All We Ever Wanted(38)

   Frankly, Teddy didn’t help matters. One weekend he borrowed his buddy’s truck and drove to Nashville, showing up out of the blue to surprise me with a bouquet of wildflowers he’d picked himself on the way. I was thrilled to see him, of course, and touched by the romantic gesture, but as the girls came around to meet him, I found myself feeling inexplicably embarrassed. In Bristol, Teddy was a big deal—not only extremely handsome but also a star athlete. As I looked at him through their eyes, he seemed a little too sweet, too simple, and very country. Even his thick drawl, which I’d always thought was so cute (he was actually born in Mississippi and had grown up there until age twelve), now seemed to border on redneck, along with his many backwoods expressions (things weren’t broken, they were “tore slap up”; they weren’t catty-cornered, they were “cattywonked”; and he was never “about to” do something, he was “fixin’ to”). His hair and clothes and shoes all seemed a bit off, too—nothing I could put my finger on exactly but somehow noticeably different from the boys at Vanderbilt, at least the ones my friends gravitated toward. Of course, it wasn’t enough to shake my confidence in our love—I wasn’t that shallow. But it did make me think a little about what my life would be like with him, versus with someone else.

   Aside from anything having to do with Teddy himself, I also had the feeling my friends thought it was sort of lame of me to have come to school with such a serious boyfriend. One night, for example, the three of them were flipping through my yearbook (I never should have brought that sucker to college—they had all left theirs at home) and saw that Teddy and I had been named “most likely to get married.” It amused them to no end, which I couldn’t quite understand.

“Omigod! Hysterical!” Blake said, cracking up and exchanging a telling look with Ashley. It wasn’t the first time I had the feeling that they’d discussed me behind my back.

I grabbed my yearbook from them and snapped it shut.

“It doesn’t mean we will get married,” I said, feeling slightly guilty toward Teddy. “Just that we’d been together the longest or whatever.”

“Hmm,” Blake said.

Eliza asked, “Did I hear you guys fighting last night?”

“We weren’t really fighting,” I said, trying to remember the precise topics from our marathon phone conversation. We always started and ended well, but occasionally there was some petty insecurity and jealousy sprinkled in.

“Long distance never works,” announced Blake, the self-proclaimed authority on dating of any kind.

“Don’t say that,” said Eliza, often somewhat protective of me, perhaps because I’d confided more in her. “It might.”

“Are you at least going to see other people?” Ashley pressed.

   “Or just cheat on him?” Blake said, laughing.

“No, and no,” I said, aware of how na?ve I sounded to them but not caring.

“But don’t you want to experience sex with someone other than Teddy?” Blake asked as she lit a cigarette. “He might suck, for all you know. You need a basis for comparison.”

I swallowed and forced myself to make the confession I’d been avoiding. “Umm. I actually haven’t slept with Teddy yet,” I said.

Eliza looked surprised, and the other two laughed and said some variation of “you gotta be kidding.”

“No,” I said. “But we’ve done everything else.”

This addendum didn’t impress them.

“What? Why?” Ashley asked, as if I were the subject of a fascinating sociological study.

“I don’t know….I just wanted…to wait,” I said, thinking of Julie and the vow we’d made during our freshman year in high school to wait as long as we could, and at least until college. I suddenly felt an intense pang of longing for the person I never had to explain these sorts of things to.

“Wait for what? Marriage?” Blake said. “Is it a religious thing?”

“No,” I quickly said, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Although Teddy believed sex outside marriage was wrong, he was willing to sin if I was.

“Oh. I thought Samford was a big Bible school?” Blake said, her tone slightly critical, though I wasn’t sure whether she was judging the Bible—or Samford as an academic institution.

“Yeah, it’s a Christian school,” I said. “But he’s not a saint or anything.”

“Well, I think it’s great to wait,” Ashley said. Of all the girls’, our values felt the closest, perhaps because we were both from the South.

   Eliza and Blake nodded, but I could tell they weren’t buying it—and that they put sex in the same category as sushi. By eighteen, you should have tried both—and California rolls and hand jobs didn’t cut it.

For the first time, it occurred to me that they might be right and that I was playing it too safe. After all, I was in college now. I needed to be a little bolder, broaden my horizons, start thinking for myself instead of relying so much on Teddy.

“Okay, girls,” I said, eager to change the subject. “I’m ready for a drink.”

In my head, I was ready for more than one. I was ready to get good and drunk for the first time. It was something else Teddy thought was wrong, and the few times I’d had a beer at a party, he’d disapproved. I once tried to talk him out of his stance, pointing out that people were constantly downing wine in the Bible.