My eyes found Sean in the darkness, next to the stairs, with his back to me. He stood a few inches taller than his friends who’d just graduated too, who surrounded him. Sean was always surrounded.As I crossed the room to him, folks kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I wasn’t interested in being well liked.By the time I finally reached him, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at Sean’s friends as I slid my hand across his T-shirt, feeling his hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my willpower, I did not flinch. I lay my head playfully against his chest, as I’d seen girls do when they claimed to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.I half-expected him to shout, “Get off me!” and shove me away. Not because Sean would ever do that to a girl—he had more charming ways of extricating himself from cretins—but because my life generally had been a long series of mortifications, and Sean shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in.
