This is a tale of betrayal in a close platonic friendship. It is also about consequences and courage and finding the strength to do what we can to take responsibility for our mistakes and make the sacrifices required to pay for them. It is not, strictly speaking, a "dirty" story, although there is sex in it. I think of it as a SHIP story, because Sex Has Its Place here. I include it because it is important to the story, not because it is the story. But it is also here because I am a dirty girl and you are a dirty reader. The question here is whether you have what it takes to read my story. Not just to skim over it and sample the juicy bits, but to dive into it and feast on the fare. Do you dare to possibly see a tiny bit of yourself in any of the characters in my little morality play?
I am the betrayer. I now believe that close platonic friendships between people who are members of each other's chosen sexual preference are impossible for people who have not achieved the wisdom of my current age. I did not do anything that I thought was unacceptable behavior for a woman who is friends with a man, but I delivered emotional pain to a boy-man who did not deserve it. This happened long ago, when we were both barely in our twenties, and the lessons I learned from it have stuck with me, but they came at an awful price. It is a price I am still paying today and I would happily pay more if ever the opportunity arose. Now back to the tale.
I tried to block Charlie from leaving by holding his forearms. He had raised them up to push past me to get out of my dorm room. He was my best friend and he had just told me that our friendship was "toast". I needed to know why. I knew what triggered him to leave, but I did not understand why it would. I knew I should not have done it and maybe that was reason enough. I knew he was emotionally fragile and vulnerable.He had just given up on a girl I had encouraged him to pursue and he was damaged goods since before he could speak. I felt bad for him, but I also felt bad for myself. I had just been dumped by my latest guy and I needed Charlie to be the rock that he had always been for me when the assholes of his gender had failed me.
There are two things that you should probably understand before we go on. The first is that Charlie was a virgin. He was tall and skinny, so much of a beanpole that the women he was attracted to rejected him because of it. The fact that he was painfully shy, socially awkward, and smarter than any ten average guys combined did not help. He did not try to make people feel dumb. It was just impossible not to notice how quickly and easily he came up with an answer that was right no matter how unpopular it was. The second thing you need to know is that I was an easy fuck for any guy who had big pecs and hard abs and made me feel desirable.
I tried to tell myself that what I did to trigger Charlie's flight response was only an attempt to cheer him up, but I knew that was not true. He had warned me enough times that it did not come as a surprise that anger was one of the things that I saw on his face. It was the other things that had me scared that I would lose him.
So there we were, struggling in the short tight hallway that led to my dorm room door and freedom for Charlie. He was fully dressed and 6'6" tall, with brown hair, freckled fair skin, piercing blue eyes behind gold-rimmed wire-frame eyeglasses and a handsome face that betrayed every emotion he felt as soon as he felt it. I also have to add that he was surprisingly strong for his skinny build. I could feel him holding back some of his strength so that he did not hurt me as he carefully pushed me backwards.
I was a slender and athletic 5'9" Polish-American girl and I felt like I had all the stopping power of butterfly on the grill of a truck. My somewhat frizzy shoulder-length brown hair was freshly washed and dried. I could feel tears welling in my light brown eyes. I was wearing a bathrobe and panties and nothing else. Well, there was some eye makeup and nail polish and a little jewellery, but nothing else that you could call clothing. The belt on my bathrobe was untied and if he looked down, he would see right between my 36Bs to my white, semi-sheer panties and right on down my freshly shaved legs to my freshly painted toenails. But he was looking right into my eyes and his eyes were burning with a mix of emotions. Pain certainly. I could tell he was holding back tears. Shame possibly, because of that. Love maybe. Hate maybe. Distress. Frustration. Anger. Fear?
I should not have flashed my tits at him. I knew the moment I saw the look on his face as he raised his gaze from my chest to my eyes that it was a very wrong thing to do. I saw the look you would see if you taunted a starving man with a steak dinner at the moment he realized that you were going to eat it yourself in front of him and that there was nothing he could do about it. It was hopeless rage. I had crossed the line he had been warning me about.
Maybe I did not take him seriously the first dozen times. Maybe I did o't think he had the strength to resist me. Maybe I thought that flashing my panties and my titties and squeezing his buns and rubbing against his crotch and giving him descriptions of what I did with and to my chosen guys along with taunts, that it was just his tough luck that he did not measure up, were just flirting and that he was weak for letting it bother him. Maybe I thought I had a right to be a cruel bitch to any man who desired my body. Or maybe I just fucked up when I asked him to help me with my Psychology of Abusers homework. I am sure that helped him to understand what I was before I understood it myself. A succubus. A predatory feminine parasite who fed on masculinity.
We had been sitting in my dorm room studying .I guess my insecurities over losing yet another boyfriend got the better of me and I wanted to know that a man whose opinion I valued still found me desirable. Charlie and I had been friends for almost two years. You maybe could say we were best friends. I certainly got along with him better than I got along with any women. He seemed to have only a very few friends and none of the others were like me. He had no one else he could share secrets with, no one else who tried to help him get over his shyness and no one else who knew that his height had yet again been offered as the reason for his recent rejection.
It must have been tough being so different during his high school years. He towered over all but the tallest of basketball players. He was in the top 1% academically in his graduating class. He could speak in front of a group, but he could not look a girl in the eye or talk to her unless she initiated the conversation. He never had a date. He did not go to his prom. He smoked pot all through high school. I think that was his way of tolerating the emotionally abusive family situation that he was born into.
I met him early in my freshman year at a gathering of stoners in one of the rooms on his floor. That is what pot smokers were called in the late 1970s when we were living on segregated floors in the same dorm building at the University of Wisconsin. Maybe they still are, but I would not know because I stopped getting stoned when I was a junior.
The thing that piqued my interest in him was his eyes. They are not the window to his soul, but they clearly reveal that a lot is going on behind them. Most of the other stoners in the room were merry-eyed or bleary-eyed. Charlie, whom I had just seen take the biggest bong hit in the history of the Universe and hold it in for long enough to let it come out clear, had what we called "American eyes", red-rimmed from pot then white, then blue with dilated pupils. But even with the buzz he was carrying, his eyes watched. He drank in the room through his peepers and when he noticed me looking at his face, he looked away like my gaze had burned him. I knew that I was not hard on the eyes of most men, so I had to find out why he flinched.
Now I know. He had developed defenses and survival tricks that no kid should have to learn. Not seeing that he was instantly rejected by attractive women was one of them. Another was a strong flight response. And in my room on the night that I flashed my tits at him, I had just triggered it.
"Sorry doesn't help, Vickie.