Angela Pt. 01

"God, I hope not, but if I did, I'll step up. Could you tell me where she went? Can you give me her cell number?"

"I don't know where she went, she was so upset. Maybe to the cafeteria, to get breakfast, or, who knows, maybe over to Student Health, to try and get a morning after pill."

"How 'bout her cell number. Heidi, I've just got to talk to her."

"If she wants to talk to you, then she'll look you up. Obviously, she knows where you live."

"Heidi, please, how can I be a man about this if I have to wait timidly for her to call me?"

I guess that was the right thing to say, because Heidi snatched my phone out of my hand and plugged Angie's number in it. "You had better do the right thing, asshole," was the last thing she said to me, before closing the door.

So, I headed down to the cafeteria. My head was still throbbing, and food would surely help things. Trouble was, as I scanned the room, Angie wasn't there. So, instead of breakfast, I got a large, to go cup of coffee, black. That would help some, and I needed the liquid to rehydrate, though maybe coffee isn't the ideal hydration drink.

I knew where Student Health was, and that was the only other clue Heidi could give me, so I headed that way, but nope, I didn't see Angie there, either. If there had been a sign-up sheet I could have checked it, to see if maybe she was back in an exam room, but I guess that they don't have those for patient privacy reasons.

I had two choices now: I could just walk around and look for her, but there were 30,000 students at UK, on a huge campus. How the heck could I expect to just run into her? Or I could call her cell, since Heidi gave me the number. Since Angie didn't have my number, it would just come up on her phone, without warning her that it was me. But it sure wasn't a confidence booster thinking that she might only answer if she didn't know it was me calling.

I was just walking around, slowly, sort of searching but halfway just wandering aimlessly, trying to decide if I should call her. It was only 8:30 on Saturday morning, kind of misty in the cool, early Autumn morning, and most students weren't out-and-about yet.

Can't say that I had the best searching technique in the world; too often I caught myself not scanning the distance, but looking down at the ground. A million thoughts were running through my head, a lot of them unpleasant. The alcohol hadn't kept me from remembering last night, and how wonderful it was to be with such a warm, passionate girl, how great it felt to make love to her, and how much she seemed to want me as well. But then there were the other thoughts, about how she screamed that I ruined her life. "I hate your fucking guts!" she had screamed at me, as she was slamming my dorm room behind her when she left. There's just no way to soft-peddle that one: having the girl who made love to me last night screaming out her hatred in the morning was not exactly a cheery thought.

I had to look up, and around as I came to the curb, to check the traffic before crossing the street; getting squished by a Hyundai wasn't exactly what I wanted to do this morning, though as low as I felt, maybe that wouldn't have been the worst thing. Maybe it was what I really deserved.

And that's when I spotted her. Oh, I wasn't sure that it was Angela, not at this distance, but I could see someone, sitting on a bench near the brick walls across from the Funkhouser Building. Funkhouser dated from the forties, and I guess it used to be a classroom building, though now it held some administrative offices. That worried me: that might be the place a girl could go to report a sexual assault. I knew that it wasn't an assault, that she had been just as eager as I had been, but that was last night; who knows how she might see things this morning? All that she had to do was say that she was drunk, too drunk to consent, and I'd be done at UK, even though I had been just as intoxicated as she was.

At any rate, I walked toward her, still not sure it was Angie. It could have been, though: whoever it was was short, like Angie was, and appeared to have short, dark blonde hair, like Angie's. Finally I got close enough to see: she was staring straight ahead, at Funkhouser, not down the sidewalk as I approached. Her face was set like stone, not crying, but not happy, as though she was trying to pull herself together.

Damn it, I knew it, I was toast. Being Saturday, the administrative offices in Funkhouser were closed, and if it was her goal to report me, she could easily see that that wasn't the place, not on a weekend anyway. But I didn't know if that was her goal, or if she'd just picked this bench randomly.

"Angela," I said as I was about ten feet away from her, sort of quietly, really just loudly enough for her to have heard me. She turned her head toward me, and those big, beautiful green or were they hazel, eyes from last night looked dead black, lifeless eyes, the way Quint described a shark's eyes in Jaws.

And her voice was lifeless, too. "What do you want?"

"Angie, I want to talk to you."

"Maybe I don't want to talk to you, did you ever think of that?"

"Angie, I need to talk to you, I love you."

Well, that brought her up short! It took her a second or two to process that, before she finally said, "Oh, bullshit, you don't love me, you're just saying that shit." With that, she stood up.

Thing is, I don't know why I said that, hadn't thought about it at all, it just came out. I guess that every guy is going to think that the first girl he sleeps with is special, but it felt real to me, not that I had any experience with things being real.

"No, it's true, I really do love you." I persisted. Angie had stood up, like she was going to turn her back on me and walk away, but she didn't.

"Well, I love Steve, and I just fucking ruined that, didn't I?"

Part of me felt relief; she had said that she had ruined it, not me, and that meant - I hoped! - that she wasn't going to claim that I had assaulted her or taken advantage of her being drunk.

"Angie, nothing is ruined, to me, everything is wonderful, amazing. You're just a marvelous girl, and I want to be with you, I want us to have something together."

"Don't you get it? I don't love you, I don't like you, I hate you, I hate your fucking guts!"

"Angie, don't hate me, nothing is ruined. Don't you see? It could be us, the two of us who are together. That's what I want, anyway. You know, I gave you my virginity the same time you gave me yours."

"Oh, cut the crap. Everybody knows that doesn't mean the same thing for a guy as it does for a girl."

"It does to me."

I think that kind of shocked her. She was still angry with me, but she hadn't turned her back, hadn't walked away. Whether she really hated me or not, she was at least listening to me.

Actually, she was more than just listening. I'm not really sure how it had happened, but we were close, as in in each other's personal space close. Somehow, some way, I had her hands in mine, not hard, but gently, and we were close enough that she had to look up to talk to me. The lifeless eyes? Those were gone, too, and whether she realized it or not, those big, beautiful hazel eyes had returned.

Oh, they were wet, certainly enough, as though she had been crying, but they were just enough to give me some hope. "Angie," I said, my voice half a whisper, and then I reached down to kiss her.

It was a soft kiss, a bare brush on the lips, but long enough that I could tell she liked it, and was returning it. Then she pushed away, saying, "Simon, we can't be doing this. I love Steve, and I'm going to marry him."

That wasn't the kind of statement I wanted to hear, and maybe it was wrong of me to want to fight for this girl, but I did anyway. "And have you told Steve about us yet?"

"There is no 'us,' Simon! Last night was a mistake, a horrid mistake." Angela had pulled away from me a little, out of 'personal space' range, as it were, but was still not walking away.

Then, for some stupid reason, I made things easier for her, with the kind of statement which helped keep me a virgin for so long. "You have a gymnast's body. Did you do gymnastics growing up?"

"Yes, all the way through high school, but I wasn't good enough to get a college scholarship. Why?"

"Because a woman who did gymnastics all of those years could easily have broken her hymen years ago, so I guess that your Steve would never know about us. And that leaves it completely up to you as to whether to tell him or not." Holy Hell, I had just given her an out! But I persisted. "Still, if you're going to be honest, you have to tell him."

"It would crush him! He'd be devastated! Our first time was going to be on our wedding night!" She burst out in tears at that. And then she fell into my arms, crying into my chest, and I did the only thing I could, hugging her, trying to comfort her, and kissing her on the top of her head.

Then I half-way friend-zoned myself, because I'm stupid. "Angie, if he really loves you, he'll understand, and he'll get over it. But I do love you, and I want us to be together, not you and Steve. Come on, I'll walk you back to the dorm."

Shit, what was I doing? Well, maybe this would work out for me, because Angie started walking back to the dorm, with me, still sniffling a bit, but not running away from me, not pushing me away. They say that a woman never forgets the first man she sleeps with, and one thing was certain: whether we ever got together again, Angie would never forget me.

In my mind, I kept debating what I should do now. I wanted to take her hand, to hold her hand as we were walking back, but she kept them jammed tightly into her jacket pockets. No one seeing us now would think that we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and if we didn't look like that, then I guess we weren't.

But I wanted to be, damn, I wanted to be!

We were getting close to the dorm, and the cafeteria, when I stopped and pulled her a little closer to me, personal space close, but just barely, enough to talk to her, as a hopeful boyfriend, but not so close that it would be an unwanted assault. "Listen, Angela, I've already told you that I love you. Please, please, don't hate me."

Man, that put it right out there! I had been trying to work out, in my mind, ahead of time, what I wanted to say, but this wound up completely spontaneous.

And I think it worked. She reached her arms out, putting her hands on either side of my waist, looked up at me, still with moist eyes, and said, in almost a whisper, "I don't hate you."

"Oh, thank God," I said, and then I pulled her the rest of the way into my arms, holding her. She had her head in my chest, not really the right position to kiss her, but this was enough, it was enough for now.

I don't know how long I held her like that, certainly more than a few seconds, and almost an eternity. I had a chance!