Mirandized

“I’m sorry,” I said finally, feeling the emptiness of the words.

“Why? You didn’t rape me.”

“Still, I. . . .”

“It’s why I’d never been with anyone before this,” she said. “I couldn’t trust anyone.”

“And you could trust me?”

“Well, no,” she said, perfectly candid. “I barely know you. That’s not the point.”

“Then?”

“It’s been more than ten years, and I was still afraid. Then I realized how stupid that was, to fear something that happened more than a decade ago, to deny myself a perfectly natural experience because of one sick fucker.”

“Did they . . . did they ever catch him?”

She nodded. I saw tears fall down her cheeks. “But not for years afterwards. Not before he’d gotten to more than a dozen other girls.”

“Bastard.”

She nodded again, and removed her glasses to wipe her eyes. When she replaced them, her face had returned to its default, emotionally-devoid state.

“This doesn’t change anything between us,” she said. “It doesn’t bring us closer. It doesn’t make us friends.”

“If we’re not friends, then what are we?” I said, with not a little trepidation. This was something of a bombshell. I didn’t really know how to react.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Students.”

“Of what?”

“Each other, I guess.”

“You . . . you want to do this again?” I almost couldn’t believe my ears. I kept expecting someone to jump out from the closet, or behind the bed and screamSurprise, fool!

It never came.

“Of course,” she said. “So we’ve had sex. Big deal. I want experience. I want to do everything, and have everything done to me. Then, when I’m with someone I care about, I can make him happy. I can keep him interested. What about you?”

“Nothing so profound,” I said. “I just wanna fuck.”

She laughed and I grinned, glad that I could lift the melancholy that had befallen us.

Opening the blanket, she spread it on us both and cuddled up to me again.
“Earlier,” she said. “When you came, you whispered “Thank God.’ Why?”

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You did.”

And it came to me. As overtaken as I was by the intensity of the orgasm, such a small detail had slipped my mind, but I remembered it now, and the memory of it made me blush.

“What?” said Miranda, seeing my face redden. “What?”

“I thought . . . Christ, how stupid. I thought that maybe I’d like, killed it, or something. Like, I’d used it to death.”

She chuckled. “Wow. You must really like masturbating.”

“Not especially. I mean, it’s like an addiction. It never amounted to anything—I hadn’t had a proper orgasm in a long time before—but still, at the slightest arousal, the faintest tingle, I’d run into the bathroom, or into my room, lock the door, and beat off. In all honestly, I thought it was dead. I was like—” I barked a sharp chuckle. “It was like beating a dead horse.”

“Oh.”

She mulled that over for a while, while I burned with embarrassment.

“You’re right,” she finally said, reaching over to turn off the lamp. “That is stupid.”

There was a long moment of silence, during which I stared at the ceiling and tried inanely to discern patterns from the shadows thrown by the stucco there.

“When do you want to do it?” I said. “Next time, I mean.”

“Soon,” she said. “When doesn’t particularly matter. Ideally, several times before I might meet a man with whom I could fall in love.”

“When doesn’t matter,” I repeated. It wasn’t really an answer, but okay. “I’m assumingwheredoes?”

She nodded. “Ideally, my first time would not have been in a smog-filled frat house,” she said. “Nor with a boy so very drunk.”

“Boy?”

“Wearein a frat house, and youaredrunk,” she said. “Maybe less so than when we began, but nevertheless, next time, you’ll be less intoxicated.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, already envisioning illicit meetings between class periods in a hall closet somewhere.

Perhaps I’ve watched too much internet porn.

That would probably stop now.

Probably.

“I want it to be in a hotel,” she said. “Not amotel, some twenty-dollar-an-hour dump, but a regular hotel somewhere.”

“I think you’re romanticizing it,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said. “I got caught in the heat of the moment, or else we would have done it in a such a hotel in the morning.”

“Really? I’m kind of glad we didn’t. I might’ve lost my nerve.”

“Or your buzz.”

“Same thing,” I said.

Miranda got out of bed and began putting her clothes back on. And I watched.

“You’re going?”

“I have an exam in the morning,” she said.

“Do you have to go now?” I said, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

“No,” she said, equally upfront. “But I want to. I can’t do it again. Not here. Not in this smoky frat house, amongst dozens of copulating drunkards.”

“Your place, then?” I said, idiotically hopeful.

“No. The dorm is no more an ideal location. We’d be caught, or interrupted. A hotel,” she said, resolute. “Tomorrow night.”

She put on her jacket and made her way to the door. “I’ll call you with the details.”

She didn’t even look back as she opened the door and stepped out.

And she was gone.

I watched the door a moment, then lay back, my hands behind my head, watching the ceiling.

A smile crept onto my face.

Dear Penthouse. . . .