Biker's Virgin

Once again, I was confused about whose side Tiffany was on. I wanted it to be mine. Did the fact that I didn't want him to dump me again because of some shitty reason mean she actually was on my side? I just couldn't have the faith in him that she had. It wasn't her fault that she had it; it was sort of expected. I envied her for it, but I knew better than her.

"I don't want to regret letting him back in," I grumbled, licking the already clean spoon that I had been eating my applesauce with. A laugh suddenly fought its way up out through my chest.

"What's funny?" Tiff asked.

"I never used to feel this way, isn't that weird? Since we met, Roman has always had football and the army – two things that could have taken him away at any second from me. I never felt insecure about it. I always knew that they were there and that in two seconds flat, outta nowhere, he might have to leave, but I was never scared."

"Not even a little?"

I thought back. It wasn't even the football that had been the problem, it had been the army. I had always thought that when the time came, we'd talk about football. We had been in the same graduating class, which meant that if he did have to travel for a team, I was in a position where I could go with him and that was a step we could see taking together.

We had met and built our relationship on campus grounds, but I never felt like that was what defined it. I never felt like graduation day would be the day we said goodbye and went our separate ways. Call me stupid for believing that what we had would be able to last and mean something in the real world. It had been that big, that serious, and that real…to me anyway.

The army on the other hand... That one had scared me. I knew that when and if the time came, then I'd have to watch him go. I hadn't had a real plan for what I would do, besides write him and try to talk to him as much as I could. All I had known was that it made me nervous and would be miserable, but I knew I would have found a way around that.

So many people had their loved ones deployed and for so many of those people, they managed to make the army and its demands part of their lives. I thought that I could do it, too, if it came down to me needing to. For Roman? I had been willing to do just about anything. I hadn’t cared about needing to make changes and adjustments because that was what being with him meant and I wanted to be with him more than I could even express.

Too bad I was wrong for believing that even if we weren't together physically, I could have relied on the fact that my love and support was being received and reciprocated from wherever he would be.

"I thought that I had no reason to worry. I could be scared of the danger, or the distance, or the loneliness, but I never had to be scared that we would stop being us once we were no longer in the same place," I said, shrugging.

"Could you wrangle up some of that trust right now?"

I could try. I didn't say it out loud.

"That needs to be earned."

"He can't try to earn anything back if you're not giving him a chance," she said. "I was with you when it happened last year, so I'm not insensitive to that. I just want you to remember this hasn't been a fun ride for him, either. He wanted to keep you last time, but made a mistake. Let him talk to you. Once you're both over what happened, then you can stop being so scared."

I didn't know why Tiffany caring for her brother made me so upset. She was in an awkward position, but the girl code trumped the genetic one, didn't it? Maybe it was because it made me jealous that she and I weren't in the same position. She could speak so confidently about Roman, all this great stuff that she knew he would never do. I used to be in that place, too, and I didn't know when I would ever be able to go back.

We headed out to lunch. Tiff wanted Italian, and I could already feel that big plate of pasta sitting in my stomach like a rock. The applesauce snack had taken the edge off my hunger, but now my gut felt like it was burning. I felt anxious and a little sick. I was grateful that I had Tiffany who was always ready to talk, but I wasn't that happy about what we tended to talk about most of the time, especially lately.

Was this making Roman as nervous? What was I thinking, of course not. It was just like last time. It was still his life that was taking him away from me somehow, and it was still just me who had to find a way to deal. He was, once again, the one who would make the decision about what would happen whether he talked to me about it first or not.

"Didn't you have Beckett for Western Civilization?" Tiffany asked me from across the table. She was slicing her fork through an unctuous, cheesy slice of lasagna. I had thought about getting the same, but I didn't get away with food like that the same way she could. It was a lot more of a balancing act for me. I'd have to move up a dress size if I ate the way she did for a week.

"Yeah. Why?" I asked, eating a soft, drenched crouton. Soup was all I could imagine stomaching with the way I had been feeling since leaving Tiff's place.

"He was the one you said you got weird vibes from?" she continued. I froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

"What did he do?"

"It's just these comments he makes sometimes," she said lightly. "He's a good teacher, and he doesn't seem like the predatory type, but I don't know how he gets away with being that flirty with his female students."

I laughed a little. College wasn't high school; everyone there was an adult, students and faculty. Sometimes wires crossed. Professor Beckett was in at least his fifties and looked like he had lived every minute of those fifty plus years. He wore a wedding ring, so there was that; with the tweed jackets and thick glasses he wore, too, he came off goofier than anything else. He’d make the comments so flippantly, like this one time I had been in an admittedly lower cut top than usual and when he had greeted me when I came into the classroom, he asked whether all that was for him.

"Has he said anything to you?"

"He pointed out how nice it was to see my beautiful smile this beautiful morning when I went to his office today," she said. That didn't sound that bad, if maybe he was her dad and she was eight years old instead of twenty-one. He was so geeky, maybe that was why he hadn’t gotten hit with any sexual harassment complaints.

She asked me for tips on how I reviewed the course content when I took his class. For me, it had helped to study with a friend. Since we had had the class together, that friend at the time had happened to be Roman. He was so good at popping up right when I least wanted him to.

Not bringing him up was a challenge, but I didn't want him to be the subject of all the conversations the two of us had together. I never even used to think about him as often as this when we were together. It was embarrassing. Tiffany was asking me whether I had any of my old notes from that class, and I was wondering what would happen if Roman did so well at the combine that someone recruited him into a team.

He was a good player, I had watched him. He was the reason I knew anything at all about football – enough to know it wasn't a secret that he was on his way to the pros before his football career was interrupted by his deployment.

Because there was part of me that had never stopped loving him or being his friend, I wanted that for him, so much – but what would it mean for us? I could support his ambition. I remembered that being one of the things that I admired most about him, it still was, but how the hell was I supposed to support something that would take him away from me again?