He wasn’t good with his hands. I thought he didn’t really know what he was doing, so I made up my mind to help him out. I tried to show him the kind of thing I wanted, pushed him down flat on his bed and pulled his hair right above the neck so he closed his eyes. He found my hips and pressed me into him. And for a second there, I thought things were going to get interesting.

I had been feeling pretty low, dancing with my friends in a bar, trying not to check my phone for missed calls from Eddy when I spotted the guy over by the wall, on the edge of all the commotion. He was standing by himself, sipping a brown drink. His name was Jack, and I’d seen him around a lot. He’d smoked with me a few times, given me a few rides home. Once, outside our friends’ house, we smoked a blunt in the trunk of his SUV and watched the stars, which felt corny to me even at the time. We were out there for a while, just the two of us and could barely hear the thumping of the speakers from the party because he was parked up the street a bit.

That night, I reminded him that we were just friends, and he said okay. After that, I hadn’t seen him too much.

So when I saw him in the bar, I thought I would go over and say hi.

He was happy to see me. He smiled and offered to buy me a drink, but I hated letting guys get me drinks. I thought it made girls look cheap, so I refused. But grateful to be in a conversation with someone who wasn’t an asshole, I stuck around and talked with him. We got to dancing a little bit when put his hands on my waist and I let him do it. He tried some other stuff, but I told him he needed to act like a gentleman in public.

After enough drinking, I followed him to his car, got in, and rode home with him, all the time knowing what I was getting into. But when it came to it, on top of him in his queen sized bed, his stomach hair like wire grass clinging to my thighs, I wasn’t into it.

I kissed him a bit more but then slid off to the side. He asked me what my problem was and I told him it wasn’t really anything, but I was feeling tired. So he said okay, and we spooned a little bit. But his junk was touching my ass the whole time, so things started heating up again. Though once he got going, doing his thing and breathing heavy, trying to touch me all over, I got pretty bored. Lying still on my back, I looked at all the stuff tacked onto his wall. He had albums from the Beatles and Hendrix and Lou Reed all staring out from their black and white tableaus. There were flags and popular film posters, and I thought the place looked like the inside of an airport bookstore.

Jack was sucking my neck too hard when I told him I didn’t want to have sex with him, and he said okay. Really, I just wanted to leave, but Jack said he had his heart set on going down on me. I told him I really didn’t feel like I was up to blowing him at all and just wanted to go home. But he told me it wasn’t about a blow job, and he said some really nice things and started kissing me and telling me he liked me a lot. So I let him do what he wanted and closed my eyes and tried to have a nice time.

For a minute, things were going pretty great. I thought, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I was finally taking everybody’s advice and forgetting about all the shit I went through with Eddy for the past three years, and getting some real action for once. But I started thinking about how Eddy could call at any time. The phone would ring and his name would light up the screen laying over on the nightstand, and Jack would wonder why I had some guy calling. Then I remembered since it was the weekend he’d probly have a girl, or else he would have called already. Not wanting to make an image of Eddy and a girl in my mind, I opened my eyes and looked at Hendrix and Lou Reed and tried to picture the room from their perspective. And actually, that was starting to get me somewhere, but then Jack stopped and asked how I was liking it. So I kissed him and told him just to lay down with me.

He put an arm around me, and I guess he felt pretty good about himself because he was acting like he was about to go right to sleep. I tried to relax there in the dark next to him for a little while and let him run his fingers over my back in a haphazard way that gave me goose bumps. I wondered if someone was doing the same to Eddy because he always liked that. He would call me up late a few nights a week when he was drunk and needed a ride home and then ask me to stay and scratch his back in the same way Jack was doing. Usually, I would do it. I would get in bed with him and hope he would ask for something more, but he never did. He wasn’t in love with me anymore.

Shrugging Jack’s hand off my back, I told him I couldn’t stay, which he didn’t like. I felt bad telling him, especially in light of what had just happened between us, but I wasn’t feeling too great, in general. I just needed to get home.

Jack walked me to his car and drove me down the road where I lived, and really didn’t give me much grief about it. When we got to my place, I was feeling pretty guilty over the whole thing, so I grabbed him and kissed him in way which maybe wasn’t fair because he was all breathless when we said goodbye.

Climbing the stairs to my place, I took it slow because I liked the way the breeze was picking up and blowing the smell of Jack’s body off me. But also, I was thinking that he really seemed like kind of a nice guy, and I started feeling pretty guilty over how things went. The dim light in the stairwell shifted like a strobe from the movement of bugs caught inside the fluorescents. They were buzzing around, smacking into each other, frantic to go free. At the top of the stairs I fumbled with my keys for a bit and looked out into the parking lot where Jack’s car was just then starting to roll away, and I felt bad over the whole thing. I guessed mostly for him. Give it a few days, I thought, turning my key in the lock. Something like this wouldn’t matter to anyone.