of that. Nathan was a virgin, but that didn't seem to impair him in the least; she had never known her body could be made to feel so good, and it was hard to know how far she should let him take it.
So they dated, and spent time together, and kissed, and things were good; but not always. There were arguments--about the sex, of course, or lack thereof, but also about other things. Stupid things, sometimes, like whether it was okay for him to cancel a date because one of his guy friends had tickets to a concert, or the new
Guitar Hero
game. Stupid things, like whether she had the right to tell him she didn't like his favorite pair of tattered, broken-in jeans. Stupid things, but in the end they piled up, and the two of them just drifted apart. Still, they stayed friends, seeing each other on occasion, exchanging e-mails.
Nathan graduated and went straight on to pre-law, as he'd always planned. Within a month he knew he'd have to kill himself if he kept on with it. His big break came when every computer in the Law library went down, all at once. Nathan, a hardcore gamer whose computer had been able to run
Crysis
at full graphics settings without a flutter, had become experienced in tech support due to the demands of his lifestyle, and he volunteered to try and figure out the problem. He not only isolated the hack into the library network, but was able to make hardware suggestions to lower costs, streamline access and prevent this sort of network-wide damage. The Law school faculty paid him a thousand dollars for his services, and Nathan had a career he could stand.
Robin met Clarence during her last year at college. He was different than Nathan in many respects: he had cultivated that home-down-south air, walked around in cowboy hat and boots. She wouldn't've believed it if she hadn't seen it. After years of Nathan's indie/emo fashion sensibilities, Clarence was a refreshing change. His personality too: where Nathan was cautious, Clarence was bold; where Nathan was sensitive, Clarence careless; what Nathan scoffed at, Clarence valued. They were both pretentious, but in different ways, and something about Clarence's cocksure swagger--looking like an idiot, and not giving a care--drew her in. They married right after she graduated.
Nathan dated when he had the time, but he didn't have much of it. His business was booming: in addition to growth by word of mouth, the university was outsourcing much of its IT to him, and on a campus of 15,000 there was always something going wrong. Soon he had hired his first employee, and then his first three, and more until eventually ten people answered to him. One of them was an accountant, to keep track of all the money going in and out. He was single, yes, and often overworked, but he didn't notice; he was having fun, and making a difference.
Robin first started to think that marrying Clarence was a mistake the night he came home drunk and beat her. Unfortunately, it took three more years before she could get up the gumption to tell him where to stuff it. In retrospect, it was easy to reconstruct the justifications she'd built up in her mind. True, he wasn't the most sensitive of lovers; true, he was working a dead-end job at McDonald's, the only thing his bachelor's in Communications had been able to gain him; true, he rarely came home without reeking of drink, and spent most of the time in front of the TV once he arrived--watching the NASCAR, most of the time, but occasionally she would catch him jerking off to videos of nubile vixens--neat, perky blondes with sensuous names like Lolita or Pearl or Butter. (Once, Lolita and Butter
at the same time
, goodness-gracious-me.) But he was trying. She couldn't deny that. He was trying, and heaven only knew how much pressure the establishment put on men to be breadwinners, to be masculine, to be confident and good in bed and everything a man should be. He was trying, and every now and then when he came home, his eyes would light up, and he would be tender to her, caring, kind, everything she'd hoped.
And besides, my dad hit
my
mom. And I turned out okay.
She did not, though, always turn out okay where Clarence was concerned. To hear him talk, she was the worst wife he could've found for himself--and he freely admitted that he had passed up some real desperate ones. There was nothing she did that he couldn't find something to be critical about--her cooking was bad, she didn't keep the house clean, she hadn't provided him with an heir, she should forget this nonsense about having a job and become a housewife... It just went on. Robin tried to pacify him as best she could, using some of the negotiating skills she'd learned from Nathan; but even that was a slippery slope. Clarence had a way of starting small. For instance, this thing about not contacting ex-boyfriends. She had invited Nathan to the wedding, and Clarence let her, with ill grace; but the next time he called (a few months after the honeymoon) Clarence asked her to hang up. It seemd reasonable at the time, but within a year she was out of touch with Nathan completely. Within a year after that, he had--very reasonably, very tactfully--gotten her to abort just about every friendship she had; her coworkers ignored her, her college friends never called, even her parents had learned to keep a wide berth.
Perhaps she should've known the day she found herself giving up her virginity. It wasn't her wedding night. As a matter of fact, it was a couple months before he proposed. Protest all she might, Clarence was not the sort of man who took 'no' for an answer, and over the eight-or-so months of their courtship he had slowly weathered his way onto her body. On their six-month anniversary he saw her naked for the first time--something no man had ever seen before--and took the opportunity to introduce her to the world of cunnilingus. Not that he was particularly good at it. Robin was much more sensitive, much more orgasmic, than most women, a fact Clarence took to his advantage; eventually would get into the habit of diddling her up just enough to make her wet, and then climbing aboard and going to town. Sex might last five minutes. The first time he fucked her, it lasted less. He had been going down on her, "introducing" her to oral sex, when suddenly his mouth disappeared and he moved up. And, without so much as a if-you-don't-mind, she was not a virgin anymore.
She got a Depo-Provera shot the next day--and a morning-after pill, something she had always sworn she would never use, because it was too similar to abortion, too similar to murder. And yet what could she do? She believed in a woman's right to choose... But had she chosen? Could she have stopped him? And what should she do now? Should she admit defeat? No; that was not in her nature. She would make the best of it. She would do what she could with what she had. She was delighted when he proposed.
It was, quite possibly, the last time she felt happy. At least, until Nathan.
She next met Nathan at her graduating class' five-year reunion. He shouldn't have been there, but the temporary patch allowing the alumni to use their Stag Cards to buy food, just like they had back in the old days, had gone down, and the president of the university realized it was a weekend, but they were willing to pay him overtime and there was no one else they could turn to and could he
please
... When he first saw her he barely recognized her. She was heavier than she had been before, but there was a bleakness of heart, of spirit, that hung around her. The innocence--what little had been there to begin with; she was never one to remain ignorant when she had the choice--was blanketed over now by stoop-shouldered defeatism. He asked his assistant to ask that lady over there--no, that one--yes, the fat one, Jesus, is that all you think about--if she could come over and he could test her Stag Card. It still didn't work--the system still wasn't acknowledging the ad-hoc $50 every account number from her school year should have attached to it--but that wasn't why he'd called for her anyway.
It was hard to get her to talk. She was tired. She was living on her own in a seedy part of town, at the end of a messy and contentious divorce that had left her and her ex-husband quite a lot poorer than they started (but their lawyers much richer), and working two minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet. Ends weren't meeting. She might have to move home. Her parents assured her she would be welcome, but, well... He knew how it was, didn't he? Yes he did. And what he saw he wasn't pleased with. The fearless willingness to face the truth, to not flinch in the face of reality, that he had loved so, was now replaced with bitterness and bone-deep weariness. She didn't even soften why she had come to this reunion: it wasn't to meet old friends or renew business connections. What did she have to offer, except her body? No; she was here for her MRS degree.
Nathan made some calls. As it just so happened, his company was looking for a part-time, ad-hoc secretary/receptionist. He could offer better hours than her current jobs, and much better wages. It was flattering to think that maybe she had come here looking for him; but no, he wasn't from the same graduating class, he shouldn't have been here at all. He wasn't the type to lie to himself. But now she was here, and he was too, and he had to do something.
He asked her out in the most outrageous way possible: by firing her. After eight months of better conditions and much more sleep, she had some of her old fire back. She was passionate, challenging what she thought was wrong, fighting for what she thought was right. But that youthful fire had been tempered by the rigid winds of pain; she was more willing to admit she was wrong, more understanding of compromise, a better peacekeeper. He was with her through all of it--helping her buy furniture, treating her to lunch, helping her make or re-make friends. He was at her side through all of it, as she slowly woke up from her nightmare, and he burned for her; she had never been more lovely to him. But he and she both knew how stupid it was to date her boss. So he told her he had a friend in the publishing industry who needed someone like her, and that he had set up an interview for her tomorrow, and then gave her a pink slip with the dinner reservations and that age-old question scribbled across the bottom. Once she understood what was going on, she slapped him, while everyone in the office laughed.
But she did agree to go out with him.
He would be thirty soon, and they had been going out for a year and a half. He felt confident that she was the one, but at her insistence they didn't rush things, giving it a lengthy courtship. Of course, sex was on hold, the way it had been the first time, and for a while quite a lot of the emotional and physical intimacies of love were belayed as well. Robin needed distance. Robin needed to delay. She had gone to the altar with one man already, and it had been a horrendous mistake. True, Nathan was about as opposite from Clarence as it was possible to get; but opposite didn't mean better, just different. Robin had been burned. She was wary now. She saw how much her flightiness wore on Nathan, saw how much patience he had to muster to stay with her, and wished she could do something about it; but she needed to know, for herself, in herself, that she wouldn't be making a mistake this time.
But they were together again. She was the head of the editing department at her publisher's; he ran his business. They cooked together, did the dishes together, argued over the television together, went to the gym together (more for his sake than hers, now that her weight had stabilized), grumbled together, laughed together. They had started to talk a little bit about what it might be like to be married; then the conversations stopped being "if" and started being "when". She was comfortable with him, relaxed in a way she had never been able to be, not even the first time; she knew he had seen her at her worst, and not turned away, and that she could be herself with him and still be loved. She could kiss him, or feel his arm around her, or even just call him up and hear his voice, and know (deep in that place below conscious thought) that she was in the right place.
