Totally and Completely Fine(28)

Then there were days I hated it—when it felt like the town seemed to be closing in around me, and there was nowhere to hide. Those were the days I dreamed of a life where I could be someone different. Someone new.

Not that I knew who I wanted to be.

The real reason I didn’t leave was because of Spencer. He had one more year of high school, and I didn’t want to be away from him. I didn’t want to be by myself in a new town. I didn’t want to be alone.

I stayed and worked at the grocery store and saw Spencer all the time. He had dinner at the house every week, and though things were awkward between me and Gabe—both of us trying to navigate having different kinds of relationships with the same person—mostly it was okay. Mom was happy to see Spencer, and if she was surprised about the romantic development between me and him, she never said a word.

And it was kind of nice because Mikey had gone off to some college in Tennessee that had scouted him for their baseball team, and Jessica had gone with him. I was certain it wasn’t a coincidence that their absence begat less gossip and interest in my sex life.

There was a certain irony in that, because contrary to my reputation as a wanton whore, Spencer and I hadn’t had sex. Still.

He wanted to wait.

I’d almost broken up with him when he told me that.

Because it wasn’t just about getting off—I could do that on my own—it was about the other things. The little familiarities that you learned when you were naked in front of someone. The secrets you couldn’t hide from each other when your bodies were fused. When you came together and came apart.

There was something there. Something important.

To me, at least.

With the guys I’d been with, sex had been a moment when I could see them clearly. It’s not like I knew them on a fundamental level or anything like that, but I knew something about them. Something I couldn’t discover any other way.

I wanted to know Spencer that way. More than I’d wanted to know those other guys.

Thankfully we came to a compromise, one that mostly came down to semantics.

Spencer defined sex in the biblical way. Penis. Vagina. Penetration.

He wasn’t ready. And I discovered that I was completely, totally fine with that.

Because I tended to define sex in the broader way. Mouth on breasts? Sex. Hands over underwear? Sex. Rubbing against each other fully clothed until we both came? Sex.

We had fun. Gasping and laughing and being silly and also very, very serious. I was grateful for the experience I had. One of us needed to know what we were doing, and the thing about Spencer was that he was the best kind of student. Focused, curious, and hell-bent on getting a good grade.

He was a straight-A student.

My body was a math equation he was intent on solving.

Which he did. Over and over and over again.

I didn’t need his definition of sex. I wanted it, sure, I craved it, but I didn’t need it. I was satisfied.

Because I realized, with Spencer, what I really wanted. What I had been desiring above all else. What I needed.

Intimacy.

I’d thought I could get that closeness through physically being with someone. Spencer showed me that it was more than that.

Graduation came, and both Gabe and Spencer got scholarships to Jeannette Rankin College, which was a two-hour drive from Cooper. Gabe’s was for football, and Spencer’s was for academics. There was a running joke that the two of them together made one decent student-athlete.

They were going to room together their first year, when they had to stay on campus. I wanted to go with them, but apartments were hard to find in September, and we decided that it would be better if I waited until the next year when we could get an apartment together.

I’d never told Spencer that he was the reason I’d stayed behind in Cooper, so I knew I didn’t have any right to ask him to do the same, but it still hurt.

And I was jealous, so deeply jealous, of him and Gabe going off to have a normal college experience—something I hadn’t really wanted until I realized how left out it made me feel.

I didn’t tell Spencer that either.

Because his mother was already giving him plenty of guilt about leaving. Didn’t he understand that she would be ALL ALONE? That she would have NO ONE? That she’d done so much for him and now he was ABANDONING her?

He promised he’d come back every weekend.

“What about your dad?” I asked him once.

I’d been curious about it forever—not sure what to believe when it came to the rumors about Spencer Sr.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I remember him a little from when I was a kid, but then he wasn’t there anymore. I asked my mom about it once and it really upset her—she didn’t understand why I wanted to know about a man who had left us. She cried for a week—she thought she wasn’t good enough for me alone, which of course she is.”

I couldn’t stand his mother.

Spencer saw her as a perfect angel who loved him more than life itself. I saw her as a manipulative self-serving martyr who’d only be happy if her son lived with her forever.

It made sense to me now why Spencer had kept coming back to our house. It wasn’t just Gabe. It was all of us. It was my dad.

We never really spoke about it, but that was when I realized that Spencer had felt that loss too. That we had that shared experience. That connection.