A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
The other change that came with adolescence, and this, alas, brought problems enough to cause me trouble, was that I discovered sex. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that sex discovered me. I was unaware. I was so ignorant that you, who read these memories I have committed to paper, will probably want to laugh... Or maybe cry. I don't know.
See through my eyes.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I stand naked in my boyfriend's bedroom, my gawky teenage body shivering in the air-conditioned chill. The cold is making my nipples stick out from what little I have of breasts. Or maybe it's my nervousness making them do that.
I never thought it would happen, but somehow, I found a kindred spirit. We met several months ago through a school musical. My high school's thespian society was putting on a production of Scrooge, which had a few large choral numbers, and since I was in the chorus and the vocal ensemble, I got dragooned into the production as an extra, along with the rest of the chorus and vocal ensemble. We were collaborating with one of the local all-male Catholic high schools to get a supply of tenors and basses to fill out the cast and to obtain male actors for the appropriate roles - Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, et cetera. My boyfriend was the Ghost of Christmas Future.
I met him backstage. He was reading Tolkien.
My parents aren't happy about me dating anyone, but they're tolerating it for now ("He seems harmless enough," my mother had muttered after I got back from our first date - I'd introduced him to my parents before going out with him to see the latest Star Trek movie, in which Kirk and Spock steal a spaceship to go down to Earth and save the whales, and the less said about the small talk we tried to make for the duration of the introduction, the better) and somehow we've managed.
I have a very early curfew - ten o'clock, well before my bedtime - but there are ways around curfews. One way to spend plenty of time with him is to set up afternoon dates. After we had several months of library dates, and closely monitored study dates at my house, it convinced my parents that I could be trusted to actually study on a study date, so I am now allowed to study at his house on occasion. During the summer, when we don't have school, we mostly just read science fiction books, or play Talisman. His mother is downstairs the whole time, so it's not like my parents need to worry about our dates being unchaperoned.
We still haven't worked up the nerve to kiss each other yet. Isn't that funny? We've been dating for months, and we decided today to play doctor because I'd never played doctor as a child, and neither had he, and we found out that apparently that's something nearly every kid does, and we've missed out on a large part of childhood, so here I am, naked. But we still haven't even kissed.
