36 Inches (Size Matters 3)

She’s waiting for an answer, but I don't want to think about that right now.

She smiles as she strokes my face.

“Look, I’m not expecting you to put a ring on my finger or anything like that. Or even go out and declare that I’m your girlfriend. I just want us both to have clear expectations.”

I start to go red because this is my line. The one that I use on girls that I think want a relationship from me after the night’s done. This is my expectation line. The one that I’ve said so many times that I could recite it backward and she’s saying it to me.

The mood’s changed, it no longer feels nice and relaxing. It feels the opposite and I feel, as if I should be getting my ass back home, right now.

“Why? What do you think is going to happen?”

I sit up, getting ready to get out of bed. Not any other bed, but her bed. I have one of my own. I don’t need the rejection line to be told to me while I’m lying in it.

She smiles and then wraps her arm around me.

“That this is the summer and that we’re both enjoying each other’s company. After then we’ll go back to our lives. You to college and me, here.”

“Is that what you want, Jennifer?”

She shakes her head, but avoids eye contact.

“It’s not about what either of us wants. It’s just the way that it needs to be.”

Who the fuck wrote the rule book on us?

We’re both consenting adults; no one can tell us what to do. We need to decide the best step forward, but as I stroke her hair, her heart races as I feel it beating on top of me. The realization that she’s right starts to hit home. I close my eyes as I realize that Jennifer’s not giving me the rejection line, but just being realistic about our situation. When the summer’s over, we’ll be over too, just like it never happened. I should be going home, but I can’t move, my hand just continues to run up and down her silky skin. This is a feeling that I never want to forget even after the summer’s over.

Jennifer

I didn’t want to go out tonight. Carla arranges for us to go out and have that much overdue drink. The one that she promised nearly a week ago before I started sleeping with her son. I needed someone to talk to when she suggested it, but now I found him, I didn’t want to go. I told her to go ahead without me. I even suggested that she go out of with the nurses. But she just looked at me as if I was mad. As far as she’s concerned, I spend every night alone. She asked me, “Don’t you ever want to go out?”

I smiled at her and told her to come around at seven. Besides Jason wasn’t happy about the idea, he turned into some caveman when I told him about tonight.

‘I don’t like the idea of you going to bars. I mean just say some man tries to hit on you. How will you protect yourself?’

He didn’t seem to mind his mom going, just not me. I went to his place this morning while she was at work and showed him what I would only do with him and no one else. He calmed down after we did it in the utility room while the washing machine was running. It was wild, and it makes me hot just thinking about it.

“Are you sure that this is the right bar?” I shout out to Carla.

She’s laughing as she looks from side-to-side. The place is too loud, and I feel old as there are kids in the bar throwing things at each other.

“One of the nurses suggested this place!” she shouts back.

“How old are they?”

She shakes her head and grabs my arm. I can tell by her actions that the nurse must be young. We get outside, and it’s as if we’re trying to catch our breath. The place was packed, and I felt as if I was going to a crowded concert. The one that I took Daniel and his friends to when they were fifteen and needed a parent chaperone. I volunteered because I’d never been to a concert. I remember afterward thinking that there were some things that I’d never experienced and I wasn’t missing out on life as a result of them.

“Now, that was difficult,” Carla says as she smiles at me.

“Tell me about it. How old are the nurses?”

She waves her hand, as I th

ink that she spots a couple of them through the crowd.

“Junior nurses!” She laughs.

I shake my head, as I think that I’m having sex with an eighteen-year-old, but I can’t hang out in a bar that has a bunch of twenty-one or even older crowd in it.