Page 33 of Puck
“God, Puck.”
I nod. “So, I bring her inside, and she sits on my couch, and says she has a favor to ask.” I pause, and then pitch my voice high. “‘You can’t say no, because I’m dying, and you’re not allowed to deny a dying person their last request.’ That’s what she said to me, verbatim.”
“Dear god.”
“Yeah, pretty much. So I’m like, ‘all right, what’s your request?’ She tells me she doesn’t want to die a virgin. She’d been waiting for the right guy, the right time, and then she got sick, and it would be cruel at that point to get involved with someone emotionally. Apparently there was a guy, but she’d pretended she wasn’t in love with him so he wouldn’t get all invested with a dead girl walking. That was her phrase—dead girl walking.”
“This sounds like a novel.”
“Felt like one,” I said. “So I tell her I assumed she wanted me to . . . be the one. And she just nodded. My head was spinning. Like, what the fuck? What was I supposed to do? Again, I was at a complete loss. She said . . . she didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know hers, and she wanted it to stay like that. She didn’t want me to pretend feelings, don’t make it weird. But she also didn’t want to just . . . get it over with, right? She wanted to enjoy it, but keep it impersonal to a degree.”
“Goddamn, Puck.”
“So, I agreed. Like she said, I couldn’t be like, no, I’m not doing that. I mean, it felt fucked up, you know? But, at the same time, if you look at it from another perspective, it didn’t have to be that much different than any other random hook-up. I just had to put aside the fact of her terminal illness and just pretend she was . . . just some nameless chick I’d picked up at the bar.”
“And that’s what you did?”
I nodded. “I did.”
Colbie was silent for a while. “So?”
I eyed her. “So . . . what?”
She snorted. “You can’t stop now. What happened?”
I blinked. “Um, well . . . I slept with her.”
“And?”
“And what?” I paused. “What is it you want to hear? A play by play?”
“Was it good? Was it hot?”
“It was . . . yeah. It was good. It was hot. I told her the only way I could make sure she had a good experience was if we had sex more than once. I’d never been with a virgin, but I knew enough to know the first time was never very good. And I didn’t want her first time to be her only time, and have it be . . . anything less than memorable, I guess. So we started out kissing. Good place to start, right? The girl could kiss, too. I mean, damn. She had that shit down. I let her just sort of . . . dictate things, to start with. Figure out whether she really wanted to carry through with it, you know?” I hesitated, feeling oddly protective of the details. “She was . . . eager. After that first time, she was . . . insatiable. She stayed with me for two days. I called off work, said I had a family crisis to deal with. A boldface lie, but whatever. I made sure she had the time of her life. We never exchanged names, and we never talked about our pasts. Basically, we spent the better part of forty-eight hours eating, fucking, and sleeping.”
“Wow.”
I shrugged. “I . . . I wasn’t ever quite able to completely forget . . . the circumstances, but I like to think she was able to do that for those two days.”
“How’d it end?”
“I woke up, the morning of the third day, and she was in my bathroom, sick. She asked me to call her cab, so I did. She kissed me, told me thank you for giving her a priceless gift, and then left.”
Colbie was silent for a while and then sighed. “And you never saw her again?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Well, not in person. I was reading the local newspaper one morning about a month later, and I was trying to fold the fucking thing so I could read the comics, and the obituary section fell out. I saw her face.” I paused, tugging on my beard. “I put the paper down before I could read anything about her. Threw the paper away and went to work.”
I could tell this threw Colbie. “Why? You didn’t want to know? Not even her name?”
“I wanted to know more than anything. But her request was that she remain anonymous to me.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know. It’s something I think about, sometimes.” I shrugged. “My best guess is that she wanted me to remember the time we spent together for what it was, rather than associating it her with her life. She didn’t want to become some mythic, tragic figure for me.”
“Is that how you see her?”
I shook my head. “Honestly, no. It worked. I know absolutely nothing about her. All I know, all I remember, is two days of what was, if I’m honest, really great sex. When I start to feel nostalgic or start to put some kind of tragic angle on my feelings toward her, I think about those two days spent naked, making her feel things she’d never felt before. I think about the sex, and I make it about that. Because I like to think that’s what she wanted. And also because otherwise, I might go a little crazy over the whole thing.”