No Strings Read online

  No. There was no use thinking about it now. I wouldn’t go down that path just because Holly had been so cruel tonight.

  I was sitting with my knees bent to my chest, arms wrapped around them tightly, hugging them to me, chin resting on my knees as I watched the water. It was bright with the glow of the stars above, making the reservoir look like a silvery, metallic, rippling mass; a thick sheet that could cover my world and help me forget.

  Between the reservoir and the walking and running path that surrounded it there was a huge patch of grassy land that laid in between. People at school always called it “Klein Beach,” but since I had grown up visiting my grandparents on Cape Cod I always felt weird calling this fifteen foot stretch of grass a beach when I had laid on some of the most beautiful, sandy beaches in the country.

  God, why was I even thinking about Cape Cod? Why was I thinking about my date with—what was his name even? Randy? Richard? Ryan? Kyle?

  “Hey.”

  I turned my head, expecting to see Gabe striding toward me, but my eyes widened slightly for a moment when I saw Brody Galen walking toward me, down the path that led from the south end of campus to the reservoir, his fair skin and platinum blonde hair nearly glowing white in the moonlight.

  I didn’t even have the energy to feel shocked. I was drained and exhausted from the events of the evening. I was drained from how much I had dreaded going, how much Gabe had had to talk me into it and how much Talia had tried to talk me out of it. I was drained from how tense I had been since stepping foot into that house. I was drained from running all the way down here after I’d gotten away as quickly as I could. I was exhausted, so I turned back, away from Brody, putting my chin back on my knees and staring back out at the shining water.

  “Hey,” I replied, not wanting to be completely rude.

  Brody sat down next to me, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankle as he leaned back on his hands. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tilt his head back and gaze up at the sky.

  Neither of us said anything. I was too tired and embarrassed and fed up and bemused as to why Brody was sitting out here next to me, and I imagined that Brody probably couldn’t quite find the right words to say.

  “Hey, sorry my friend outed your virginity in front of my entire group of friends.”

  “Hey, sorry you’re a virgin.”

  “Hey, wanna talk about how you’ve wasted every chance you’ve had to lose your virginity and now you’re twenty-two, a senior in college, and can’t even tell one story about a weird place that you’ve had sex?”

  I shook my head just as a small bird glided against the surface of the water at the same time a strong wind rushed through the trees and across the water, causing it to spray in our direction. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back a bit, the mist and the wind feeling almost spiritual as it washed over me. I could hear the rustling of the trees as the wind traveled—the leaves rustling against each other—and all of it combined to make me feel marginally better.

  And I could even admit that maybe, perhaps, Brody’s presence next to me made me feel better as well.

  “Don’t worry about Holly,” Brody said after long moments of silence.

  I craned my head slightly to look at him, only to see that his head was still tilted back and his eyes were closed as if he were basking in sunlight. I smiled a bit in spite of myself, just for a moment, and turned back to face the water.

  I didn’t say anything.

  It wasn’t like I was worried about what Holly had said. Not really. I wasn’t even really worried that people knew. Because, quite frankly, it wasn’t their business, and Holly had no right to make me feel stupid or small for something that I had no reason to feel stupid or small over. But Holly had intentionally tried to embarrass me, intentionally tried to cut me down in a group full of people, and of course it had gotten under my skin. Of course it had. She’d laughed at me in front of everyone—“I can’t believe you’re a virgin, Cat!” But it hadn’t even been that. The real thing that kept bothering me, the thing that I kept coming back to, was that that simple question had forced me to examine things I in no way wanted to examine.

  “I just don’t know why she had to do that,” I said quietly, staring out at the reservoir, trying to sort out my thoughts. “I don’t know why she had to… make it into this thing, you know?”

  “I know.”

  I looked at him over my shoulder and felt a slight swoop in my stomach when I saw that he had opened his eyes and was regarding me, head slightly tilted to the side. I looked away quickly, unable to meet his eyes.

  We fell into silence again, and I sat staring at the reservoir, feeling the nerves and the anger curling in my stomach, slowly building up more and more as the silence and the weight in between us expanded.

  And then, suddenly, I laughed. I burst with laughter, tears starting to form in my eyes, from the laughter or from the anxiety I didn’t know, as I continued to laugh, most likely at just the shear absurdity of the entire situation. I buried my face in my hands and kept on laughing until I lost my breath. I hadn’t heard a sound from Brody, and the only reason I knew he was still there was because I saw his legs stretched out next to me.

  “You want to know what the worst part is?” I said, still laughing a bit. I didn’t look at Brody. I could have been talking to a bird or the air around me as much as I could have been talking to him. “I don’t even want to be a virgin. I’m not…” I shrugged. “…holding onto it for any reason, not saving it for anything or… or anyone. It just…” My voice got quieter as I started to trail off, regretting I had said anything, regretting so many things from this night. “It never came up.”

  Brody didn’t say anything from behind me, and the silence was so thick, so present, so there, that I felt like I could almost reach out and touch it. Swat it away, maybe.

  But that was precisely one of the nerves that Holly had struck. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed that I was a virgin. I didn’t care necessarily. Virginity was a ridiculous and absurd concept anyway. Virginity. Purity. It didn’t even make any sense. It was all just another way that people were classified, that society determined which box we would fit into, a calculus to determine if women were either prudes or sluts. So, no, the actual idea of virginity bothered me more than the fact of my own.

  Holly, the question she had asked, it had all just reminded me of something I had been thinking about for a long time. My best friend Talia, a lot of the other girls we hung out with from choir or from theater, they talked about sex and what it was like, and I… well... no other way to say it, I wanted to know. I wanted to know for myself what it was like, see what all the fuss was about. Talia talked about it like it was some kind of religious experience. Kate, one of the theater techs we were good friends with who had worked on the production of My Fair Lady that we’d done last year, talked about how painful it was and how she didn’t understand all the hype and how “Sex and the City” lied to her and all of us.

  I remembered at the cast party last spring, I had gotten pretty drunk at my friend Trinidad’s apartment. I was flirting with a really cute guy with a man bun (God, I hate that phrase) and really pretty blue eyes. He was telling me how good I had been as Eliza Doolittle and asking me to do my cockney accent and laughing at all the right spots and touching my arm when I wanted him to and leaning in to whisper in my ear every so often and making me shiver when I felt his breath there. The party had been in full swing, and I think someone had been doing a keg stand right when he leaned in and kissed me. He’d used way too much tongue, but it had actually been a really hot kiss, I was super drunk and horny, and I wanted him to ask me to go home with him. Instead he slipped me his number and said to text him so we could go out for coffee.

  Talia told me that the guy—she just knew that he went by Ace and in all my drunk flirting I had never actually asked for his name—was really sweet and she’d seen him around a few times. I was going to text him the next day, but th
en I didn’t want to be too forward. Then I started to freak out that he wouldn’t remember me, and I started to wonder if I had done or said anything to embarrass myself that night. By the time I finally told myself that it was fine, a month had passed and it would’ve been way too weird to text him at that point.

  But God, I had really wanted Ace that night. And if he had asked, I totally would’ve given in because by that time, I was so obsessed with wanting to know what sex was like that I was prepared to give it up to just about anyone who asked.

  I just… I wanted to know. In the same way that I wanted to know and understand a lot of things. Like, were there other life forms in the universe, or how did rainbows happen (Talia once tried to explain this to me while she was drunk and it did not work out), or how come people in television shows or movies never say “bye” when they hang up the phone. I was interested in knowing things. And over the past year, I had been thinking so much about my virginity and what it might be like to lose it that it had become almost like an infatuation. I would imagine different scenarios, different faceless guys and what they might do to me, how it might feel, what I might think afterward. I wanted to have experiences where I could say where the weirdest place I had ever had sex with someone was, and Holly had just brought all of that to the surface of my mind, reminded me that there was something out there I wanted but didn’t have, didn’t know, couldn’t get to.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Brody finally spoke up behind me. I froze, waiting, almost having forgotten he was there, pushing my thoughts away, hiding them away inside me like I thought he might see them. “It doesn’t matter what Holly or anyone says or thinks. Why should she embarrass you for not having a bunch of sexual partners at our age? You would never embarrass her for the number of people she has slept with. It doesn’t matter if you have or haven’t had sex. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and no one should make you feel bad for that.”

  I turned to him. I found him sitting up, frowning, chest heaving a bit, looking and sounding like he had prepared that entire speech, and for a moment, I imagined that he had said those exact words to Holly.

  “I know,” I said. “You’re right, it’s just…” I shook my head and faced forward again, too overwhelmed by the way Brody was looking at me.

  A few moments later, I saw Brody’s legs move, and for a moment I thought he was leaving. The pang that the thought of him leaving caused in my chest was something I was unwilling to acknowledge.

  But then he was scooting up next to me, his hip only inches away from mine. He bent his knees up and rested his elbows on them before turning to look at me.

  I glanced at our elbows. They were almost touching.

  “What?” Brody said, his voice a slight hush. “It’s just… what?”

  I lifted my head and turned it toward him, arms still wrapped tightly around my knees, as if they might protect me from the vulnerability I was suddenly feeling. My heart was thumping madly in my chest, not just from the words I knew I was about to say, but from the way Brody Galen was looking at me. Sure, he had been around my family for years, but his attractiveness had never grown on me. I had never gotten used to it, and having his sexy eyes so focused on me was incredibly unnerving.

  Vaguely, I thought that this was the longest conversation we had ever had, the longest amount of time the two of us had ever been alone together.

  “It’s just…” I started slowly. “I do… want to do it,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I met his eyes squarely, unabashedly, unashamed, knowing what I wanted and not caring that I was saying this to a guy who was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger. “I want to know what it’s like.”

  Brody exhaled slowly, his eyes meeting mine without saying anything. He was studying me, looking like he might want to say something, but he didn’t.

  And I didn’t know what was making me brave, didn’t know if it was the moonlight reflecting in his eyes or the way he seemed so intent on every word I was saying or if maybe I was at the point where I felt like I really had nothing to lose. It could have been any of those things that gave me the courage to say my next words as I continued to stare into Brody’s gray eyes.

  “What is it… like?”

  Somewhat surprisingly, Brody burst with laughter, and it made me smile because it wasn’t a laugh to embarrass me or make me feel stupid; it was a laugh that showed that he was genuinely just stunned by the unexpected question.

  “Well, it’s different for girls and guys,” Brody said, grinning at me when he finished laughing. “But… well, I think it’s fucking amazing.”

  I swallowed and asked my next question, figuring if I’d made it this far already, I could just keep it going. Why not?

  “And…” I bit my lip and looked away from him, for some reason only now realizing how ridiculous all of this was.

  Brody leaned a bit toward me and nudged my elbow with his. “Go ahead,” he said. “You’ve already gone this far,” he finished with a lift of the corner of his mouth, echoing my thoughts.

  Okay, I thought. Not so ridiculous. Surreal though.

  “Well.” I turned my head to look at him again, feeling more confident with every word, my confidence aided by the fact that this was a completely out of body experience. That separation almost protected me in a way, shielded me, as if this wasn’t really me so I didn’t have to feel the lunacy of all of it. “The girls you… did that with…” I paused and thanked God for the darkness when I felt my cheeks heat. “Did they think it was… amazing?”

  Brody chuckled. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “They certainly seemed to like it at the time.”

  Briefly, an image of a blonde head and a bare, muscular back moving underneath a sheet that covered his body from the waist down on a bed flashed in my mind, and I looked away as my blush deepened.

  “It hurts,” Brody said, quieter and a bit more serious. “For girls... you know, the first time.” I turned my head slightly to look at him for a moment. “But after the pain, there’s good stuff, too.”

  I wanted to be shocked and appalled and scared and confused about this conversation I was having with Brody, of all people, a guy who, despite his extremely close friendship with my cousin Gabe, had been so terribly unreachable ever since I had known him.

  And even though Brody and Gabe were probably some the most popular guys at Klein, Co-Captains of the soccer team at our small school that was known for winning the regional soccer tournament every year for the past decade, and universally liked by pretty much everyone who knew them or had ever even met them. They were tall, almost equal height, good-looking, but Brody was slightly more bulky compared to Gabe’s lithe soccer player frame, which made the difference as to why Brody played goalie and Gabe played forward on the team.

  And even though Brody had been around so often throughout our time at Klein and even before, spending weeks at a time at the Keatons during the summer when I was growing up, and I had seen him often, it had never really been more than that. Gabe and I were close, sure, but Gabe sort of kept his life of soccer fame separate from everything else, almost like it was some sacred thing that no one but really he and Brody could understand. He kept his friends separate, too, most likely because he knew what assholes they could be. But I could remember being fourteen-years-old and sitting watching TV with my cousin Annie, Gabe’s younger sister, while Brody and Gabe would walk by on their way to his bedroom. Gabe would ruffle my hair and say something to make me laugh or roll my eyes, and Brody would just watch, slightly withdrawn, smiling politely like he knew that things were just... separate.

  We had hardly ever exchanged more than polite conversation—“Hello”; “How are you?”; “Good.”

  And I had… wondered, yeah. He seemed arrogant and kind of snobby and like all he had time for were other rich kids like him (although Gabe wasn’t one of them), but everyone seemed to like him, and so, yeah, it made me wonder.

  “I could…” He broke into my thoughts. “…help you�
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  I looked away from where I had been staring out at the reservoir, lost in thought, and looked at Brody, who was looking at me, frowning, a look on his face that was almost—almost—shy, but more than the shy earnestness on his face and in his voice, there was something else, something I couldn’t help but notice.

  Daring.

  He was daring me, challenging me, trying to see just how far I was willing to take all of this, just how far I would let this insane conversation go until I finally put a stop to it, but also wondering if I truly meant what I said—if I really did want to know what it was like. Or maybe I wasn’t hearing him properly.

  I stared, slightly open-mouthed. “Ex—um—excuse me?”

  Brody chuckled a bit, propping an elbow up on his arm and resting the side of his face in his palm, regarding me casually. “I could help you with your, um…”—he smirked—“your… virginity problem.”

  If I had been taking a drink of water in that moment there was no doubt in my mind that it would now be spit out all over Brody’s face. I gaped at him, not believing what I was hearing but somehow believing it because that was the kind of night I was having. The kind of night where I had been outed as a virgin in front of all of Gabe’s friends, and where the only person to comfort me was Brody Galen, who was sitting next to me by the reservoir, my favorite place, elbow almost touching mine, talking to me about the fact that I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. Talking to me about what it might be like and feel like to not be, and maybe, oh, sure, maybe, why not, it makes perfect sense, he could help me out with that… virginity problem.