Straight No Chaser

Virginity

i can read you just a little bit better than you think i can, and don't worry, i wouldn't overstep. it feels good, very good, to be told "you've never disappointed me." well. at first it feels icky, incomplete, sort of when-will-the-other-shoe-drop. but then it drops, and it's still okay--that's when it feels good. i wouldn't want to jeopardize that, and i don't see any reason why i should.

i don't want you, of all people, to construe me as the sort of person who can't be trusted in a certain way. that way. i've always been worried about it, because it's hard to communicate the way things are between us, without sounding like a liar. but no, really. more than just a function of our tremendous trust, we have this underlying understanding that words are words, actions are slightly louder words but just as limited in their scope; feelings, however, are personal and transcendent. which is what makes it okay, as it were. it's not what i'd have picked, for us. but it is, and it's what i live by. but mostly, most crucially, i like the respect, i like the guilt-free connection, i like the idea of something that doesn't make any sense except in its own context.

i don't know why i'm dwelling on this, except that obviously i'm just as breakable as anyone, right now. but it got me thinking about randy, about being sixteen, about dreading ten o'clock "taps" because the hours afterward would find me on his twenty-two-year-old lap in an unsupervised lodge loft, doing this little wiggle-dance of escape as his hands crept into my clothes. of nights like that, of one particular night like that, and then the morning after, of tori asking him something about "his woman" (me, to her mind), and his reply: "my woman's in jamaica." virginity was so much more appealing after that, and still is, for similar reasons. it's something i can't give away twice.

this is my extended reciprocation of the end of your last message, the part in parentheses.