I told them they could use me whenever they liked.
All three of them thought I was joking. For four months, so did I.
Fall of ’96. I’m twenty-one, I’ve got the fourth bedroom in a rented house on Tallow Street, and I share it with three men, one bathroom, and a lease none of us can break until May.
Todd, who can’t hide a thing in a pair of basketball shorts.
Scott, who does everything exactly once and never hurries.
And Aaron, who leaves the room every single time I walk into it.
I didn’t want to be seduced. I didn’t want candles, or a conversation about my major, or somebody’s whole evening. I wanted to be the thing they reached for without stopping what they were saying.
By January, that’s exactly what I was.
Then they took a vote.
Three to one, written up in the house notebook and hung on the fridge where I had to look at it eleven times a day:
NOBODY FINISHES INSIDE ANGIE.
I spent the rest of that year trying to break it.
I broke it in March, when I went looking for aspirin in Aaron’s desk and found seven months of my own cycle charted in his handwriting, underneath the pills.
