I put my hand on his hand and move it back to my knee. He keeps it there and tightens his grip on me and kisses my neck for a while, but a few minutes later he slides it back up and I have to move it again.
“Sorry,” I breathe.
He stops and looks up at me. “For what?” He tucks some hair behind my ear.
“No, yeah, I mean about...” I gesture at my thigh. If I needed proof that I wasn't ready to have sex, my inability to say anything related to it out loud would be a pretty good clue.
“It's okay,” he says. “We can go slow.”
“Yeah...” I say. “But that's the thing. There's going to be a stopping point no matter how slow we go.”
He leans back in his seat, watches me. “Okay.”
I feel like I'm shrinking. “Are you mad?”
“Hey, no. Just listening.”
“Okay.”
“Is this like a Catholic thing?”
“Maybe. I don't know. I just...this is as far as I've ever been, y'know? Southern territories have never been explored.”
“You are such a dork, Cipriano.”
“Shut up or I'll get off your lap.”
He laughs. “I'm not going to push you,” he says. “You don't have to worry.”
I'm quiet. I can see him, lit up by the moonlight and the fluorescent sign of the liquor store in the shopping center next to where we've pulled off the road. I watch him frown, slowly.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing.”
“You've got something to say.”
“I just...I just wonder if you'd be this patient with me if you weren't having sex with somebody else already.”
He lets his breath out slowly. “We don't have to talk about this, y'know?”
“You asked me what I was thinking.”
“I know. And I'm telling you for your sake that this isn't...something you have to think about. You don't have to be all...competey.”
I slide off his lap and back into my seat and shut off the music. “That's not even a word.”
“Yeah, I couldn't think of the adjective.”
“Competitive.”
“Ugh. Right.” He's quiet for a minute. “Okay...I need to ask something.”
I know what it is. Of course I know. “Okay.”
“Do you...not like her?” Yep.
“I...”
“I know that it's complicated,” he says, quickly. “And I know that there's gonna be some amount of tension and that's really part of it and that's something you have to choose if you want to...but I don't think that's the same as just not liking her.”
Everything is slipping away, so hard and fast that I swear I can physically feel it leaving me.
Stop stop stop.
But I can't. “What if hypothetically I didn't like her?” I say. “Hypothetically.”
He sighs.
“Would you break up with me?”
“I don't think so. I don't know.” He squirms around a little. “I mean...it would be hard dating someone who didn't like my best friend. Have you ever done that?”
“No.”
“It would be like...not liking a part of me. So I guess it would be weird.”
“But she's not just your best friend. You can't pretend that it's that simple.”
“I'm not,” he says. “But not liking someone is a pretty simple feeling. So if you can reduce it to that...maybe I could reduce to something simple too.”
“I didn't reduce it to that,” I say. “You brought it up.”
“You did hypothetically,” he says.
Right. “Yeah. Hypothetically.”
“Should we get back on the road?” he says.
“Okay.”
We're quiet, just listening to the clicks of the walk/don't walk timers at stoplights and the whisper noises of the other cars. We've merged onto the highway before I even sort of know what to say.
“It's not simple,” I say. “The way I feel about her. I don't know anything but I know that it's not simple.”
“She's not easy,” he says. “She takes time to grow on people. Even people who aren't girlfriends with her boyfriend. But I swear she's—”
“Can you not?” I say. “I don't need you to tell me how great she is.”
“Okay.”
“Next you're going to be talking about how she's great in bed or whatever.” I slump back against my seat and feel so childish and stupid.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he says. “The sex thing?”
I shrug.
“Do you know...” he says. “What it is in particular that bothers you? Is it like...the imagery of it?”
Well, now that you mention it. “It's more like...I don't know. Like what are you getting out of you and me if you're getting so much more from her.”
“...See, now I kind of want to have sex with you just to show you it's not that big a deal.”
“Oh, great, that's why you want to have sex with me.”
“You are a difficult person to have difficult conversations with, m'dear.”
I tip my head back against my window and look at him. “I know.”
“It's true, though,” he says. “Sex gets hyped up as this huge deal, this really important aspect of relationships, but it's like...it's just a thing. It's just kissing but more.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“But still more.”
“Just...physically, not like, in significance.”
I say, “I guess I just don't understand what the point of me is if you get all the relationship stuff plus sex from her.”
“But you can't just blanket-ly put relationship stuff on everything. Each little thing is its own thing. I don't have to be careful what I say around you the way I do with her. I don't have to make sure I'm saying exactly what I want to say because she's going to latch on to every word. You let me...revise, I guess.”
In a way I kind of am a revision, but I don't say that.
“I don't have the new relationship excitement with her,” he says. “I don't get to be with someone who's incredibly brave starting this
