She's in love with an asshole.
It started back in senior year, when she noticed that the tall boy with the glasses and the almost apologetic smile was staring at her. He was more interesting than Dr. Scott's lecture, so she stared back—stared and observed him.
He inspired a load of uninteresting phrases—tall, bespectacled, blue-eyed, nerdy. Brown hair always a little untidy. Thick-rimmed, cheap glasses. She recognized him vaguely as being the kid everyone called Asshole. It was a name without meaning, without origin—it simply came to be, and she'd so often heard friendly shouts of
"Hey, asshole! How ya doing?"
She met his eye and he blushed—his eyes were once more on the Doctor, and his pen was moving feverishly over his notebook in quick, untidy motions. Heat rushed to her cheeks for a moment and she turned away, dismissing him as just another Aw-shucks All-American dork.
She was Janet Weiss, rather pretty and very blonde, and she wanted more than that.
The next time she saw him, he was staring again, talking absently to Ralph Hapshat—whose nicknames, predictably, made 'Asshole' almost complimentary—and watching her out of the corner of his eye. She was startled to find how this disconcerted her—there was something, she thought, almost unsettling about his eyes. They were too bright, too open, too unsettlingly intent. She smiled uncomfortably and turned away as he reddened.
"Eye on the ball, Asshole!"
It was a week after this and she was walking by on her way to the library, hardly glancing as a bunch of them played a casual game of football. He was there, in the middle, tall and awkward and inattentive as they shouted at him to focus, for Chrissake, Asshole.
By the time he managed to stammer a few apologies, she was a considerable distance away.
He approached her—finally—in Doctor Scott's class. His hand was rubbing at the back of his neck and he looked rumpled and boyish and terribly, terribly awkward.
"Hi," he said, standing aimlessly by her desk. She smiled at his slacks.
"Hello."
"I-I'm Brad Majors," he said, sticking his hand out into space for her to grab. She wanted to smirk. Of course his name was Brad Majors. It couldn't be anything else.
"Hi, Brad, I'm Janet. Janet Weiss."
He had long fingers and short nails and she liked the warmth, the dryness of his hand when she shook it, even as she ignored the way it trembled a little.
"I uh—you wanna go see a movie or something?" he said, as if the idea had just come to him. She wondered how often he'd rehearsed this moment…she wondered what he'd imagined her saying.
"I can't tonight, but maybe sometime soon," she told him, thinking of the things that happened to girls that went with strange, staring boys to a movie.
He grinned, and she was surprised by the expression became him. She found herself admiring his white canines.
"Super! Can I uh—can I walk you home then?"
He gestured lamely toward her books, intimating their heaviness, and she relented because she'd never had anyone look at her like that before.
"Well—alright. If you like."
He did like—but, by the end of it, so did she.
He took her out to that movie two weeks later. They were friends and he knew it and he didn't kiss her. But there was a tenseness to him and she caught his shifting, ashamed glances and knew he wanted to.
Afterward they stood on her porch and talked and he told her he didn't want to be a doctor but his father was pushing him to and she told him she hated it when boys called her "babe" and that she wanted to be more than a housewife.
And when he left, he wasn't an Asshole or even an Aw-Shucks and she smiled at the thought of him.
The first time he put his arm around her, she thought he'd explode.
They were walking home again. He was telling her about some problems he'd been having with the car and suddenly his arm was fumbling its way around her waist and…
Something about the feeling was odd and comic and pleasurable and…
She almost wanted him to give one of his sideways glances and kiss her and…
He flushed and she saw herself in the corner of his eye and they both smiled.
They were in the halls on the way to class when he did it.
He stopped and swallowed. His eyes were bright and eager and nervous. She waited.
"Janet," he said. Swallowed again. Leant in and stopped.
"Sorry," he said—and then kissed her. He was clean and boyish and his mouth was inexpert and his hands were fumbling, cupping her face, moving south to her shoulders as he tilted his head at an angle which made it hard for her to reach him so she took his face in both hands and brought him back down to her.
He kissed her like he didn't know how but he was trying his damndest and it was lovely.
He was kissing her with his tongue hesitantly tracing her mouth and she sighed and parted her lips, allowing him in.
He was kissing her like he spoke to her—eagerly, clumsily, with little murmurs aching in his throat when she stroked his jawline with her thumb.
They pulled away and he opened his eyes, staring blurrily down at her through his crooked, foggy glasses.
"Mmm," he said, smiling.
But then he remembered what he'd done, that he'd kissed her, that he'd put his burning, inept hands on her back and her waist, and he frowned.
"Was that—too forward?" he said, looking anxiously at her. She shook her head and laughed a little because he couldn't be forward if he tried.
They had dates after that, shameless dates where they sat together in the theater and his hands were tight, tight, tight in his lap because otherwise they'd be wandering over her leg. He kissed her like he was gasping for air sometimes, and she ran her hands up his torso and under his shirt collar because at night she had dreams of hot, hasty rendezvous with him in empty rooms.
She was kept awake sometimes thinking of his quick, awkward fingers and was ashamed of where she wanted them.
So when she pressed herself into his clean, hard body and kissed him eagerly and felt him wanting her, she was thrilled and embarrassed and wholly disconcerted.
He pulled away, his cheeks burning and his eyes guilty.
"S-sorry, Janet," he mumbled, and she saw him sit stiffly upright, waiting for it to pass.
But she was overtaken by a sudden wantonness and put her hand on his leg.
"It's alright," she said, drawing him close to her. "I-I'm flattered."
He made a soft, groaning noise and his hands found her back. She could feel him shaking.
"Janet…"
"Yes?" she murmured, not knowing what she wanted to happen or how far she wanted to go. He turned his head and somehow his mouth was on hers and he kissed her in that breathless, urgent way that made her whole body feel like a rippling reflection in a pond.
Then he was gone and she was solid again, sitting beside him in the close darkness of his car.
His hand found hers and he stroked it—only then did she realize that it was trembling.
"Let's wait, sweetheart," he said, very quietly.
So they sat there together, trying to breathe and staring into the abyss that had just opened before them.
It's been a while since high school now, and she's retchingly, terribly, awkwardly in love with him.
He's still tall and thin with large hands, and she adores his square jaw and long fingers and cheap, thick-framed glasses.
He still kisses her like he lost the manual, and when she runs her hands up his chest that odd, moaning little noise still finds its way out of his mouth. He still blushes and calls her by all those silly, nonsense endearments which she can only stand from him—she's his sweetheart, his darling, his love, and from him it's oddly fitting.
He's sweet and comically gallant and holds doors for her and she smiles to herself at his clean-cut masculinity.
But at the same time he's different—he reads books his father doesn't approve of and laughs when she tells him an off-color joke and sometimes makes a few of his own…and she loves that about him.
He gets angry sometimes, and when he does he whips his glasses off as if he wants to throw them and even in their worst fights she has to stifle a smile at this.
He's supportive when she cries and holds her tight to him and strokes her hair and tells her it's alright, even if it's her fault.
He's Brad, for better or worse, and she's frightened of the way she feels when he strokes her hand.
He's Brad, she's Janet—and, just that afternoon, he flushed and smiled nervously and told her fumblingly that he wanted to marry her.
And she's never been so happy and it's warm and the leaves are bright and she's going to marry an Asshole.