Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

V practices restraint

Vanessa sat cross-legged on her futon mattress with her iMac in her lap, forcing herself to write a boring, friendly e-mail when what she really wanted to do was show up unannounced at Dan's house again, dive under his sad frayed Spider-Man quilt, and ravage his hopelessly pale, spent, and hungover bones. His room had been dark when she helped him into bed the night before, lit only by the flickering blue computer screen. She could just make out more of Jenny's artwork hanging crookedly from the walls. Who could not love such a devoted brother? He was the sweetest boy alive.

Dear Dan,
Hope you are feeling okay today. Just wanted to thank you for the pepperoni. We should catch a foreign flick sometime when you're feeling up to it. Maybe tomorrow at the Paris? Oh, but you have that big Hamlet term paper to write. Skip it. Spring break is in two weeks—let's definitely get together then. I promise not to do anything you're not ready for.

Her unmanicured fingers hovered over the gray keyboard. She'd wanted to be encouraging, but what she'd written sounded like she was ready to do all sorts of kinky things. Actually, she was pretty sure she would like to do all sorts of kinky things with Dan, but that wan't what she meant. She just wanted him to know that she wasn't going to try and kiss him again. Not when it had made him so nervous he'd fainted. She'd just have to restrain herself and wait for him to kiss her.

She erased everything except the first three lines of the e-mail and then added,

See you over spring break, maybe. xo —V

P.S. E-mail me those poems immediately when you finish them!

She pressed send and then clicked on the pages of Dan's poems that were already stored in her computer. She scanned through them, lingering on the lines she treasured most. Do they wear black like you? . . . We only just met but . . . bite me.

Yes, she would restrain herself. Then, sometime soon, Dan would be in the middle of writing a poem and suddenly realize that he could stand it no more. He'd rush out to Brooklyn, take her in his arms, and kiss her madly, desperately. From then on they would be inseparable. In fifteen years, when Dan won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and she won an Oscar for her courageous documentary about the detritus of the city, they would leak the news that she had been the muse for his poetry since he first began to write. They would live together in a crazy factory loft building in Williamsburg and create raw, magical masterpieces together until they died in each other's shriveled arms at the age of one hundred and three. Books would be written about them. They'd be famous for their work and for their partnership in love and art, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Together forever.

Sounds like the stuff of poetry. Or fiction.