Author's note:
An entry for the Valentine's Day Contest 2023. Please leave an honest score and maybe even a comment. It really helps.
All sexual activity in this story is between people over the age of eighteen. Trigger warning: story mentions pegging, pansexuality and vegetarianism.
~~~~
Always go forward, never back was one of my few life rules. So why had I returned to the sprawling port city where I went to high school, walking along Harbor Street at dusk, soaking in memories and melancholy?
I had only lived there for three years, from the second year of high school until just after graduation. Yet as the plane was landing, giving my first view of the harbor in sixteen years, my stress melted away. Gone was the pain of my failed marriage and months of job seeking. I felt eighteen again. When I got to the downtown hotel, I dumped my bag in the room and hurried into the damp February air.
Most of the buildings were the same: narrow three-story structures with storefronts on the ground level, shouldered together along the main street. For well over a century, they had held dry goods stores, chandleries, restaurants, and taverns. Lots and lots of taverns. Modern office buildings and condos had sprouted between some, grotesquely out of place.
A few fenced-off empty lots gave a view down to the harbor. The usual assortment of trawlers, freighters and bulk carriers squatted along the wharf. At the government pier sat a Coast Guard ship and I thought of Brenda. I didn't want to think about Brenda.
But what did it matter? She had left for California years ago. Over the years, everyone I had known had gone somewhere else—for work, college, or just to get away—and slowly we had all lost touch.
What a bunch of misfits we were. I had fit in perfectly. We colonized the end of the East corridor of the school, shared lunch breaks and, some days after class, trooped downtown to the sandwich shop. There we spread our books over the corner table at the back, sometimes studying but mostly goofing around. We got away with it because Heather's mom owned the place. Heather flitted between sitting with us and jumping up to help her mom and older sister serve customers.
Heather was gone too—to Belgium, so I heard. Many times, I had dreamed of visiting Europe and somehow finding her. But college, jobs, and a tortuous marriage had kept me close to home, eating the years.
Soon I found myself at the end of the street, staring at the building where the sandwich shop had been. It now housed a trendy coffee shop, the picture window fogged and dripping.
I went in to warm up. The creaking wood floor and stamped tin ceiling were the same, but the rest was a generic upscale coffee shop. Hipsters with complicated drinks hunched over laptops or leaned back, stroking precise beards. At least the place still served fresh food, judging from the chalkboard menu.
Ordering a normal coffee from the server, I shed my coat and sat warming my hands, ready to wallow and reminisce.
At first, I thought nostalgia had me imagining things when a woman stepped through from the kitchen. She set a plate of food on the counter, dinged the bell, and called a name. It couldn't be Heather, but that unruly hair, those nerdy glasses, that wry expression...
She called the name a second time and scanned the room for a response. Her eyes fell on me and narrowed, then widened as her mouth dropped open before forming that tight, playful grin that always made my heart skip.
It
was
her: older and thicker—it
had
been sixteen years—but somehow cuter than she had been in high school. More womanly, less tomboy.
She said something quickly to the woman at the cash, then rushed to my table, immediately pulling me into a hug when I rose.
"What are you doing here, Colin? I thought you were gone for good."
"I have a job offer," I said. "They flew me in for a few days to see if I wanted to live here again."
"And they sent you in mid-February? Maybe they're seeing if you're a masochist."
"I like winter here. Never gets as cold as on the prairies. Or as windy. And I love fog."
We stood, arms loose around each other, just looking. She had changed little: those sparkling eyes, her upturned nose, and every other feature I had seared into my infatuated teenage brain were still there. And just like back then, I fought an urge to kiss her.
~~~~
On my first day of high school, my family having just moved from our prairie town, Heather found me in the foyer, lost and bewildered. It was bad enough moving half-way across the continent to an unfamiliar city, but being plopped into second year at a new school was overwhelming.
She adopted me immediately, guiding me through the class scheduling, school rules and giving the low-down on the cliques and teachers.
That weekend, she showed me around the city, navigating the bewildering bus system like a wizard. We toured the malls, the city parks, and along the harbor front. Heather chatted, pointing things out, relating the city's long history, and sharing secrets only someone who had lived there all their life would know.
"And whatever you do," she said, "do
not
walk along Harbor Street after six on a weekend. Unless you want to get robbed by a gang of bums or knifed by a drunk dockworker."
"Hey, I've been in fights," I said. "I can handle myself."
Heather stopped walking and faced me. "No. Port cities are rough. Being stuck on a ship for months can make you, um, grouchy. Some sailors fight like they mean it. So do some of the locals. If anyone confronts you, run."
Later I showed her our new house, unpacked boxes stacked everywhere. In the still-empty living room, she set her glasses aside and faced me, hands behind her back, and grinned.
"So, mister tough guy ready-to-fight-a-longshoreman, think you can fight me?"
I didn't know what a longshoreman was, but I sure wasn't going to trade punches with a girl. Heather stepped close and grabbed my wrists. It took surprising effort to break free, then she spun behind me, kneed my leg and dropped me to the floor. She straddled me, pinning my hands beside my shoulders.
Heather was average size, but when I tried dislodging her, I discovered she was strong. Really strong. It took everything I had to break her grip and reverse our positions. She deftly evaded my attempts to capture her arms and wormed away when I nearly had her pinned.
I had never wrestled a girl before and quickly learned I didn't need to go easy with her. Heather flopped and rolled elusively and, with a laugh, bucked me off just when I had her. I worried each time my hand brushed a boob or her ass, or when she grazed my crotch, but we both understood it was unavoidable when grappling.
In the end we rested sitting against the wall, panting and sweaty, grinning at each other. I hadn't pinned her even once.
"How are you so strong?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I have two older brothers and an older sister. We fought a lot." She gave me a sideways glance. "Did it wound your ego to get beaten by a girl?"
"What? Why? I'm just amazed."
Heather regarded me for a moment, then smiled broadly.
After she went home, I was awestruck and overcome. Heather was confident, light-hearted, and level-headed, so different from girls back home. Most of those were either bulldog crude or flower-petal sweet. My parents only allowed me to date the latter: church girls with marriage their only goal. I couldn't place Heather at all.
Monday at school, she introduced me to the nerdy outcasts she hung around with. When they discovered I was just as awkward and nerdy as them, in their indifferent way, they welcomed me as part of the gang.
After school, they invited me to go with them to the sandwich shop. We joked, sipped hot chocolate, and traded snarky comments about our teachers and the popular kids, discussed Star Trek and D&D, video games and science news until we had to go home.
At school, Heather hung around with the rest of us misfits, but never paid me any particular attention. Then randomly she would invite me to go with her to the mall, or a movie or a concert, becoming outgoing and playful when it was just us. They weren't dates: she never made any moves or gave any sign she wanted me to make a move on her I could see. Each time afterward when we parted, she smiled, said thanks, and left.
Every encounter left me confused and yearning. Was I missing some sign? Or was it as I suspected—I was too geeky and gangly for someone as cute and wonderful as her? I was terrified to make any move, not that I knew how, fearing it would wreck our friendship.
One Sunday we were studying in my room—yes, studying—when she wanted to wrestle. She loved wrestling me every chance she got; I think because she always won. We thumped around on the floor of my room, twisting and laughing and straining when my dad yelled from downstairs to stop making so much damn noise. We froze, faces inches apart, looking into each other's eyes. I looked at her impish, knowing grin and knew I had to kiss her.
"Don't," she said, turning away.
"Don't what?"
"Don't kiss me."
Instantly I got to my feet and flopped face down on the bed, angry at myself, angry at her and awash in a surge of jumbled emotions.
Heather sat on the bed and touched my shoulder. After a long moment, she left without a word.
~~~~
Standing there in the clink and murmur of the coffee shop, we looked at each other exactly as we had on that Sunday long ago.
"My god," she said, "you look the same. Except your skin's cleared up. I—I thought I'd never see you again."
"And I never thought I'd see you. I heard you went to Europe. And your family closed this place when your mom died."
We sat. She looked at my cup.
"What do you mean coming in here and ordering just a plain americano?" She smiled. " No coconut milk? No cinnamon powder? Not even a pump of honey blend? The other customers will make fun of you."
"Like I ever cared what others thought," I said. "You never did, either."
Heather laughed. I hadn't realized I'd missed her laugh.
"Yes," she said, "we did close the place. And I did move to Brussels. I got married."
