I couldn’t look at him, though, or think of who was saying these things, whose hands were touching me. I dreaded when he asked me how I felt about him, asked why I didn’t return his compliments. I had a difficult time not laughing when he told me how he felt. He was so awkward. So unreal and different from anything I had heard or could even imagine him thinking. I had forgotten that I really viewed him as a eunuch, as one who didn’t feel those things. I told him I didn’t know how. Didn’t know how to lie, is more like it. At least I still had some integrity left?

One night we watched another movie. Brad Pitt, some beautiful woman teaching him how to kiss, how to love. I never wanted to watch that movie in the first place. Cheesy, romantic chick flick crap I thought. But watching that with someone else sitting next to you, well, it changes the whole thing.

The next evening as I was studying for an exam, he said he needed to ask me something. He looked embarrassed. I knew he meant something about the evening before. There was something I saw in his eyes then but was afraid of, of knowing and admitting. His inability to find the words surprised and bothered him. Finally, he blurted it out.

“Last night you looked as though you wanted me to kiss you.”

“Really. I didn’t realize one could look that way.” I said, after my hated blushing routine subsided. “What stopped you?”

I knew why. That night I had told him it was weird thinking of him kissing someone. I remembered he told me at the café that kissing would be what made us a couple, which we agreed we weren’t.

He voiced my thoughts. I half kicked myself, half thanked myself, for saying what I did. At least my curiosity didn’t pull me to doing something I would sincerely regret, even though I still wondered…

Later, with the lights out, a basketball game for white noise, he did kiss me. Just a quick kiss on my lips.

‘That wasn’t all it’s cut out to be’, I thought, consciously forcing myself not to wipe off my mouth with the back of my hand. I turned my attention back to the game for a few more minutes before our incredibly overlong and lingering goodbye.

Things carried on like that for a couple weeks. It was broken up by more movies with friends at his house, with Jeff and his girlfriend, Marie, constantly physical, making anything he and I did pale in comparison. He and Jeff would sit on the couch. Marie and I would sit on their laps. I felt like I was back in a high school sitcom, the sitcoms I would laugh about for their foolish falsehood. His arms were immediately around me, his fingers slightly lifting the edge of my shirt so he could run them against my warm flesh.

It stopped creating any different or new sensations in me. But I needed what it offered. That's why I didn’t say to stop. I didn’t say we were compromising. He wouldn’t, of course. He saw an opportunity and took it. So did I. I saw the opportunity to gain some experience, however minimal it probably appears to most people, with someone I trusted not to laugh at my naivety, not to share trumped up escapades with his friends. I wonder, now, why I thought I could trust him. I wonder why I shared anything with him at all.

Eventually we would lie down on the floor or on the mattress that he would pull into his room as we would watch DVDs, movies, play video games. Anything was an excuse; as long as we had one, a justification, everything was fine. Nothing went further than his hands on my back, my personal bubble was shattered…but slowly rebuilding.

Yes, my conscience beat through the hormones and pheromones. I realized I did this for the experience and I realized I didn’t want it anymore, I couldn’t continue using him in that way. I couldn’t continue feeling as though he used me, used me because he saw an opportunity to have the pseudo girlfriend he hadn’t had in two years. I didn’t want to let myself think anything more of him, either. I knew nothing could carry on between us. I didn’t like the black hole my solitude became. I couldn’t justify it. I just couldn’t.

I wrote him, he praised my eloquence, he told me he could never write as well as I. He told me he didn’t know how to be creative. I tried to find the creativity inside of him, to draw it out. But he was right. Nothing was new. Nothing was spontaneous. I didn’t want to carry things further physically; only he had nothing more to offer. I remembered why things had never worked before. Words he said, attitudes, ideas of his, grated against the inner core of who I was. I didn’t say this to him, though. He told me constantly how Jeff was ignoring him, giving up his best friend just for a girl. He told me if he ever had kids, he didn’t want girls. I ignored him and further discounted anything he had to say.

I stopped sharing as many of my thoughts with him. He didn’t really appreciate them, anyway, he didn’t understand my ideas, my passions. How could a passionless person understand the slightest hint of passion, of being driven? How could I ever have aligned myself with one who lacked passion? I still can’t understand how I succeeded in deceiving even myself into the belief that he understood me. Appreciated, sure, but understood, definitely not.

I came home one night, pensive, wondering about the situation in which I found myself. I went to bed. Sleep wouldn’t grace my eyes, wouldn’t slow my thoughts, wouldn’t silence the words in my head. All I could do was write. So write I did and was surprised and relieved by what I saw on the pages I filled.

The next evening I stopped his hand as he placed it around my waist. He wondered what was wrong. The next day I emailed him. I told him. I said I wanted things back to how they were. I wanted to cut the physical. Cut the touching. I didn’t tell him I had cut the emotional and mental intimacy already.

So he cut off everything. All communication. Marie asked me what was going on. I told her that apparently he felt that if I couldn’t pretend to be his girlfriend, then I couldn’t be his friend. She was relieved, she didn’t like him anyway. She told me that she and Jeff were talking about him the other day, saying he wasn’t ready for a girlfriend, but that at least if he had to have one, then I would be the best one for him. I acknowledged that he wasn’t ready for a girlfriend. I told her that for the last couple of weeks I kept remembering why we had never dated before. I told her I didn’t know why I thought things would be different now.

He was engrossed in everything but his friendships. No one saw him. He didn’t want to be with Jeff or Marie because he was jealous of her. He, who wanted to be married, settled down, didn’t, wouldn’t recognize this in Jeff and Marie. He told me one night, before he stopped talking to me, that he always thought he would be the first of his group of guy friends to have a girlfriend, to be married. We only saw each other out of necessity. He still needed to be with Jeff, his only security and source of entertainment. He didn’t meet new people. Marie and I were friends; Jeff and I were friends. He was only in my company when he couldn’t get around it. He started hanging around with Sarah again.

But I won. But I lost. I won the man. Proved I could. I lost my integrity. Small things, I know, but firsts.

It has been nearly three months since I sent him the email. I still am repulsed by the idea of kissing him. He hugged me a week ago. Apparently things are fine again. I pulled away from the hug quickly, making sure I only barely touched my body against his.

He doesn’t call anymore. He used to call every night, at any hour, no matter how late it was or whether I wanted to sleep and not hear all his woes.

He called…once…right as I was going to bed. He talked for three hours, rarely giving me time to interject or share anything of my own. At least he said why he had stopped communicating with me. Apparently I was supposed to call him but never did. He thought I didn’t care. The truth was, I did call. I did care, I wasn’t so callous as to not care for him as a person. He forgot that whenever I called, he would have something else that needed to be done right then.

So I stopped calling. I said out loud in my empty room that if he wanted a friendship, he could go find one; I wasn’t going to waste my time and emotional energy on him. He said he had many things to sort out and assumed I would call when I could coherently tell him what was going on. He never did have the patience to hear me talk things through. I wasn’t logical enough for him. Yeah, well who needs his logic when you ignore the emotion that makes you human.

He said, at the end of the phone call, “It was good talking to you again.”

I replied listlessly, without much conviction, “Yeah. I’ll talk to you later.”

My words must not have made it past my phone. They dropped with the connection as he hung up his phone. I replaced both things on my desk, amidst the general clutter.

He hasn’t called since. I refuse to call. It was only a game, a challenge, anyway. Right? It meant nothing and I won. I ended the game with an honest email.

Now I heard he hangs around with Sarah, again. Sarah, the one who cried to him on the phone when she heard I was at his house, the one who shot deadly glares my way, scaring the others. (Of course I only found that out through Jeff and his girlfriend. And I laughed, disbelieving.) He had asked me before how to tell Sarah ‘no’, that he wasn’t interested, how it could never be anything beyond friendship. I invested serious time and thought into my advice.

Now he seeks her out. Now, if he calls, he calls me to do favors for him.

I don’t like remembering my foolishness. My game.

But I won.

And now, this new one. Drops my words at the door mat, plays my computer, borrows my books and painkillers, eats and drinks from my fridge. In return? Do I receive? There is nothing to win. I don’t hope. I allow. And his hands rarely leave his pockets. Never extend toward me. And that makes me, what, happy? Sad? No. Indifferent.

I pull my shirt over my head and toss it onto the growing pile. Unsnapping my bra, I walk to my bed. Somehow, I slip into my old t-shirt and hospital scrubs. I turn on the radio, the British accented news fills my ears, drowning my thoughts until…sleep blissfully holds me in its arms, caressing and lightly kissing my neck.

The incense still burns, its trickles of smells and smoke creeping into the corners of my closet and into my dreams…erasing the scents and memories that still linger.

Continued.