Page 55 of The Progressions

“I’m definitely not interested in Cody. Definitely not,” I stated with conviction. “He showed up about two years ago to deliver water bottles to our complex, and I just about puked. He’s been bothering me on a biweekly basis ever since, but I stopped being interested in him about five years ago. That was when I finally grew up, but throughout my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I was still trying to catch his interest with my couplets.”

“By couplets, you mean poetry. Not…” He pointed at my breasts.

“He wasn’t that enthusiastic about those, either.”

Tyler looked at my chest. “If I were him, I would have been interested in all of it. I would have liked if somebody wrote a vill—what was it?”

“A villanelle,” I said.

“I would have liked someone to write that for me, and I don’t see what’s wrong with those.” He pointed again.

“He wanted something larger,” I explained. “He had a lot of ideas.”

“The real thing had to be better than whatever porn he was watching.”

“Maybe. It hurt my feelings how he made fun of me, so I wrote a pantoum about that. ‘My body was yours, but you despised it, O the wild night that ended in ruin.’ It only got worse from there because those lines repeated.” I shook my head. “I should have stuck to blank verse. Or maybe, I should have taken up footballand worked through my emotions on the gridiron instead of foisting my poetry onto the world.”

He reached over and tested my arm muscle. “I could see you as a receiver. You were pretty fast when you made that run into the end zone at the practice building, even though you’d eaten half the buffet before we went out on the field.”

“I felt the need to get my money’s worth,” I explained, and he answered that I hadn’t paid for that lunch, had I? “Whatever,” I said. “I would like more chances for free buffets, but I think I’m better just watching you instead of than trying out for a team.”

“You should stick to poetry. I kind of like it,” he said, but I no longer considered myself as someone who followed the muse. “What are we going to do about that villanelle guy?” he continued.

“Cody? I don’t think we’ll have do anything, because he’s scared.” I relished the sound of that. “He’ll leave me alone.”

“No,” Tyler told me. “He won’t, because he’s in love with you.”

“What?” I sat up and the mattress squealed. “He is not! He never was, and especially not now. We hate each other.”

“You may hate him, but if he’s been coming in every two weeks for years to bother you, it’s not because he’s an asshole. That’s not the only reason,” he corrected himself.

“No,” I said. “No way.”

“Why aren’t you seeing anybody else? Just a lack of time?”

“I guess.” I lay down again and he turned onto his side to face me, muttering a little about the poking springs. They didcreak horribly under his weight. “I met a guy when I started college and we went out for a while, but we didn’t have the same interests and no, I didn’t have the time for it. But I was interested in sleeping with someone else, so we did.”

“How was it?”

“Meh,” I answered. “He liked my body a lot more, which was gratifying. But it was the only thing that was gratifying.”

“So…no O,” he correctly surmised.

“Not when I was with him. I know there’s nothing wrong down there, but he was pretty quick and he didn’t pay much attention to my enjoyment.” That, along with how many cans of beer he was slamming, had led to the end of our dating relationship. It just seemed like such a waste of my resources, especially since he’d insisted that I had to bring the condoms if I wanted to use them. I did, and they were expensive. “I think that everyone should share the price of birth control,” I mentioned.

“That guy was selfish,” Tyler commented, and I remembered him kissing Shay Galton and how she’d pumped her hips against him. She’d seemed into it.

“You’re not selfish with sex?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I never heard that I was, but maybe they’re talking behind my back.”

Yes, Shay Galton had seemed into it, but her whole life was pretense. How could he have judged? “I bet everyone’s saying nice things,” I said, in case he really was worried. “I bet you do just fine.” I patted his shoulder to encourage him.

“Thanks, Kasia.” His eyes met mine through the darkness. “Want to see for yourself?”

I looked back at him, sure that I’d misunderstood the meaning of that question. “What?” He couldn’t have been suggesting…

But maybe he was. He reached over and put his hand behind my back, and then he pulled me toward his body. Space remained between us, but I was close enough to feel the heat of him. “What are you doing?” I asked.

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