Despertar

january 9, 2010

At midnight, my parents, younger brother and I were getting in one last game of Monopoly Deal (a faster-paced, card-oriented spinoff of the original--I am terrible at it, for reasons I haven't figured out) before Chad had to leave for Atlanta in the morning. I wanted to stay awake as long as possible, knowing I won't see Chad again until May at the earliest, but it's been an exhausting week and I haven't been to the gym in ages, so I could barely keep my eyes open. I fell asleep next to Chad while he watched episodes of Lost on my computer.

In the morning, he was already on his way out the door when I woke up. He looked like a real man, gearing up for a ten-hour road trip, one of his frat brothers already situated in the passenger seat of his car. I said goodbye, sleepily, and then started packing to leave myself.

My parents were very obvious about not wanting me to leave. If there's any time of year they truly hate, it's this frosty period lodged in the middle of January, when work starts up, the Christmas tree goes down and Chad and I have to leave the comfort of our old bedrooms and go back to school. If they had a more affectionate marriage, I think they'd be okay with watching us go--after all, Jesus, we were home for close to three weeks--but our visits (mine frequent and random, Chad's infrequent but scheduled) are the high points of their entire year, hands down. It's a huge pressure, a lot of responsibility, and the best way to do it, I decided, was just to rip the whole thing quickly, like a Band-Aid. Both of us gone within an hour.

My dad cornered me in the foyer and started assaulting me with questions about my finances. First interrogation, then bribery. He'd help me with my flaky roommate's half of the utility bills if I stayed in the suburbs a little longer, just long enough for him to go to the bank. I told him no thanks, I'd already taken care of the utilities and expected her to reimburse me pretty soon. He offered me a ride to the Metro so I wouldn't have to drive back to the District in such shitty weather (a light coating of snow on the ground and nothing falling for the past twelve hours). I told him no thanks, I needed to go ahead and get the car downtown and start easing back into my academic routine. Just one more semester, so why not start strong, et cetera.

Then, my mother, in the kitchen, aggressively proffering boiled eggs. No time to eat, I said, because I had a thing scheduled for early afternoon and needed time to do some laundry. All of it true, but there was an edge in my tone, I think, and on my way out the door, I heard her tell my father she thought I was lying, that I just wanted to get out of Silver Spring now that Chad was gone.

Long drive back to Chinatown.

I really did have something to do at one-thirty. An insider's tour of the White House for me and the guy, made possible by my cousin, who's a policy advisor to the First Lady. I had planned my day around the belief that I'd have two and a half hours to prepare, but all the bureaucracy out in the 'burbs had fucked my scheduling up pretty severely. Didn't have time to do most of what I'd planned, most notably complete a load of laundry, so I ended up in the stiffest, most uncomfortable business casual outfit you can imagine. Chocolate brown button-down, navy blue V-neck, pin-striped brown slacks, red pumps. Stacy would have been proud, but I felt like a transvestite, except for the shoes. Also, I didn't have a clean thong or an iron, so the entire lower half of my body was a worst-case scenario of last-minute dressing.

Went to pick up the boy, who was in the shower when I got there. Chatted up his roommate, awkwardly. By the time he got out of the shower, I was pretty sure we were going to be late, but he proved me wrong, dressing and grooming himself in record time. He wore one of the silk cotton cashmere sweaters I gave him for Christmas, and looked delicious.

Downtown, we were actually a few minutes early, so we did the touristy thing, taking a bunch of pictures of ourselves before the iconic Front Lawn. He was actually giddy with happiness, which was more than I even would have thought to ask for. His favorite show of all time was The West Wing, which I knew when I asked my cousin for the tour, but I'd still figured he was only coming along to indulge me. But no, he was actually really, really excited, and he stopped passersby to ask for pictures of the two of us in front of a variety of landmarks we see literally every day, from farther away.

My cousin met us at one of the trillion guard posts and took us inside. We saw the entirety of both the West and East Wings from the bottom up: the Situation Room, the Roosevelt Conference Room, the place where they do the press releases--Helen Thomas has her own assigned seat, front and center--and a bunch of stately waiting rooms that smelled like old flowers. We couldn't get close to the Oval Office, though, because as it turned out, President Obama was working there at that very moment, which was super exciting to the guy, in particular. He stalled a lot in the area surrounding the Oval Office, taking a bunch of extra trips to the bathroom--later, he told me he was hoping we'd still be around there when the President emerged to take a break or something. No dice. But we did get to poke our heads into the Rose Garden, at exactly the moment the First Dog, Bo, was trotting by with a dog walker. We saw the top of his black head bobbing over the row of hedges lining the path, at which point I felt a hand on my butt, and turned around to look up into the guy's face, which was shining with this kind of mixture of awe and arousal. I took note and squeezed him back, a little bit.

My cousin liked him, thank God. I was worried, because I am my cousin's favorite person, and men tend not to measure up, in his opinion, but this one did, apparently. He texted me later, saying "He gets a passing grade. For now," which, coming from my cousin, is, relatively, the highest stamp of approval.

We ate at Taylor's, both of us exhausted from all the walking, and then I took him home, and then I took myself home, and did a little work in preparation for my first day interning at the D.C. Court of Appeals, but fell asleep approximately thirty seconds after I sat at my desk.

When I woke up, I diddled around on the computer for a while, simultaneously watching the first third of Ocean's Twelve, and then I accidentally caught the sex scene in the middle of Titanic, and while anyone else probably would have exploded from the utter volume of now-trite cliches, I sat there, mesmerized, and then thought maybe I'd like to be having sex.

Texted him, wound up on his couch an hour later. We played three rounds of Jeopardy--I won the first two, lost the third on a technicality--while getting progressively drunker on homemade vodka gimlets. We heated a plateful of teriyaki wings and ripped through them like the Tasmanian devil, both of us giggling the whole time about how fat we're getting and how it's our own fault.

Afterward, and with the kitchen still a wreck from the chicken-wing tornado, we climbed into his bed (I'm fudging the times a little to include this part; this didn't actually happen till around four o'clock this morning), and he put his arms around me in a way that, really, no one, him included, has ever done before. It wasn't about sex just yet, and it felt innocent and warm, and I loved it.

At midnight, I was thinking about how nice that was.