“Meet at the light?”
I look down at my phone and see the text from Henry. I smile. I was just about to send him the same thing.
It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday, and I just got home from my hostess job, still in my khakis and ketchup-stained maroon polo.
“Yeah, give me 20 mins,” I reply. I throw on leggings and a sweatshirt and leave my hair in its messy post-work ponytail.
I start making my way out of the house, tiptoeing down the stairs. The easiest way to do this is to be in and out before my parents realize I’m home. I’m not great at lying to their faces, and they wouldn’t be thrilled to hear I’m going to see Henry. If they text asking where I am, I’ll say I’m at Michaela’s.
Ten minutes later, I’m pulling into the parking lot behind a closed-down ice cream parlor. He beat me here—he usually does. Apart from our two cars, the lot is empty.
I pull up next to him, hop out of my car, and slide into the passenger seat of his. We’ve done this many times now. Meeting at this spot has kind of become our thing.
Henry is slouched back in the driver’s seat in his casual way, his phone already in his hand when I shut the door. I pull out a few old mix CDs I brought with me and push one into the player, having already decided that tonight we’re listening to throwbacks. Above us, a soft yellow street lamp flickers once, then steadies.
That lamp is the reason this place has a name. One night we’d joked that it was a clap-on, clap-off light, and when I clapped, it actually shut off. Henry threw the car into reverse and we peeled out of the lot, away from the haunted street lamp. We came back laughing, and that’s how this spot became “The Light.”
We met like this most weekends, platonically, for months. We’d listen to music, talk, gossip. I loved getting to finally see this side of him, to get to know him like a real friend.
He’s texting; his phone and the dashboard casting him with a cool blue glow. His thumbs keep moving as he asks how my shift was, I tell him about how the other hosts and I were hiding fries and candy in the host’s stand. He laughs in all the right places without once looking up.
Despite any potential sparks, it was always clear that he had no intention of us becoming a couple. I figured his logic mirrored mine: we were horribly incompatible. I’m sure he saw it too, if our previous relationship was any indication. However, what really drove the point home was his nonchalant way of mentioning all the girls he was seeing and sleeping with. It was like a neon sign flashing “Not Interested in Commitment.”
There were a handful of girls whose names he casually threw around. Naturally, Carly was one of them (although he kept the details vague, perhaps due to the stress she caused during our relationship). Then there was Leah, who I’d assumed was just a good friend until now. Also he was hooking up with a blonde girl from our Spanish class. With his secretive nature, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were more names on that list he wasn’t letting slip. Still, there was a strange allure in being privy to his confessions. It was like being on the inside of his world. I loved being the girl he told about the other girls without actually being one of the other girls.
The phone in his hand tonight is nothing new. As we idled in the car, he’d often be glued to his phone, juggling texts and Snapchats while still managing to keep up conversation with me. I always assumed he was texting these other girls, but my suspicions were confirmed one day when he nonchalantly showed me an alluring Snapchat from the blonde girl in our Spanish class. There she was, lounging in a bathtub, reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and holding a small leopard-print vibrator.
Our texting, however, was limited to logistics—when and where to meet up. No good morning texts, no discussions about the day. Honestly it felt freeing to only text sporadically, given that I used to text him every minute of every day.
What’s more, I still had a Jurassic-era slide phone, and I wasn’t necessarily looking for reasons to spend more time on it. I didn’t take pictures, and I didn’t (couldn’t) take screenshots. The only hard evidence on my end that we were friends at all was from the time I left my phone in his car and had to reach out to him on Facebook messenger from my laptop.
But I was loving getting to know him again. As a boyfriend his mercurial mind frightened me, but now it was precisely what made him so interesting, what made me so eager to befriend him. I was getting to know the version of him that I had always been so curious about. I was drawn to unraveling the enigma of who he truly was.
Sneaking out to see him became intoxicating. Soon I felt like an addict who’d been clean for years and convinced herself one small hit wouldn’t count. All I ever wanted was his approval, his attention, just another little taste of ecstasy. And in our new arrangement, I got it… and then I wanted more. For the first time since the early days of being his girlfriend, he was showing me his nice side, his funny side, his flirtatious side.
Tonight, I kick my feet up on the dash and cross my ankles. He glances over at me, but then pauses like his eyes got caught at my hips, like this is the first time he’s actually seeing me this evening. He holds his gaze on me without quite making eye contact. “Your legs look incredible,” he says softly. I feel it land exactly where he meant it to.
I look at him looking at me, and I realize something that makes my stomach flip: nobody is making this happen. Not him. Not me trying to keep the peace. Just me, wanting to.
So I lean across the console and kiss him.
He kisses me back. The lamp doesn’t even flicker.
I need you to know that I was the one who kissed him. I need you to know why that matters.
Back when we were dating, Henry and I first had sex on his basement couch about a week after I turned fifteen. I knew we were young to be doing this—I mean, as far as I knew most of my classmates hadn’t done it yet—but still I was happy with this decision at the time. In my mind he was my soulmate, he was the person I was supposed to “lose my virginity” to anyway, so why did it matter if we tried it out just this once? We were in love and curious, I didn’t see any harm in doing it.
We had a difficult time making it work the first time. We eventually made it happen with some force, but for me it hurt horribly, like an internal rug burn.
I told him I was in pain. He said he was enjoying it. I wanted to stop, but I was afraid to say so out loud, because I knew it would make him angry. So I told him again, more than once, that it hurt, thinking that would be enough to gently convey what I couldn’t.
It wasn’t.
I braced for more pain, but then thankfully the moment was interrupted when we heard his parents near the basement door at the top of the stairs, and recognized that as the cue that they were about to come down and check on us.
It was like there was a disconnect between my mind and my body—my mind was saying, “Just do it!” but my body couldn’t seem to get on board. For him, I wanted to be able to take that step in our relationship. But honestly, I wasn’t ready yet. I remember going on a walk with him afterward, holding his hand and smiling at him, but inwardly wondering why I felt so empty.
However, after that first time he suddenly wanted to have sex with me all the time… and I guess I thought that if I let him do it once then that meant he was free to do it again as he pleased, like I had given him my lifelong consent. I was worried that since I already said yes once that I would be the one in the wrong if I said I didn’t want to. Then whenever my interest in intimacy seemed to waver he’d accuse me of not loving him or not being attracted to him… and I was so afraid of making him doubt our relationship. Now there’s nothing wrong with having a high sex drive, but when I was fifteen, I wasn’t ready to make the jump from being an inexperienced teen girl with crushes and butterflies to being fucked every day after school.
In movies and shows, I had often heard women say, “he couldn’t keep his hands off of me,” as if it were a compliment. I didn’t experience it that way. Instead, I felt like he was marking me, emphasizing my place in his world. But I quickly noticed that the only time he wasn’t scolding or upset with me in some way was when I let him touch me, so I never voiced my discomfort.
His parents granted us a decent amount of privacy while we spent time together on the couch in either his living room or basement, though they never knocked before entering the room—so we tried to be fairly inconspicuous. We’d lie under a blanket, mostly clothed, and he always turned me facing away from him. I didn’t need to participate much for him to be satisfied. It was a loophole for keeping his anger at bay, and my spirit was so broken that I chose the heartless sex every time.
When we were together on his couch the TV was usually on, tuned to a random channel. However, I was never allowed to pay it any attention. If my gaze flickered to the TV even for a moment, he would become angry, demanding to know what on the screen could possibly be more important than him.
I didn’t dare glance at the TV while he had sex with me, no matter how desperately I craved the distraction. Instead I picked a spot on the floor to stare at, and tried my best to dissociate. Sometimes I wonder if it was worse that I didn’t cry, that instead I became numb. My mind drifted to a place where the sensation felt neither particularly good nor bad. Instead, it felt as ordinary as if someone were touching my leg.
Back in the car, I pull back. I’m not staring at a spot on the floor. I could look anywhere I wanted—at the windshield, the lamp, my own hands even—and nobody would demand to know what was more important.
I just look at him.
This is what I wanted when I was fifteen.
I know how it looks... but we were only making out. It wasn’t even every time we met at The Light, and it certainly wasn’t the whole time! We were friends first, flirts second. And this time, I was the one who started it. The ball was finally in my court. I wasn’t kissing him because I felt obligated or because I needed to stave off his anger. I was kissing him because I wanted to.
Our story was changing.
But still, I was hesitant to trust him so wholly. I saw the way the blonde girl in our Spanish class laughed a little too loudly at his jokes, how Leah, a year younger than us, looked up to him like a role model, and something in me would just boil. I don’t know if it was jealousy, anger, alarm bells, or what. But it made me uneasy, and I could say with confidence that I still didn’t trust him enough to not treat another girl like he treated me. I wished I could warn these girls about him somehow without coming across as a jealous, crazy ex.
Because here’s the thing: I knew something they didn’t. We were all playing with fire, associating with him, but I was the only one who actually knew it. I was the only one who knew how not to get burned.
He’d been mean as a boyfriend but nice as a friend—and the difference, I figured, was the label. All I had to do was not be his girlfriend. Easy. I could be around him, finally get the respect I deserved from him, and still not get hurt. I was safe, because I knew I’d never date him. That was the plan. I was going to have my cake and eat it too.
Also, for the record—kissing wasn’t dating. Dating had a label, and I would never give him one. It was a loophole, and I was already good at those.
So of course, that meant it was okay for me to keep seeing him, because I knew I wouldn’t let myself get too close to him… right? I had already seen all of his tactics, I wasn’t going to fall for them again. It was safe for me but dangerous for the other girls because I’d see the signs if he ever turned. Right?
Right?
And I mean, just because we were bad together doesn’t necessarily mean he’d be like that with every girl he dated. And like I said, I just wouldn’t date him. I was probably even being overly cautious in saying that. He could go off and do whatever he wanted and I wasn’t going to worry about it because I was sure it was fine anyway.
Plus, honestly worrying about him was exhausting. At first I did really want him to own up to how badly he’d treated me, and I would try to coax a confession out of him during our late-night talks at The Light. I wanted to knock some sense into him before he hurt another girl. But I’m not confrontational, and he never took the bait. I’d drop small comments about our dysfunctional relationship, hoping for any reaction, and he’d shrug them off. I never found the nerve to press further.
Soon I started to question if maybe I was just… wrong about him. If maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe I’d just been fifteen and scared and made it all bigger in my head.
I didn’t always understand what my feelings were towards him, but his “good side” was who I originally fell in love with when I was fourteen, and that version of him was who I was spending all my time with now. Although I tried to fight it, it’s hard to acknowledge that a person’s evil side is still real when you never see it anymore.
And so I let the memories of manipulation fade to the back corners of my mind. I decided I could forgive the controlling version of him I once knew if this kinder version was who he’d become. It felt good to let the weight lift, to tell myself he’d reformed and I didn’t have to hold on to so much anger. I convinced myself this was his truth, that my memories of his cruelty were exaggerated.
I wasn’t necessarily tearing out the rotting wall that had become part of my foundation, but I was smoothing over it. A little plaster for the cracks, a few coats of something bright on top. From across the room, it almost looked brand new. And I wouldn’t press on it anymore to see if it gave.
This was the new truth; our new truth. I had decided. We were rewriting the narrative, and I was loving every second of it.