Hell on Church Street (7 page)

She said, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. I’m sorry about showing up like this. You live closer than any of my friends, and my father keeps the only phone in the house in his bedroom.”

“Gee, make me feel special why don’t you?” I teased.

“No,” she said with that pleading smile only a teenage girl can master. “It’s not that. I think you’re great.”

“Thank you. I think you’re pretty wonderful yourself.”

She smiled. My angel.

“I should go,” she said.

I said okay. We stood up and I walked her to the door. She touched the doorknob but turned around before she opened the door.

“I can’t believe you’ve never been in love. You’re the sweetest guy.”

I smiled. “I’m waiting for the love of my life,” I said.

She stared at me, opened her mouth to say something but then didn’t. She smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“C’mon, it was something.”

She bit her lip. “Can I come back over here again?”

I had to take a deep breath just to find any breath at all. “Of course.”

“I just like talking to you.”

I looked into her eyes, and I didn’t blink. Neither did she. I told her, “I like talking to you, too.”

She blushed, turned and opened the door and slipped out into the night. I stood there for a moment. My hands trembled. Something inevitable was moving beneath the surface of my life, moving inside of me. I knew it, and it scared me, but I couldn’t stop it.

After that first night, she started slipping out to see me.

I did very little on each occasion. Please believe that. She sat on the couch and talked and talked and I listened. Oh, I said things here and there, mostly affirming her view of the injustices visited upon her by her parents, but I didn’t touch her one bit except for a hug to greet her and one to see her off. She came to think of me as a valuable friend and ally, certainly against her parents, but also against Oscar. It wasn’t that he was mean to her. It was worse than that. He didn’t know she existed. To make matters still harder for Angela, he would occasionally grin at her in the hall between classes, one of his big meaningless goofy grins, and every one of them was a bullet to her young heart.

Even though a lot of those early conversations were about Oscar, it was still fun to talk to her. She was, I suppose, the only girl I’d ever really sat and talked to for hours.
All of it—her voice and her fears and her dreams and even her stupid love for that boy, all of it made me love her.
Her self-esteem was lower than a slave’s, but she could be funny and sweet, and everything about her fascinated me.

One night we were sitting and talking, and she told me, “I’ve never kissed a boy before.”

“This sounds like the beginning of a question.”

She chuckled. “Is that weird or what?”

“It’s not so weird,” I said.

“Why?”

“I think God wants us to wait until we find the right person. The one he intends for us.”

She nodded, but then a wicked little smile crept onto her lips.

“Yeah. Well, that’s not why I’ve been waiting, you know. It’d be nice if I
was
waiting for that, but I’ve been waiting because I have to. I
ain’t
got a lot of options.”

I wanted to lean over and kiss her then, of course, but I thought,
wait.

“You’ll do lots of kissing before you’re done,” I said. “The Lord shall provide.”

She laughed and blushed and looked at her hands. When she looked back up at me, the space between us hung with the weight of what we weren’t saying yet.

Finally, I broke it with a joke. We moved on to something else, but when she left that night she gave me a long hug. Then she stared at me for a while.

“You think I’ll get to do some kissing?” she asked finally.

“I guarantee it,” I said.

The next time she showed up things
were
different. We were both acting odd. She was nervous, but she was dressed up. She wore makeup and her hair smelled nice. She just looked so pretty.

My hormones were having an orgy. I swear to God, it was like I was sixteen. The difference, of course, was that I never got near a girl when I was sixteen.

We sat on the couch, just talking, and she kept looking at me. The lights were low, and it was late, and she just stared at me.

“Angela,” I said.

She smiled. “I like when you say my name.” Her face turned red; I could tell, even in the dark. I think I must have been the first man she’d ever flirted with. Her hands shook, and she held them tight on her lap.

“I like saying your name,” I said.

She tried to smile and bit her lip at the same time. Poor thing.

“Angela?”

“Yes.”

“Can I kiss you?”

She looked off and up and feigned thought. “Hmm.” Then she smiled and we both laughed. “Yes,” she said. When she said it, it was as if that little bastard Oscar had never been born. She never mentioned his name again.

I leaned over and took her trembling hand in my trembling hand and kissed her. She was the first girl I’d ever kissed. She is still the only girl I have ever kissed. I was at least as scared as she was.

After that we made out every time she came over. It progressed quickly into touching each other. Finally, one night it ended with us on my bed, our clothes half off and Angela pushing me away, “We shouldn’t,” she said. She covered her chest with one arm and her soft, white gut with the other arm.

“But we love each other,” I said.

She said, “I love you more than anything, but we can’t do this. What about the Lord?”

I took her hands slowly away from her torso and noticed a brown birthmark above her navel. “I want to marry you,” I said.

She touched her bare chest as if she were short of breath. “Do you?”

“Of course, I do,” I said. “Do you want to marry me?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I do.”

I rubbed her hand. “Then I think in God’s eyes we are married. Marriage isn’t some piece of
paper,
it’s a holy bond. Two souls joined together in God.”

She held my hand and looked down at it. “Yes,” she said.

I squeezed her hands in mine. “Would you marry me right now?”

“Yes.” She frowned. “But I’m too young.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t mean ‘let’s go to Vegas,’ I mean
right now
, in the eyes of God. You,
me and the Lord.
The only three people that matter.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Yes. Yes, I’d do it right now.”

We shut our eyes, she with her pale breasts bare as the noonday sun, me with a hard on, and I prayed a long and intricate prayer about the holy union of souls and the sacred covenant of marriage. You might think I was just trying to fuck her that night, trying at long last to lose my own virginity—and I won’t say I wasn’t—but I did also love her and I meant every word I said. I did want her to be mine. When I finished it, Angela was crying.

I said, “We’re married.”

I held her for a while and then we started kissing. Slowly I lowered her onto the bed.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

She stared at me, looked me right in the eyes. I tried to look consumed by love instead of raging with lust.

Her brow was tight, her mouth crooked as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. She kept staring at me,
thinking
.

“What?” I said.

Still she stared and thought, and I didn’t think it was going to happen, but then I saw the insecurity flood her eyes and she smiled painfully. And I knew I had her.

“You do love me, don’t you? If we do this, you won’t…”

“You’re my wife,” I said. “I love you. I will always love you.”

She nodded. “I trust you,” she said.

“And I love you,” I said.

I had her at last.

After that, we didn’t see each other for a few days. She was scared of me, I think. When she did finally come over she didn’t want to have sex again, which hurt my feelings, of course.

“What if I get pregnant?” she said.

That certainly had never occurred to me. I didn’t know a lot about that kind of thing. “Can’t you take pills?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Where am I going to go to get birth control?” she said. “Why don’t we just put a commercial on channel eleven?”

“There’s no reason to be sarcastic,” I said. “What about condoms? I could drive up to Black Bear and get some at Wal-Mart.”

She asked, “They sell condoms at Wal-Mart?”

“Of course they do.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. “How do you know?”

I stared at her. “I’ve seen them there,” I said. “I saw them one time in the pharmacy area.”

She nodded, and I moved closer to her and took her hand. “I told you,” I said, “there’s only been you. There’s only you, always.”

I leaned forward to kiss her, but she pulled away.

“Please, baby,” I said. “You’re all I think about.”

She stood up. “You think you’re not all I think about?” she asked. “I can’t read or watch TV. All I can do anymore is think about you. But it’s all…happening so fast. It’s happening really, really fast for me.”

“I know,” I said. I went to her and put my hands on her shoulders. “You’re my wife. I can wait for you.”

She grinned. “I should go,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Are you mad at me for not having sex with you?”

“No,” I lied. “I just love you and want to express it to you. I don’t take that lightly.”

She said, “I don’t either.”

“Well,” I said.

She sighed and kissed me. “You know I love you,” she said. “I’m desperately in love with you. I cry at night thinking about you.”

“Then make love to me,” I said.

She smiled and hugged me, hugged me for a long time like a little girl. Then she said, “Let’s make love.”

Chapter Seven