the softest boy

you kept safe all the parts of me that mattered

I gave my prom date a hand job in his bedroom watching Battlestar Galactica, months before he ever asked me to prom. He buried his face in my hair, breathing deep as he ejaculated, and whispered that I had given him his first orgasm.

This was shortly after a forty year old man picked me up at a hotel bar, showed me pictures of himself in Mallorca at the beach with his toddler daughter. He seemed like a good dad. I hugged him as he cried about his unfolding divorce, and he gave me $8000 for the taxi home.

Anyway.

We sat together in junior year math for a whole year before he kissed me after a single beer one Friday night on a rocky outcrop under a blanket by a campfire with our friends. He confessed that he’d been smelling my hair just as hungrily as I had been absorbing the heat off the back of his hand that entire year. He spoke to my dad the next day on our landline while I was at church to assure him that his intentions were good (omitting that they were not entirely pure) — this was 2008. We all had cellphones.

The following Monday, he strode up to me, eyes on fire, grabbed my face, and kissed me hard and deep outside the science labs. Classmates whooped. Fucking finally. But also, what the fuck?

When he heard from that I’d been accepted to all three colleges I applied to, each one at least two states away from his, he burst into my homeroom, grabbed me, and swung me around. Everyone else had applied to ten - three reach, four good fit, three safeties, early decision at least two to five Ivies. I picked three that seemed to accept and encourage the certifiably insane and had applied regular decision because I had been busy detangling myself from a married lover.

He wrote me lists of things he liked about me on his parents’ law firm letterhead in blue ballpoint. The banal fact that my nose got cold in the winter became funny and sacred.

A motherly teacher stopped us in the stairs, telling us asking us to please stop sitting in each other’s laps.

We sat in the library cheek-to-cheek between classes, his soft peach fuzz tickling my ear. Our inside jokes were bathroom words from an ancient book on human biology. I admired him as he walked through the school gate every morning and made his way to the slab of marble where I sat waiting. I lived to see him approaching with his backpack, plaid shirt, khaki shorts with way too many pockets. It never got old to feel myself lighting up like a candle, to see his entire body smile when his eyes found mine. I had never given anyone such pure, unadulterated happiness in my life.

Every time he left for class, he breathed mist onto a cold window next to where I sat in the library and drew a heart with our initials in it.

We were at his house in a typhoon. His parents called my mine to ask permission for me to shelter at their house so they wouldn’t have to drive out to get me in the storm. They withdrew to their bedroom with a wink.

We dyed his hair black in my bathtub after yearbook photos, just before graduation. He slipped his soft grey sweater with the name of his parents’ law school across the front in all-caps over my head when I said how much I loved the way it smelled.