“They’re going without us.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I want to go.”

“Then fucking go, Cree.” I was incredulous. What the??

“I can’t leave you here like this!”

The ‘like this’ referred to was me, supine on the curb, bootsoles flat to the street’s asphalt, knees (remarkably) primly together. Demure While Drunk In Public Settings is a course that all Southern young women are required to take, even if they never plan to touch a drop in their lives (also paramount is the early-learning regimen of both How To Tell A Bald-Faced Lie Earnestly and Looking Sweet And Only Cutely Flustered In Moments of Discomfort*).

Also, I should mention, I took a painstaking twenty-five minutes –while everyone else was shooting the breeze or talking shit (which really are only slightly different…it’s all in the set of your mouth as you are doing it) –-arranging my hair, braided and at right angles, behind my head. When you’re the right shade of pickled everything’s an artistic moment: I Am Living Sculpture, Hear Me Roar.

Everything else residing between the boots and the hair, well….let’s just say those things were sort of left to their own devices. The knees were on autopilot, performing quite nicely and according to their ritualistic training.

I was becoming one with the stars, motherfucker, and just wanted to be left alone. My senses were so keen that I could smell the mineral content of the concrete beneath my back, feel the thrumming of a miles-away textile plant on my leaden arms.

“There was a ‘don’t’ and then there was a ‘care’. I think I said them together, but I can’t be sure because I am very, very polluted at present.

“Yes,” I lifted my head so that I could fuzzily eyeball his face, “I’m almost positive that I told you I don’t care.”

“I’ll just stay here with you,” he said, exasperated beyond typical levels.

“You know what, Cree? I really can take care of myself.” He opened his mouth to speak again, and I halted him.

“If you are going to stay, then at least shut the fuck up. You can babysit me in silence, can’t you?” His response? He waved the other four on and leaned inside the car to turn on some music

while the merry band of tricksters headed toward a grocery store to stuff cold slabs of plastic-encased beef in their shirts for a little two ay emm breakfast feast. I remember hearing about this later and thinking, “I should be doubly jealous; they got both steak and erect nipples on their outing.”

After an indeterminate amount of time (thirty seconds? forty-eight weeks?), I surmised that it might be best if I explored the whole ‘being vertical’ thing for a little while. I managed to nearly raise myself erect when, whoops, overbalance kicked in on the deal and I stumbled forward into Cree’s magically-waiting arms.

As much magic, anyway, as can exist when said arms are stringing you up by your pits and saving you from violently kissing some ‘crete.

But when I extracted myself somewhat, I noticed that those arms were gooshfleshed, hair on them standing aloft. I remember being suddenly moved by his body betraying his manner and wanting to kiss him because of it. I drew him gently -–my hands clasped on his forearms and his on mine—- toward me, backing into the corner where the ticket booth and front doors met up to do whatever business involves doors and ticket booths.

And when I was suitably pinned in that swooping corner, I pulled him in to me. Our lips were inches apart; we could have breathed in each other’s expelled air had we bothered drawing breath, but we did not. He placed his right hand on my sternum, fingertips lightly resting on my neck, thumb below my chin. That particular move buckles my resolve damn near every time and suddenly here we were, boots jockeying for position and limbs clumsily (in their haste) searching for purchase.

I bit my cheek and he drew my earlobe between his lips, hands working the denim at my waist, pushing and opening all at the same time, damn the physics of it all. I maneuvered his head further downward so I could get my hands in that mass of black hair.

Everything in us both was screaming ‘GIMME!’ and we let fly on one another, the moon above witness to him bringing me to an arching, gasping place where I wanted to both run away from the intensity and stay forever awash in it.

Though we were still running buddies after that, we regarded one another with the keen distaste of ‘conquest’ and eventually the group we hung with shifted, then dissolved altogether.

Every now and again, I will see him in the grocery store, and he eyes me with appreciation and something akin to subtle want. I’ve now become a fondness in his memory; I can see him wishing away my spouse, the years, our mutual dismissiveness after that groping, fevered coupling.

It makes me uncomfortable.

*Of course I failed both of these miserably