“That’s just what I would very much like to do. I want to be friends with you, Lexie, because we have a lot in common, and we like each other as friends, and most of all, feel comfortable with each other. I’d like to think that when I do go out on dates, I’ll be as comfortable with them as I am with you. Maybe that’s not realistic. Maybe the impossibility of anything serious between us is the whole reason we find each other so easy to be with.”
“Yossi, I know it’s tough for the likes of us, but let’s try to not over-analyze things. How about this: let’s make a deal. I’ll help you become comfortable talking to girls, and you help me be comfortable talking to guys. Let’s shake on it. What’s wrong? I thought you said it was OK for you to shake a girl’s hand.”
“It is, Lexie, when it’s a simple matter of social convention. It’s not any more, at least not for me. If you gave me your hand now I wouldn’t want to let it go. It’s late, I’d better head home.”
My mouth stayed locked open as Yossi quickly left the room. At first I felt giddy and wonderful. What a sweet thing for him to say! He really feels that way about me! Here I was at the age of eighteen, realizing for the first time that a boy liked me, so much so that the touch of my hand was a danger to him. Then I began to worry if I’d done anything wrong, if I’d crossed any line which might ruin things between us. Next my fantasies started piling up, one more daring and thrilling than the other, of kissing him, of crushing his body against mine, of him touching me wherever I willed myself to be touched. I felt like a complete fool, but my need was so intense I could not turn off the deluge of erotic fantasy. It was if four years of adolescent anguish were compressed into a single evening.
I had often had romantic fantasies, sexual fantasies even, but always with a safely distant figure. I fell in love with John Keats and Frédéric Chopin, haunted, handsome young men whom I could save from a tragic fate, presumably with time-travelled antibiotics. They would have been much less attractive had they just died of old age. (Byron and Liszt were even better looking but they’d be a real handful, and I wasn’t interested in falling for such bad boys.) I loved them through poetry and music, making me feel wonderfully high-minded and pure. I felt so superior to girls whose masturbation fantasies were only of Brad Pitt.
I told myself, this is different, you idiot. This is a real human being, a very nice and decent human being, as liable to get hurt as I am myself. I resolved to do my best to keep our friendship alive, but more or less resigned myself to never seeing him again after the semester was over. Nevertheless, the only way I could get to sleep that night was to pretend Yossi Churchill was thrusting himself into me.
Two days later he emailed me asking when would be a good time to talk on the phone. The first thing he did was to apologize. “Lexie, whatever I may have felt the other night I had no right imposing on you.”