A few nights later I’m at Casey’s house. She promised me she was horny and if I got to her house as fast as I could, she’d be waiting for me naked on her bed. We haven’t fucked in a few days and she’s leaving town tomorrow, so I accepted her offer.
Casey’s lying on her bed, as she promised, but she’s fully clothed and talking to her mom on the phone. Occasionally I can hear Casey say one of the following things: “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I guess. No, you’re right. I never thought about it like that. I will.”
I’m sitting on her couch watching an old episode of Who’s the Boss in which Tony Danza gets pursued by his overly aggressive high school girlfriend who just wants to have a fling for old time’s sake. And although Tony really wants to fuck her, he can’t stop thinking about Angela.
Who’s the Boss ends and Casey’s still on the phone. I find nothing to eat in her refrigerator, then go to the bathroom to piss.
When I lift up the toilet lid there’s already piss in the bowl, and I’m reminded that in an effort to conserve water Casey never flushes after she pisses. There’s something slightly unsettling about my piss mixing with her piss. When I flush I hear Casey say, “Only if it’s brown.”
I ignore her and go back to the living room, where I settle in for an episode of Family Ties in which Michael J. Fox takes amphetamines so he can study for a test without knowing the serious harm he could be doing to himself. It’s just getting to the part that they use in the opening credits where a speed-wired Michael J. Fox slides across the floor in a rolling chair, when Casey steps right in front of the TV.
I try to look around her, but Michael J. Fox has already rolled across the floor. I missed it.
I notice she’s not talking on the phone anymore when she says, “Sorry. She called right after I called you.”
“That’s okay.”
I get up and start kissing her neck as I unzip her pants.
“Hang on.”
“What?”
“I want to talk about something first.”
“I thought you said you were horny.”
“I was.”
“But not now?”
“I just got off the phone with my mom.”
“So?”
“She was asking me if we were ever going to get married.”
“So?”
“So are we?”
I wish I would have left work ten minutes earlier so I wouldn’t have been there when Casey called, or that I had just jerked off in the first-floor bathroom so the lure of fucking her wouldn’t have been so strong. I wish a pot of scalding water was on the stove so I could dunk my head in it.
I can’t talk. I just stand there.
She says, “Well…have you ever even thought about it?”
I can’t think. I just open my mouth. “No.”
“You’ve never even thought about us getting married?”
“No.”
“We’ve been dating for like over a year.”
“Right.”
“And you haven’t ever even given it the slightest thought? Like what I’d look like in a wedding dress?”
For the first time in my life, I imagine Casey in a wedding dress. She actually probably would look good from the front.
“No. Have you?”
“Of course. I love you.”
My involuntary reactions come back to me. “I love you, too” crawls out of my mouth.
“Then why wouldn’t you think about us getting married?”
“Why are you bringing this up now? What did your mom say to you?”
“She wanted to know if we were thinking about getting married yet or like thinking about having kids.”
“Kids?” Is this a fucking joke?
“She had me when she was twenty.”
“Kids?” It’s not a fucking joke.
“My sister just had a baby and my mom wants me to give her grandchildren, too. I don’t think that’s so bad.”
Her cats are sitting on the coffee table watching us argue. I wish they were watching us fuck.
I have to get out of this. I say, “Do you want to go get a sandwich?”
“What?”
“I didn’t eat before I came over here. Do you want to go get a sandwich?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to get a sandwich.”
“Are you like trying to change the subject or something?”
“No, I just, I’m just hungry.”
She gets really pissed. She stomps off into her bedroom and slams the door shut. Her cats are still sitting on the coffee table just staring at me.
I’m afraid to knock on her door because I know the marriage conversation will have to be resolved. So I sit back down on the couch and finish watching Family Ties. I wonder how many eighteen-year-old hardbodies Michael J. Fox fucked in his prime—before Parkinson’s, before marriage.
I watch TV for the next few minutes, during which I formulate my apology and the quickest route of conversation that will lead me to fucking. I watch a little bit of a soft-core porno on Cinemax called A Rock and a Hard Place. I contemplate jerking off in Casey’s living room and then going home, but I ultimately decide against it. It turns out to be a good decision, as Casey comes out of her room ready to start up the conversation again.
She says, “So are you ever going to apologize?”
I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I say, “Of course. I just thought you needed some time to yourself. I didn’t want to interrupt you before you were ready to fully talk about this whole thing.”
“Well, now I’m ready.”
I take a deep breath and try to look like I care. I say, “What you said earlier just caught me by surprise. I came over here thinking about one thing and then your mom called and I ended up getting another. You know how us guys think.”
“Yeah, like rocks.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“So then what do you think about the whole us getting married thing?”
This question inspires me to create the following masterwork: “Of course I’ve thought about us getting married. It’s not like I don’t see us together in the future. I guess what I meant was that I never even questioned whether or not we’d be married so I never really gave it much thought. It’s just something that I kind of take as a given.”
That one got her. She smiles and says, “So you think we’ll get married?”
“Someday…in the future.”
She sits down next to me and puts her arms around my neck. She says, “I knew you’d thought about it. You must have just been confused. Like you said.”
“Right.”
“And now that you’ve had some time to clear your thoughts, you realize that we should get married.”
“Sure…at some point.”
She squeezes me and kisses my cheek. She says, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She pulls away a little bit and looks me in the eyes. She says, “So then we’re basically engaged, right?”
“Uhh…” The only sound I can hear is the blood pounding against the back of my eyes. I’m dazed. She must take my slack-jawed stupor to mean yes because she hugs me tight and says, “I love the feeling of being engaged.”
Dazed becomes paralyzed. I wish a plane would crash into Casey’s living room.
She pulls back again and stares at me, this time with a look in her eye that I haven’t seen since we first started dating, and she says, “You know what we should do to celebrate our engagement?”
I want to get the fuck out of her house and celebrate by wrapping my car around a telephone pole.
She says, “We should make love.”
She insists on fucking missionary style so we can look into each other’s eyes. She keeps holding my face and saying she loves me as I’m trying to fuck her hard enough to erase the memory of this entire night. She’s nowhere close to cumming and I don’t care because she keeps trying to hug me as we’re fucking and she won’t stop telling me how much she loves me.
I’m about to blow my load so I pull out and shoot it all over her stomach and tits, knowing that I’ll get at least a little break from her “I love you” barrage while she goes to the bathroom to clean up.
I’m almost asleep when she comes back from toweling down. She snuggles up beside me and forces me into the spoon position.
Again she says, “I love you,” and I almost lose it. I almost get up, get dressed, and walk out, but I’m tired. Maybe I can just ignore this whole night. Maybe we’ll never talk about getting married again.
I’m almost asleep when she says, “You’re still taking me to the airport tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t wait to tell my parents I’m engaged.”