AS I EXIT THE AIRPLANE and walk though the terminal, my palms sweat and my heart races. What if Neil didn’t get my text message with my new flight information? What if he did and he decided he didn’t want to come pick me up? We haven’t talked since the phone call in Paris when I practically proposed to him. And his few texts back to me have been short and generic. Maybe I scared him.
When I enter baggage claim, my eyes lock on to Neil. It’s almost like slow motion—the way we run toward each other, the way he hugs me so tightly that he lifts me off the ground.
“I’m so happy you’re back.” He sets me down. His cheeks are flushed and his whole body shakes in excitement.
He grips my hand tightly, interlacing our fingers, and as we wait for my bag to come out on the carousel, he pumps me for details about my trip. When I point out my suitcase, he grabs it with his free hand, pulling me with him. He doesn’t want to break off our contact for a second.
Even in the car he keeps only one hand on the steering wheel. The other rests on my thigh except when he has to shift gears. When we get to my apartment, I thank him for taking a half day off from work to come pick me up.
He looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind. “Of course I came. But I didn’t take off. I went in early.” He deposits my suitcase next to my closest in my room.
“You must be exhausted.” I strip off my sweater and my shoes and hop into bed. “Come take a nap with me.”
We lie side by side facing each other. I take a deep breath and plunge right in with my most burning question. “So, remember our last phone conversation? What do you think about us getting married? I mean, obviously it doesn’t have to be now or anything. But it would solve so much, wouldn’t it? We could live together.”
“Uh . . . do we have to talk about this now?” Neil avoids my gaze.
My heart plummets. I’m starting to think that as clear as it is that he loves me, Neil doesn’t think I’m marriage material and doesn’t want to have to tell me yet. Or maybe he thinks eighteen is too young—it is too young—and that there are infinite women in his future who are better for him than I am. Maybe I have to be much more convincing, even when I’m not all that convinced myself.
I push him onto his back and straddle him, lifting his arms over his head and pinning them down. “Yes. You’re my prisoner, and I have ways of making you talk.”
Neil goes totally still and squeezes his eyes shut. Then his body starts to shudder under me. He’s crying.
Neil has never broken down in front of me like this. Ever. I don’t know how to react. “Neil . . . what’s wrong?”
“I—I’m not good enough for you. You don’t want to marry me. Trust me.”
My head spins. He can’t be serious. “Are you crazy? If anyone’s not good enough, it’s me.”
“I’m not a virgin,” he blurts. His cheeks blaze crimson.
Those words are the last ones I ever expected to hear come out of his mouth, and for a long, terrible moment time stands still.
But then it sinks in, and I roll off him, jump up, and press myself against my bedroom wall. “What do you mean you’re not a virgin?” I screech. My eyes must bug out of my head. My pulse is racing and I might faint. I can’t believe it. All those rules he made about keeping our clothes on. All that bullshit he said about signing the virginity pledge. All that self-control that I hated but admired. He was my example of purity. He’s the one who made me want to be good. But it was based on a lie.
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I was ashamed, and I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand. Because you gave me a reason to be happy again. You’ve seen everything I am, and you still love me. But you couldn’t do the same for me and show me who you really are. I never needed you to be perfect. I needed you to be real.” I’m so angry, I could punch a hole in a wall.
Neil’s eyes are rimmed in red, but his tears have given way to righteous fury. He gets up and stands opposite me. “Well, now you know the real me. I’m no saint. I’m nobody’s savior. I’m just as fucked up as anyone else.”
I fall back onto my bed. Curl into myself. Close my eyes. “Was it Gracie?” I say in a small voice.
“Yes.” That one word has the power to crush my heart in its fist.
My head and heart are heavy with the weight of the thought of Neil and Gracie having sex. It’s so unimaginable. And I can’t explain it, but for some reason it makes me feel dirty. Like everything he and I did together was a lie.
The room is silent and as cold as winter. As the minutes tick by without either of us daring to speak, I envision snow falling swiftly and burying me alive.
The bed shifts under me. Neil reaches out and brushes my hair behind my ear, but I won’t look at him.
“I’m naked,” he says. And my eyes can’t help to fly open and rove over his body when I hear that. The sheet is strategically placed so I can’t see everything, but I can tell by the bare skin of his hip that he’s telling the truth. “I remember you once thought you had to be naked in order to bare your soul.” His tone is wistful, and my heart hammers in my chest, remembering the day I confessed my sins to him.
“So how did it happen?” I ask grudgingly.
“After Gracie and Nate broke up, the church gossip was that Gracie must have had sex with him and that’s why she didn’t come to services anymore. At school, when she was there, we only saw her alone. The day she came to see me at my house, it was the day after she told Nate she missed her period and she thought she might be pregnant. She didn’t tell me that, though. Nate told me later. She was hysterical and crying, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. When she finally calmed down, she asked if we could go to my bedroom. No one else was home at the time, but she wanted privacy. She insisted. And I was still so in awe of her. Even when she closed the door behind us, I didn’t protest. I didn’t think about it. I was consumed by the improbable fact that Gracie Logan, this older girl, this gorgeous girl, was in my room.” Neil shakes his head at the memory.
He goes on. “She told me that she hated Nate. Everything with him had been a mistake. She had been in love with me all along but hadn’t realized it. I had never felt so dizzy in my life.”
I cough. I’m not sure I want to hear the rest of this story, but I don’t want him to stop telling me either.
He inhales deeply. “She said—and I’ll never forget this—she said ‘Look at me, Neil. I want you to look at me like you always do in church. When you think I’m not watching.’ I was so overwhelmed, but she didn’t seem to care. She pushed me against the wall and kissed me, and I . . .” He stops, the last words mangled by emotion.
He covers his mouth with his fist and squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t really even know how it happened. One minute we were standing, and the next we were on my bed and . . .”
I hold my breath, bracing myself for the awful details.
“And then it was over. She kissed me and put her clothes back on and left.”
I let out my breath.
“I felt terrible. I mean, it was magical. It was. But it was also wrong. I didn’t know how wrong until the next day. Gracie called me and told me to meet her at the bridge over the creek on Route 4, the one where all the couples go to park. I took my bike. I had to, because I was too young to drive. I wanted so desperately to see her again. I wanted to apologize to her for being so weak. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, as if that would make it less of a sin.”
He’s shaking now, and there are goose bumps on his exposed skin. “When I got there, she was standing on the outside of the guardrail. She was kind of swaying, and I remember thinking that if she weren’t careful, she’d lose her balance. There’d been a lot of rain that spring, so the creek was pretty full, but still, it wasn’t that deep. I was only about twenty yards away from her when she saw me. She opened her mouth and whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then . . . she let herself fall. I screamed and ran toward her, but it was too late.”
“But she didn’t die.” I remember Nate saying that she had come back to town.
“No. When she hit the water, I panicked.” Neil exhales loudly through his nose. “But then she surfaced, and she was laughing. She begged me to jump in too. But I couldn’t. When she waded over to the bank and toweled off, she said that meant I was scared of commitment. Like Nate. The bridge was a test, and I failed. She never did come back to church, and she refused to answer my phone calls. I saw her at school, but we were never alone again. And after she graduated, she went to college in New York. I always wondered if she used me to get back at Nate. But I really loved her.”
I’m so conflicted. My heart goes out to Neil for what he went through, but I can’t reconcile it with the way he always took the moral high ground. “There was nothing wrong with you loving Gracie,” I tell him. “And you shouldn’t feel guilty for having sex with her. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
He raises his eyebrows slightly, and waits for me to say more.
“What I can’t understand is all your talk about the importance of virginity and waiting until marriage. Is it something you said so they wouldn’t judge you at church?” I’m curious how he’ll answer. “I mean, how can you even sign that pledge if you’re not actually a virgin?”
“I rededicated my virginity.”
“I don’t know what that means. How do you ‘rededicate’ your virginity?”
“I heard a speaker at one of our youth conferences talk about it once.” Neil’s tone is defensive. “And it made sense to me.”
“Okaaaay, so they encourage you to rededicate your virginity?”
“I wouldn’t say they encourage it. It’s not a ‘get out of jail free’ card or anything.” He manages a self-deprecating laugh. “But it’s an option for those of us who messed up. Giving into the sin once doesn’t mean you have to continue to do it.”
“Are you saying that even if Gracie had become your girlfriend, you would have made this rededication pledge? Or did you make it because if you couldn’t have sex with Gracie anymore, then you didn’t want to have sex with anyone?” Every muscle in my body tenses, waiting for his answer.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“I bet you’re still in love with her. I bet that’s the real reason you don’t want to marry me. I’m just a poor substitute for Gracie.”
“I never said I didn’t want to marry you,” he protests. “I said you wouldn’t want to marry me. And look—I was right, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t know, Neil. I really don’t. This is too much for me to process right now. Because guess what? Lying is a sin too.” I turn my back to him and close my eyes. “I think it would be better if you went home.”
“But—”
“Please,” I say wildly. “I need some time alone.”
Neil gathers his clothes, gets dressed, and puts his shoes on. His retreating footsteps are followed by the slamming of my front door. Only then do I allow myself to cry.