed had been extremely impressive.
It was a gum wrapper. She didn’t watch as I unfolded it or read the note that was written in pencil on the inside. “You have a nice smile,” it said.
“So do you,” I whispered back.
She didn’t see me put the note in my pocket that day. She’d laugh at me if she knew that I still carry it around, but I have no intention of telling her. I open my wallet to pull it out of the pocket behind my driver’s license, like I always do while sitting around waiting for her to show up, when she plops down on the couch.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, breathless. There’s a leaf in her hair.
“There’s a leaf in your hair,” I tell her. “And my coffee is cold.”
She looks confused, puts a hand to the side of her head. “It’s windy,” she tells me. She puts the leaf on my knee. “And you should have finished your coffee by now, kiddo. Don’t blame it on me!”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Didn’t you tell me last time this happened that you were going to come five minutes later than the time you told me to be here because you’re tired of waiting for me?” she asks, wriggling out of her brown corduroy jacket.
“That sounds like something I might say.”
“So what happened?”
“I forgot.”
“I’m late, you’re forgetful—we’re even.” She winks.
“We do this like three times a week, Jenna. I’d think you’d have it figured out by now,” I tease.
“And I’ve been late for everything since you’ve known me. I’d think you’d have it figured out by now,” she says, throwing her scarf at me.
Her hair is sticking out strangely. I reach out and smooth it. Her hair always smells like it did that first day, a combination of outside and a hint of vanilla that lingers on my clothes after we’ve been together.
“Static electricity,” she says. She pulls an elastic band from around her wrist and holds it between her teeth as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail. “I can’t stand it. I’ve been getting shocks from doorknobs all day.”
I nod sympathetically.
“I want tea,” she says. “You want coffee?”
“I’d like hot coffee, if that’s what you mean,” I say, gesturing toward my half-empty mug. “That’s barely room temperature.”
“I reiterate, you should have finished your coffee already.” She stands. “However, since I’m feeling particularly magnanimous today, I will happily purchase a hot caffeinated beverage for you, Paul.” A pause. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Two conditions,” she corrects.
“We’ll see,” I say, but we both know I’ll agree to her demands. I always do.
“Number one, stop whining.”
I pretend to be offended. “Me? Whine? I would never.”
“Right. Condition two, come over tonight.”
I pretend to think it over, and she smacks me with a throw pillow after about three seconds. “Fine, fine,” I say finally. “I’ll think about coming over tonight.”
“And I’ll think about not spitting in your drink.”
She comes back a minute or two later with a fresh latte and a cup of Earl Grey. In the more than two years we’ve been coming here together, she’s never ordered anything but the Earl Grey, and I always get the latte. It’s our thing.
We have a lot of “things,” I guess. I think it’s inevitable when you spend as much time together as Jenna and I do. Between the two of us, we’ve been through eight failed relationships (seven were hers, one was mine), six roommates (for some reason mine keep transferring to other schools), and I don’t even know how many gallons of hot drinks.
I realize I’m staring at her as I do the math in my head, and she’s making horrible faces at me.
“It’s cold out,” I tell her. “What if you freeze that way?”
“I’m no biology major, but I really don’t think that could happen.”
“If it did, I’d have to pour a bucket of water over your head to defrost you,” I tell her.
She finds this amusing. “If my face freezes,” she says, trying to look serious, “you can pour a bucket of water over my head.”
“Awesome.”
“Shut up,” she says, trying not to smile.
“You love me,” I tell her matter-of-factly.
“That’s irrelevant.”
Tom, my roommate for the last three semesters, thinks it’s some kind of weird sexual tension that’s kept Jenna and me together all this time. He also thinks I’ve been holding out on him when it comes to details.
“You can’t tell me that you’ve been hanging out with this girl for three years and you haven’t even kissed her,” he complains.
“It’s not like that, man. We’re just friends.”
“Whatever, dude.”
I heave a sigh. We go through this regularly. “You know what happened last year. She’s not interested.”
“If she would freak out that much over you suggesting something more than this fucked up we’re-just-friends shit you’ve been pulling for the past two and a half years, then she’s probably been thinking about it herself.”
He has a point. Jenna shuts down when people get too close. She’s gone through so many relationships in the time I’ve known her because she can’t handle it when the guy falls in love with her. She breaks up with him as soon as she feels herself losing control of the relationship. And she never wants to talk about it.
“Dude, you’re in love with her. You know it. I know it.” He rolls his eyes. “Hell, she probably knows it.”
“It’s not worth it. I don’t want to lose her.”
He looks at me hard. “What did you just say?”
“It’s not worth it?”
“Not that part, jackass. The part where you said you don’t want to lose her.”
“Yeah…”
“People don’t say that when they’re not in love, dude. You don’t want to lose her friendship, okay, maybe, but you don’t want to lose her? Come on, man, face it. You love her.”
I think about it sometimes, what it would be like if Jenna and I were a couple.
I asked her about it once.
“We are a couple,” she told me. “A couple of losers who drink way too much coffee.”
The way she said it, I knew she didn’t want me to push, but I did anyway.
“Come on, Jenna, you know what I mean.”
She gave me a fierce look. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you want to ruin everything?” She grabbed her bag and moved for the door.
I grabbed her arm. “Jenna, don’t do this.”
She glared at me with her jaw clenched.
“Don’t do this. Why do you do this every time we start to get close? Why can’t we just talk about the possibility—“
“There is no possibility. Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Because I don’t believe there’s no possibility. In fact, I think there’s a pretty good possibility because I think you feel the same way I do and I think you’ve been lying about it for the last year and a half. That’s why I can’t just let it go.”
“You don’t understand. You don’t know anything about this.” She shook my hand off her arm and stormed out of my room, slamming the door behind her.
I didn’t bring it up again. Things were weird for months after that, and I got scared. Tom was right. I didn’t want to lose her because I was in love with her. Okay, I’m still in love with her. I have been all along. Not that admitting it to myself makes it any easier. It makes it harder, in fact.
“Dude, why don’t you just move on?”
“Lay off, man.”
“No, I’m serious, Paul. You’re no Vin Diesel, but you’re not entirely unappealing. I’m sure you could find some girl who’d take you.” He emphasizes his point with an impressive burp and hands me a beer.
“You don’t know what she’s like.” I hate beer in a can, but there aren’t any bottles in the fridge, so I drink it anyway.
“Then tell me what the big attraction is, ’cause I don’t get it.”
“She’s just this…incredibly amazing person.”
He sighs, exasperated. “That clears everything up.”
“No, man, I mean, she’s beautiful and she’s smart and she’s funny and I can’t stop thinking about her. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since the day we met.”
“All she does is reject you, dude.”
“It’s not like that. She’s just scared of commitment or something.”
“Yeah, I heard about how she was engaged right before she came here and then he cheated on her and she called it off. I guess anyone who’d had that happen would be afraid of commitment.”
I choke on my Miller Light. “Where did you hear that?”
“That chick Amy I was hanging out with last weekend. The blonde?”
I nod.
“They went to high school together. When we saw you at the dining hall she commented on how surprised she was to see Jenna in a serious relationship after everything that happened. I corrected her of course, told her you weren’t getting any.”
“Are you making this up? ’Cause it’s not funny, man.”
“Well I didn’t really tell her you weren’t getting ass, dude, I just told her that you guys weren’t together.”
“No, no, the rest of it.”
“You didn’t know about that?” He’s amazed.
I shake my head. “I had no idea. I mean, it explains a lot, but I had no clue.”
“Sorry, man. I just figured you knew.” He looks at the beer in his hand, chugs what’s left, and throws the can into the trash bag on the back of the door. “You gonna talk to her about it?”
I’m stunned. “I don’t know. I don’t—what would I say? ‘So about that guy you never mentioned the three years we’ve been friends? Whatever happened with your disastrous and heartbreaking engagement?’”
“No, that probably wouldn’t be so good.”
We stare at The Simpsons for a good five minutes without talking, until a maxi pad commercial comes on.
“You okay, man?” Tom asks me, offering another beer.
I take the can automatically. “I’m not sure.”
“Look at it this way: at least you don’t have to take it personally anymore.” He grins at me.
I punch him in the bicep with my free hand. “Not helping, dude.”
Jenna has a single room and a big bed, so we always hang out at her place, curled up on her mountain of pillows. Tonight we’re talking about relationships again. Somehow that always happens when it gets late.
“Tell me about your first kiss,” she says, coming out of the bathroom in her pajamas—a pair of boxers (from one of her many ex-boyfriends no doubt) and one of my tee shirts. The irony is not lost on me.
“Didn’t we already go through this?” I sigh and turn off the television. What I really want to talk about is what Tom told me last night.
“Tell me again,” she says, crawling under the covers. It’s cold in her room tonight, and we’ve been curled up against the pillows with a blanket over us for the last hour or so watching sitcoms on Nick at Nite. That’s another thing we do. We both love Three’s Company, so we watch the reruns almost every night.
“Why don’t you tell me about your first kiss?” I ask. “You never tell me about your boyfriends, but I always have to tell you about my girlfriends.” I’ve told her my story half a dozen times if I’ve told her once. She thinks it’s cute that I kissed Erin Borney under the slide in eighth grade. “It’s my turn to laugh at you.”
“It’s too embarrassing.”
I don’t say a word, just look at her. If I wait long enough, she won’t be able to take it any more.
“Oh, fine,” she finally says. She sits up, the covers pooling around her waist. Her bare arms must be cold, because I can see goose bumps rising from her fair skin. “It was about a month after my fifteenth birthday. I met him—this sounds so dumb—on the Internet.”
I have to laugh. “Yeah, that does sound pretty dumb.”
She grabs one of her many pillows and brings it down soundly on my head. “Do you want to hear the story or not?” she asks, grinning.
“Okay, okay. I’m being quiet.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I’m starting to laugh again, but I put on a straight face to make her happy.
“Okay, so anyway, I’m fifteen, he’s almost seventeen. He takes the train down to visit for a weekend.”
“I bet your mom loved that.”
“Yeah, she was less than thrilled.” She rolls her eyes. “At any rate—don’t let me digress any more or we’ll be here all night—this kid comes down for the weekend, and the first thing he wants to do is watch Jurassic Park.”
“That’s romantic,” I interject jokingly.
“I thought you were being quiet.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
She sticks her tongue out at me before continuing. “So like halfway through the movie—we were curled up on my bed, much like this in fact—he leans over and kisses me.”
“You don’t say!”
She shoots me a dirty look, but I know she’s hiding one of those smiles I love.
“I was so nervous,” she says, looking right at me.
I’m suddenly a little nervous right now myself.
“I’d never kissed a boy. I thought it would be dizzying or heart-pounding or at least terribly, terribly romantic.”
She pauses and pushes her hair back. “It was not terribly romantic. It was terribly wet. He kissed like a St. Bernard.”
“Ouch. Poor guy.”
“Poor him?” She falls back into the mountain of pillows and pulls the sheets up. “Poor me! I’d been looking forward to that kiss practically my whole life. I was so disappointed. I couldn’t believe that was what sealed marriages in front of all the wedding guests.”
She readjusts the blankets, and I can see the tiny freckles on her wrist.
“I’d forgotten about him,” she tells me. She’s getting sleepy now. Her eyes are closed longer and longer each time she blinks.
“It’s funny how the things that seem so important at the time just fade out of our memories, isn’t it?”
She thinks about it, studying my face.
Any minute now will come the inevitable. She’s ready to go to sleep, and that means I’ll have to leave. I’ll go back to my room and I’ll lie in my bed smelling her scent—the scent that clings to my clothes and my skin so faint that it’s barely perceptible.
I sit up as I throw back the sheet and the blankets.
“Hey, you can—you don’t have to go.”
I look into her eyes the way she looked into mine before, and I nod.
“There are sweatpants in my bottom drawer,” she tells me. “They’re my dad’s. They should fit you.”
I change into the sweats and climb back into bed.
She rolls over so her back is to me and turns out the lamp clipped to the headboard. “I’m glad you’re here,” she tells me. She turns her head a little bit and looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “I really am.”
“Me too,” I say. I kiss her temple before I even realize I’ve done it.
She settles against my chest, and I can feel her heart beating faintly through her back as I put my arm over her. She falls asleep almost immediately, but I fight to stay awake a while longer. I breathe her in—not the scent of her on my tee shirt, but her.
