“YOU KNOW,” I said, “if I had been there, if I had been there beside you instead of Denny, we would have had a lot to say, we would have had a lively conversation, we would have had a lot of laughs.”
“Oh, Peter. Stop torturing yourself. You would have been as tongue-tied as Denny.”
“But I always had a lot to say to you when we were alone at your parents’, when we were in the little room, watching television together.”
“But I wasn’t available then. You know what I mean?”
“Ah—”
“I wasn’t available to you. Sexually.”
“Oh.”
“The possibility of our having sex wasn’t buzzing around everything we said, every gesture we made, threatening to sting one of us at any minute. You may have thought it was, you may have wished that it was, but it wasn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“You were a child.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“For Denny and me, sex was in the air. I was available to him. And he knew it. It changes everything.”
FINALLY, the oafish dolt said, without turning to look at Ariane, “So, what do you say we go down to the docks?”
He was clutching his beer can for security, twisting it round and round while he struggled to seem indifferent, nonchalant.
“Dennnny—” she said, stretching his name out, as if she were reproaching him for his forwardness, but being playful about it, making it a parody of a reproach, turning her head to the side, toward him, smiling a knowing smile, raising her left eyebrow, “—cut it out.”
He said, “Hey—don’t take it the wrong way. Lots of the kids are going. The party’s kind of winding down, and—”
He lost all his confidence at once, like a dying man giving up the ghost, like a cartoon cat giving up its lives one by one, little cat souls drifting from the cartoon corpse like limp deflated balloons, but those cartoon cats always manage to reach up with their dying breath and grab hold of the last of their lives, and Denny managed to hang on to the very last bit of self-confidence, and managed to finish what he wanted to say, though with little hope.
“—oh, you know, they’re going to go down to the docks, have some laughs.” He shrugged.
“Okay,” said Ariane. She felt sorry for him. He was so clumsy. “If that’s the way it is,” she said. “But I’m telling you now, Denny—if we get there and nobody else is there, I’m getting right out of the car and going home. I don’t care if I have to walk.”
She was doing such a good job of not coming on like the Town Slut that she was starting to sound like the Virgin Princess. She thought the performance needed tempering, so she smiled. Smiles, she thought, when she saw the way Denny’s hopes immediately began to rise. You have to learn to be more careful about the way you use those smiles, Toots.
“Fair enough,” said Denny. He shrugged again, as if he were barely interested, but he knew that Ariane had a reputation, and his hopes were high.
[to be continued]
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