The Crush

The complications of your love telling you about their crush.

That morning, Leah told me that she had a crush on a boy.

I was still half asleep as she sat on the edge of the bed and slowly slipped on her bra. I watched as she fumbled a bit with the tiny bent clasps.

There was a clumsy girlish charm to her, lazy and pouty and seemingly unaware of how beautiful she was. Her mop of short dirty blonde hair, always so perfectly disheveled. Her curious eyes, always hunting for clues. And her lips.

My thoughts and my eyes always came back to her lips. Fat bee-stung, always a little chapped and often imperfectly stained with red lipstick.

I was obsessed with her lips and she knew it. Sometimes she teased me about it. Other times she forgot and absentmindedly hypnotized me with them.

She didn’t look at me as she explained that her crush had a girlfriend and that “they weren’t like us.” He was just a good boy who didn’t know any better, but he was tall and charming and had a crooked smile, and she liked him.

If he was good, what did that make me? What did that make us?

“His name is Matt. I see him all the time at school, he’s in my graduate program. Sometimes we go out for drinks,” she said, as she pulled her panties up her long legs.

Sometimes when we got dressed after sex, it felt like an affair. It felt like we weren’t in my apartment, but instead a seedy motel room and we had to gather all of our things and get out before checkout.

It felt like somewhere there were husbands and wives worried and waiting. It made things feel just a bit more dirty and forbidden, which of course made me hard.

The fact that she was somewhere in the middle of her twenties and I was almost forty certainly made that fantasy a little more potent and dirty.

“He comes to my house sometimes,” she admitted, gauging my reaction from the corner of her eye.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing like that, we just lay on the couch and watch movies,” she explained, slapping me on the arm for my look.

I imagined them on the couch, innocently cuddling. He was in his twenties too. She explained that they were similar heights and similar builds and I remarked that it sounded like he was more her type than I was. She rolled her eyes at that.

She sat in her panties and a bra, pulling on her socks. As she bent over to pull them up, her ass was right in front of me, plump and perfect in pink boy cut glory. I wanted her again, though I knew once she was on her way out all my seductions were in vain.

I wondered if I was capable of laying in bed with a woman completely innocently anymore. Or a man for that matter. I felt very old and very jaded and for a moment very broken. I worked to keep up my façade of casual curiosity. But really it was emotional reconnaissance.

“What goes on, on that couch, I wonder,” I said, and gave her my most crooked grin.

She shrugged. She wasn’t her playful self. She didn’t want to be teased about it. She had a crush. She had a crush on a boy she couldn’t have.

I let myself be jealous. It felt good to feel heat in my veins. It was nothing, she wasn’t mine, not like that, but still, I wanted to be her crush again. Like when we started. I wanted to be desired and forbidden.

“We just lay there for hours, like cats. We watch stupid things on YouTube. Sometimes he brushes his fingers along the inside of my arm,” she said, her eyes closing and her chipped nails slipping against the vulnerable skin of the crook of her arm, mimicking what he did.

I gritted my teeth.

“Nothing more?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

She sighed.

“God Mark, I told you, he’s not like us.”

We both had people we were dating, people we were fucking, all on the up and up though. Everyone knew what was going on. Apparently, he was one of those monogamous people who confused me so.

“Last time he was over, I asked him about his girlfriend. He told me all kinds of stories, most of them very sexual. We were inches apart. He smelled so good,” she closed her eyes again.

I moved closer to her. She was still sitting at the edge of the bed. I laid as close as I could to her, wrapping my arms around her and she let me hold her for a moment.

She kept her eyes closed and then twisted out of my embrace, standing and looking for more of her clothes.

“I think he knows I like him though, last week he told me he probably shouldn’t come over anymore,” she said in a whisper.

“What does he smell like?” I asked and she shrugged.

“I don’t know. He smells like boy. Soap and some cologne. I think it’s Dior something. The commercial with Johnny Depp. It’s what they all wear these days,” she said sleepily, settling back onto the bed.

There was something in the fact that Leah always answered my questions, even when she didn’t want to, that made my heart ache. I loved her for that. If you could call it love. Could I call it love?

I slipped out of bed, and she pulled the blanket over herself. She looked beautiful, with her soft little mop of short hair, her fat lips that were always pouting, and her big sad eyes.

I went to my dresser, racking my brain to remember where I put something. At the bottom of a drawer, I found it. A little sample. A little gift a shop clerk put in my bag when I was Christmas shopping. A vial of his cologne. I dabbed a little behind my ears, just a little.

Back in bed, she was purring like a cat. Her body moved magnet-like against mine as I lay behind her. I wrapped my arms around her, and this time she let me.

“I’m sorry. I miss crushes,” I said into the hollow of her back.

She sighed deeply and laid back down next to me, turning into a little spoon. I heard her sniff, and then again, and her body tensed.

She pushed her ass back against me. My hands moved to her waist. My nose was in her hair, my lips just brushing her ear. She turned and buried her nose in my chest.

She moved up, our lips just barely missed each other, she kissed me on the cheek. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“I forget how good you are at things like that,” she said softly. Her eyes all far away, the way they got when I had her.

But I didn’t have her, not really. Not that morning.

“We’re not bad,” I said softly. We tell each other what’s going on. He’s the one brushing his finger against your arm and probably not telling Mrs. Matt, wherever she is,” I said seriously.

She took a moment to consider that.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. I think my friends would understand cheating more than… this.”

I nodded. It was true.

“People are dumb,” I explained.

“Boys are dumb,” she whispered.

“Boys are dumb,” I agreed.

“Crushes are dumb,” she whispered in her tiniest voice. A voice cracked like her lips.

“No they’re not,” I said into her neck.

I felt her swallow down the tears.

“I should go,” she said, but she didn’t move.

I kissed her forehead. “As long as you come back.”

“I will,” she said, and buried herself in my arms a little longer.

The end