CORY DOCTOROW · 218
and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose. Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears. I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I’d ever felt before. She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box. I’d thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I’d imagined it. Some days, I’d thought of practically nothing else. It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us. It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other’s eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can. When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her XBox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly. “Thanks,” I said. She didn’t say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. “You’re a good man, Marcus Yallow,” she whispered. “Thank you.”