Nine hundred thousand square feet wasn’t adequate for the distance I needed to put between me and Troy. I needed to be as far away from him as possible. I needed to breathe unrecycled air. I needed to escape the mall and go.… where?
The nearest exit brought me to the sidewalk abutting the Macy’s upper level parking lot. The sun was shining, but the damp air was fragrant with impending rain. I closed my eyes, tilted my head to the sky, and filled my lungs as the first droplets of water splashed off my forehead, my nose, my chin. I don’t know how long I stood there, but when I opened my eyes, I was rewarded with the most majestic sight:
A double rainbow stretched across the firmament, a turd-brown hatchback idling underneath.
I wasn’t religious, but Sam Goody’s arrival felt like a miracle, an act of God. The passenger side door was open wide, and I didn’t hesitate to get in beside him.
“I came back a day early,” he said.
“You came back just in time,” I said.
Without another word, he threw the car in gear and sped to a more secluded section of the parking lot.
“I missed you,” he said.
He kissed my forehead, my nose, my chin.
“I missed you too,” I said.
He kissed my mouth.
My mind left me as I kissed Sam Goody. But not in a distracted way. I wasn’t thinking about the fall of communism or unfunny sitcoms. I wasn’t thinking about getting even with my ex, making peace with my parents’ split, or telling Drea the truth about her dismal college prospects. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, not even how easy it would be for a straggler shopper to see two half-naked teens going at it, that is, until we fogged up the windows to completely obstruct the view.
As we kissed in the front seat and did even more on the hatchback floor, I wasn’t thinking about how strange it was for me to lose my virginity to someone I had met a little over a month ago, to strip down to next to nothing and unabashedly share my body with this person I barely knew yet trusted completely, a person who, in tacit alignment, made himself equally available—and vulnerable—to me. With only the drumming of rain on the roof as our soundtrack, I let him discover places I hadn’t allowed anyone else to go to. I sought out parts of him too, an eager skin-to-skin exploration I never before needed to pursue. In the back of that busted, rusted Chevette, cognition surrendered to sensation. I was completely immersed in Sam Goody’s scent, taste, and touch. There was no past, no future, only the exquisite present.
I was fully in the moment for the first time in my life.