“I guess, but at least you’re over that initial hurdle. You know what you’re dealing with. And then you realize sex is just a means to an end,” Chloe explained. “The point is to keep him fixated on you. Ifyou don’t have sex, he will eventually get bored and become interested in someone else.”
Boredom was the last thing I felt with Seth; I had never considered he might eventually feel it with me.
“Seth has had sex before, right?” asked Chloe, sitting up as if this was pivotal.
I nodded. Seth had admitted as much the one time we broached the topic.
“So there you go. It’s no big deal foryou, because you don’t know what you’re missing. But Seth is living without something he used to have. See? That’s the tricky part.”
It was just one tricky part of what was becoming an increasingly confusing matrix. To satisfy Chloe, I said, “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
And I did. Before long, I thought about it constantly. I tried not to let Chloe’s words get to me, but she had planted a seed of anxiety. A clock had started, and from then on, it would always be ticking in my mind, marking time until one of two things happened: I mustered the courage to have sex, or Seth decided to leave.
I wrestled with my fears until I couldn’t be alone with them anymore. One night, when Seth and I had taken my boat to the easternmost part of Catwood Pond, where there were no houses and no lights, I finally looked at him and asked, “Do you think we should have sex? I mean, not this minute. But like, before summer is over.”
Seth looked a little shocked, then intrigued. “I mean, that would be nice.”
I felt my heart sink, realizing I had hoped he would say it was inconsequential to him.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asked. “Do you not want to?”
“No, I do,” I said. “Or I think I want to. Or I think I’msupposedto want to.”
Seth smiled. “Well, why don’t you give yourself time to decide which one it is? There’s no rush.”
“But…” It was already mid-August. After Labor Day, Seth and I would go our separate ways, and then who knew what would happen? I took a breath. “Okay.”
I wrapped a blanket around myself like a cocoon. Seth looked at me and then reached down and opened a tacklebox that was on the floor of the boat. He rummaged around and pulled out an ornate fly, with magenta feathers shooting out from a white-and-black speckled body. He then took a pair of scissors and began to pry off the hook.
“What are you doing? Isn’t it a little dark for fishing?” I could barely see the shore behind him, and all we had in the boat was a small solar-powered lantern.
“You’ll see,” he said, tying off a piece of fishing line. After a moment, he said, “Give me your hand.”
I held out my palm, but he flipped it over and then gently slid the fly—which he had fashioned into a ring—onto my middle finger. It looked as if a dragonfly had alighted on my hand.
“See?” he said.
“See what?”
“There’s no pressure. I’m already hooked.”
As we bobbed under a starry sky, Seth took the blanket I was clinging to and wrapped it around both of us. I leaned into his shoulder, and he assured me that what we were currently doing—and not doing—was just fine with him. I did my best to believe him.
As Labor Day approached, the exultation I had felt about my first love had given way to angst about what would come next. Seth was entering his senior year near Lake Placid, and I would be a junior at my school in New York City. It was one thing for me to steal the car for the occasional illicit spin around Locust, but I wasn’t brazen enough to venture on a five-hour drive on the interstate without a license. It seemed unlikely that we would be able to see each other until next summer, and that was if Seth returned to Locust at all. By then, he would be on the verge of college and would probably have more important things to do than teach tennis in a tiny lake town.When I asked Seth how he saw things evolving between us, he seemed confident that we would figure it out. But I was consumed by worry.
Eventually, Nina noticed my fretting and asked what was up. I admitted to her I wasn’t ready to have sex with Seth, but that I worried he would forget about me if I didn’t.
“That’s not true,” she said. “Don’t do anything you’re not ready to do.”
This advice came as a huge relief, and I found myself breathing more easily. But Nina’s next idea threw me for a loop.
“Why don’t you just take a break over the school year? Sometimes the best way to keep someone interested is to break up with him.”
“Really?” This seemed just as confusing as Chloe’s strategy.
“It’s counterintuitive. That’s why it works.”
I didn’t understand her logic, but I knew from experience that Nina was always right. Plus, she had had several boyfriends, and she seemed to have been firmly in control of each of those relationships.
