“But it’s not going to change the way I feel,” I tell him.

“It should.” He mutters this, staring out the windshield. Cars drive by, drivers sticking their heads out of rolled-down windows, shouting orders, picking them up, moving on, replaced by more cars, more orders. I touch his leg and say, “But it doesn’t.”

“Well, it’s hard for me too,” he says, pushing my hand away.

“I know,” I say. How could I fall for such a moron? I thought, looking over his body, then his face, trying to avert my eyes from his crotch.

“Whose fault is this?” he shouts. Nervously he tries to start the car again. “It’s yours. You ruined our friendship with sex,” he says, disgusted.

He gets out of the car, slams the door and walks around it a couple of times. The smell of the food I ordered, in my lap, getting cold, uneaten, makes me slightly sick, but I can’t move, can’t throw it out. Now I’m standing in the parking lot. It gets suddenly very cold. Neither of us can stay still very long. He reaches up and turns the collar of his leather jacket up. I reach out and touch his cheek, brushing something off. He pulls his face away and doesn’t smile. I look away, puzzled. A car honks somewhere.

“I don’t like this arrangement,” I say.

Back in the car he says, without looking at me, “Then leave.”

Moral of the story?

SEAN I would smell the pillows after she’d leave. She didn’t like to sleep in my bed; she said it was too small and that sleeping together didn’t really matter in the end. I agreed. When she was gone and after smelling the pillows, then my arms, my hands, my fingers, I’d think about us f**king, and I’d jerk off, coming once more, thinking about us, fantasizing and reshaping the sex, making it seem more intense and wild than it might have actually been. And in bed with her I could barely contain myself. I would f**k her quickly the first time so I could get off, then spend hours eating her, licking, constantly sucking her cunt; my tongue would ache, become swollen from rubbing my mouth, digging my chin into her, my mouth getting so dry I couldn’t even swallow, and I’d lift my head up and actually gasp for breath.

It would take very little, just about nothing, to get turned on by her. I’d see her bending over in just her panties, picking up something that she had dropped off the floor, or watch her get dressed, pulling on a T-shirt or sweater, leaning out my window, smoking. Even the small act, the motion of lighting a cigarette and I’d have to fight the urge to grab her, to tear those panties off, to lick and smell and tongue her. Sometimes the desire would be so strong, that all I could do was lay in bed, unmoving, thinking about her body, thinking about a certain look she gave me and I’d get hard instantly.

She spoke rarely to me, and never mentioned anything about the sex—probably because she was so satisfied, and I didn’t say much back. So there were few drawbacks to our relationship, fewer disagreements. For instance I didn’t have to tell her what I thought about her poetry, which sucked even though a couple of her poems had been chosen for publication in the school’s literary rag and for a poetry journal her teacher edited. If it ever did come up I would simply tell her I liked it and comment on the imagery. But what was poetry, or anything else for that matter, when compared to those br**sts, and that ass, that insatiable center between those long legs wrapped around my hips, that beautiful face crying out with pleasure?

LAUREN Still no mail from Victor. Not a postcard. Not a phone call. Not a letter. No message. The bastard can rot in hell for all I care.

“The school is really going downhill,” Judy tells me, explaining that I should be grateful to be a Senior so I won’t have to come back next year. And I guess I have to agree with her. The Freshman band is called The Parents—that’s enough to send out some message to people’s feelers that something wrong is going down. October seems to last forever because of Judy’s assessment. Graduation seems impossibly far off.

Gina did win the prize for changing the school sign and with the prize money we bought some XTC, which I had never done before, not even with Victor, and it was pretty incredible. I don’t think Sean liked it though. He just got very sweaty and kept grinding his teeth, swaying back and forth, and later that night he was even hornier than usual, which was no fun at all. I start drinking a lot of beer because that and play video games is essentially all the boy wants to do. But he gets better-looking as time goes on and though the sex is only okay and even if he’s not so great in bed, at least he’s imaginative. Yet he doesn’t turn me on. No real orgasms. (Well, maybe a couple.) Just because he’s so damned insistent. (Contrary to popular belief, being eaten out for two hours straight is not my idea of a good time.) He also seems suspicious. I have the feeling that he’s the mastermind of the Young Conservatives Party that had that big dance in Greenwall last Saturday. Other than being on Rec Committee I have no idea what he does here, and in the end, like Judy says, I really don’t want to know. Just want December to arrive, just want to get out of this place. Because I don’t know how much longer I can keep drinking beer and watching him get the high score on Pole Position which he is superb at.