Billie Girl

Chapter Fourteen

It took him many hours to get back into town again, but soon there he was before me, in his car, with the motor running, and I hopped into the passenger seat.

The first we thing we did was embrace like it was New Year's Eve, but really it was New Year's day and hey, that was better than nothing. It was the start of a new year and a new life together. Blake ran his hands through my tangled hair, but not in the way that most guys did (they were always trying to fix my hair, or comb it with their fingers), Blake accepted every snag his fingers got caught in. He was never one to tell me to wash my hair or any of that meaningless stuff. We were so very French New Wave in our way.

As we kissed. He tasted like the black coffee he probably had been drinking during his drive to my house. Together we blended like we were in those super sultry pictures in Interview magazines where the models look gaunt and blank-faced except in this case, Blake was far more painfully skinny than me, and I was far from blank-faced. I was positively elated.

And with his tongue tangoing with mine, I still managed to say, "Yes, I will" and my voice sounded weird and distorted. And this cracked us up. But we didn't go completely bonkers like we would if Tova were there. She was still in my bed sleeping. That girl just loved to sleep late.

"So we are going to do this," he said with moist soft lips touching my neck.

"Yesssss," I answered while licking his whiskered jaw. It was like sandpaper and so manly. He was a man, not a boy at all. He was what I wanted, someone who "got" me.

"Are you really into it?" He whispered into my ear. Now, he was pushing his luck. I mean Jeez, I just said yes, what more did he want from me?

So I said to him, "Do you want me to spend ten thousand dollars and pay to have the words, "I will marry you, Blake" written in bold letters on a billboard Downtown?"

"Do you want me to pay ten grand to have the words: "Marry me, Billie girl" sky-written above your mom's house?"

We were joking around with each other because we didn't know how engaged kids were supposed to act. All we knew was that we were rushing into things and that's what made it so fun and special.

So I was walking on cloud nine in seventh heaven and feeling like the luckiest girl alive because surely everything was going to work out from then on. Isn't that the way it is in movies? From what I had seen, most romantic comedies were about how two people get together, and when the wedding comes that's pretty much it, and it is time to play a cute current pop song on the soundtrack and watch all the minor characters at the wedding party hook up. The end.

But things didn't always turn out perfectly for me. Was that because I refused to go all the way with a guy? Tova assured me that nothing worked out for her, either even though she had done it with "two-and-a-half guys." And that didn't make everything all right.

The guy she half did it with only counted for half because he got so excited seeing her in her Victoria Secret lingerie (that she purchased with her mother's credit card) that he kind of, well, spilled the beans before the act.

She told me she had flamenco music playing in her bedroom and she was sitting on her bed in a pose that surely any painter might want to capture. In fact, he was a painter, and had seen her posing at the Kendall College.

You see, Tova's way of moonlighting was not to strip (that was too cheap for her) but instead to lie about her age on a fabricated ID which she created herself on her computer, and she laminated it and got work posing naked for adult education art classes at night. I bet that the sight of Tova sitting on a velvet draped stool with bright lights shining on her naked body had haunted this boy's dreams long before he got the guts to ask her out. "Which was pretty darn ballsy," Tova had said. She asked him to bring his sketch pad and the dusty, messy charcoal sticks to her house where she once again posed for him and well, the rest is history. Just his luck he would misfire into his boxers and she would take this as a cue from God (which she kinda believed in) to bow out gracefully. Then they ended up laughing about the whole debacle over sesame noodles at the run-down Chinese place in East Town. I hoped that when Blake and I had sex for the first time, that he would be able to contain himsel,f but if he came too fast, I suppose I would be flattered.