pouring out all of it: what had been happening between me and Bridget, what had and hadn’t happened the night before, and just how utterly bewildered I was by all of it.
Tony listened, an expression of patient amusement on his round face. When I had finished saying, for the fourth time, that I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what she wanted, didn’t know what I wanted, I finally ran out of gas and looked at him.
“This is what I meant,” he said, smiling. “Not straight enough. Look, my neighborhood growing up, it was mostly Italian, okay? So most of the boys I first started… playing around with, they were good Catholics.” When I started to say something, he held up a pudgy finger to silence me. “The point for someone like Little Miss Bridget is that, basically, anything worth doing in life, one way or another, it’s a sin, and if you go ahead and enjoy yourself, you’re going to burn forever in eternal damnation. But that sure as hell doesn’t stop them from wanting to.”
Frowning, I shrugged.
“So she wants you, Ken. Believe me — even I can see that.”
“Great,” I grumbled. “Then why can’t she just — ?”
“I told you, Ken: if she makes a move, if she says a word, then it’s an express ride down into Dante’s Inferno. But she wants you, so she can’t just say no.”
“So what the heck am I supposed to do ?”
“You’re supposed to ravish her, you idiot.”
“You mean…?” I resisted the urge to shake Tony, then turn around and shake Bridget. “You mean I’m supposed to, you know, force her to do something she wants to do? That… that’s fucked up.”
Tony laughed. “See? Not straight enough.”
I was about to tell him just how straight I was when I felt a small hand grab my crotch firmly, rendering me speechless. For a brief moment I thought the hand might be Tony’s, but then Bridget leaned up behind me and whispered moistly in my ear, “Take me home, Ken.” And then she fondled me again, squeezing any qualms or questions entirely out of me.
As I sprang up from the table, Tony smirked at me. Bastard.
By the time we tumbled back into Bridget’s dorm room, it was almost impossible for me not to do exactly what Tony had suggested she wanted me to do.
Almost.
We were sprawled on her bed, madly smooching, each rubbing away at the crotch of the other’s jeans, when I realized something: I had absolutely no interest in taking what wasn’t freely given. Giving Bridget’s still-clothed crotch a quick caress and kissing a still-covered breast, I stammered, “I… I have… have to go to the gents’. Can we…? I’ll be right back.”
Eyes wide, she gave me a quick nod, her expression equal parts naked hunger and bewildered child. Giving her another quick kiss, I stumbled out of the room.
It took a while for my hard-on to calm down enough for me to pee, and the beer from earlier that evening ensured that that process took a while as well. My head more or less clear, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and tried to look at what was going on.
The problem, I decided, was that I liked Bridget, and I found her attractive, and I would happily fuck her silly — if that were what she wanted. But I wasn’t in love with her. I wasn’t looking to promise anything. And if what I was getting from Bridget and what Tony had said were right, then fucking her would be making some kind of promise.
Well. The right thing to do, then, instead of dropping all of my clothes on the bathroom floor, slipping on the condom I’d tucked into my pocket just in case, and streaking past the damned RA and back to Bridget’s room to fuck her silly, was to take a deep breath, walk back to her room, and tell her that we should probably cool it for the night — and that we needed to have a real conversation. In the morning. Somewhere public.
Relieved and depressed to have come to a decision — a decision that wasn’t going to do a thing about my throbbing hard-on — I took a