I was hoping to get home early. Take a shower, blow dry my hair, do my makeup. I could not wait to put on my new dress, though I still felt weary at the thought of the new heels my friend had insisted on making me buy to complete the ensemble. I had been looking forward to the party all week. Responsible girl that I am, I had been studying relentlessly for my finals and I had just submitted my final paper when I got "The Call".
"The Call" is what has been happening ever since my boyfriend got his dream internship. It was another case of "Babe, I'm so sorry! I won't be back until tomorrow so I'm going to have to pass on tonight. Again. I'll make it up to you, I promise."
Paul, that's his name, is a fellow senior in his final year of mechanical engineering. A professor of his, who also consulted with a large and successful mining company had made him his protégé. This meant he worked with him on developing a new arm for some drilling mechanism... To be honest, I never pay too much attention to the details. My father found the work fascinating. At least he did that one time they met.
Engineers are abundant in my family, from a handful of cousins to my father and uncles who are computer and electronic engineers. Some of my cousins who are more artsy are architects and industrial designers, but that's as far as anyone strays. So when I declared my major to be literature after I had forced myself through two rounds of calculus and basic Physics, my mother begged me to at least consider a career in administration or economics.
My mother is an accountant. No matter that she had once wanted to be a journalist, she bowed down to parental pressure and pursued a career in accounting. Her father had been a mechanical engineer, which made my mom think he would have loved my new boyfriend. They had been curious to meet him ever since my sister had let slip I was seeing someone "seriously" since this summer. My sister is an architect who married an architect. She was pregnant, with what I am certain will be the first of her many architect babies.
Do not get me wrong, I love my family, but when the odd man out is my cousin the pharmacologist, I knew me pursuing my undergraduate degree raised more than a few eyebrows at the family barbecue. That may be why I allowed my boyfriend to pick me up from a family party where he briefly met my parents while my sister made sure to delay my leaving.
Part of me was looking for approval. I might not be following in my family's footsteps but a boyfriend who did had to earn me a few brownie points, right? I think it did with my mother who thought he was a charming young man. My dad simply asked what I thought of the current project he was working on, was it not fascinating? They've asked me a couple of times about him since that day, but not insistently.
He is the first guy I have ever brought home to meet the parents, albeit briefly. I therefore have no idea whether my parents were simply being polite or genuinely pleased and wishing to get to know him better. I usually keep any answer short and they never pushed.
My boyfriend never pushed either. We kept things light. He was busy with classes and his internship while I spent time putting together applications to master programs around the country. My first choice is of course to stay at my Alma Mater who has a great creative writing program, but I do not want to take any chances and risk not having a fall back plan.
Running after professors for letters of recommendations, writing application essays and refining my short stories for entrance consideration took over most of my free time so I did not complain much when my boyfriend started cancelling on plans we may have had for the evening but when they started to encroach on weekend dates, I complained. He apologized, promising that by the 17th of December he would be done and spend the holiday break lavishing his time on me, I caved and let it slip.
That was at the beginning of November. Since then, I've been lucky to get more than two evenings with him each week. We rarely go out, spending evenings at my apartment having dinner in the leaving room while watching movies, followed by customary sex. The sex had been somewhat satisfying at the beginning. We would make-out for a long time where we would tease each other and dry hump until we could not take it anymore and off went the clothes and he would finger me and sometimes lick me to orgasm and the groins would get together and he'd come in a condom I still forced him to wear, no matter that I had been on the pill since for years.
Though not as satisfying as it used to be, the regular sex has kept me sane during these stressful weeks before the holiday break as I make sure to manage at least one orgasm during the proceedings and occasionally take matters in to my own hands on my many lonely evenings.
Most my friends have not voiced any strong opinions about my boyfriend. They rarely see him, so he is mostly irrelevant to them. Most have been with their boyfriends for years, and know I am rather private about my romantic relationships, so getting my boyfriend to interact with the other couples... It's not something I will let happen until we at least exchanged the L word, which we have not.
The one exception to this is my single friend Jessica. I met Jessica in my first year of CEGEP. For those who do not know, CEGEP is like a mandatory two year junior college before going to university for three years.
Jessica was in the same rhetoric class where we both secretly gushed about the attractiveness of our professor. Though in his early forties, he had a passionate and energetic personality that gave him a youthful air. We would joke about how we would go about seducing him, tempting him in to a taboo situation. Of course we never put any of the many plans in to motion, they were only crazy thought from single young girls with a crush and no sexual outlet.
But unlike Jessica, I had been a virgin. A fact she thought was hilarious when contrasted with the crazy scenarios I would come up with during our sex dreaming sessions. I had made out with quite a few guys and even gone down on a couple in high school but though I had found the guys attractive and enjoyed making out with them, none had ever really turned me on enough for me to really want to try anything further. If I could take care of my own needs I saw no reason to risk getting emotionally entangled with a guy because of hormones. I did not crave that intimacy with anyone. That is, until Jessica dragged me to a party and I saw Phil again, a guy I knew from the old neighbourhood.
The fact Jessica knew about me and Phil, about all the crazy things that followed until I decided to do a U-turn this past summer to satisfy my attempt at a "serious relationship" had her griping about Paul at every occasion. I couldn't blame her. Part of me was getting tired of Paul. Being able to introduce a suitable young man to the family was not enough to keep me tied for much longer. I had recently heard Phil would be returning to Montreal, and that had my mind going wild.
***
Phil. Even just thinking about him now brings back tingles, of the loin variety. He was not a college guy. He worked for his uncle who was a contractor. He dealt weed occasionally too, mostly because he consumed so much of it. He had also slept with more females by the age of eighteen than most guys would ever sleep with. He told me once he had stopped keeping count in the 70s. Unlike with most guys where I suspected their number to be exaggerated, I always felt he downplayed it so as not to scare me off.
When I first met him, the summer I had graduated high school, he had just started dating this Greek girl with gigantic breasts, Petra. They were known to be a fiery couple -- in other words, they fought all the time.
