Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [11]
High school was similarly unsuccessful. First came Aaron Borke, chess club captain, talented swing dancer, homecoming date, and my first kiss. Then Charlie Smith, who led prayer around the flagpole every fall and spent the rest of the year in a state of borderline hedonism for which he would repent the following year back at the flagpole.
Twelfth grade was Seth Rieder, aspiring musician who was forever endearing for claiming that I had the knees of a supermodel, yet forever disappointing for liking breasts better. He stayed with Tiffanie Lewis who had breasts.
My college love affairs comprised a disappointing succession of altogether unattainable men: Leonard Brown, professor of literature, freshman year; Lawrence Green, roommate’s boyfriend, sophomore year; Barry Jones, philosophy major and gay, junior year. After graduation, there was Dylan Jones, lead singer of the church band and my cubicle neighbor with whom I flirted for eight months, dated for six. I spent my twenty-fourth year of life in love, my twenty-fifth recovering from the break-up.
And then Adam Palmer, a relationship doomed from the start, made impossible due to problems of faith—in other words I had one, he didn’t.
Of all the men I’d loved, I had relationships with four. That was an average of one relationship for every four years (if you only counted the court-able decades). Adam was the first I’d dated who neither believed in God nor made a front of being interested that I did. What had inspired me to think a relationship with a man who held every one of my beliefs in contempt could possibly be healthy?
Adam had been intriguing, his swagger a welcome change from the exhausting self-deprecation Dylan mistook for humility. And Adam made no attempt to hide his attraction or to keep his hands at bay. At first, it was exciting to be touched so boldly by a man who had none of the reservations that tortured the Christians I’d dated. I tripped along breathlessly, mistaking his flair for rhetoric for superior intellect and his sexual advances for romance. I ignored the growing conviction that I’d stepped out of line and suppressed the guilt in favor of the pleasure, a pleasure that grew more fleeting as Adam became more insistent.
At night, lying in bed alone, I relived the embarrassment of telling Adam I was a virgin, a fact I had revealed while standing in my panties and bra in the middle of his living room five seconds away from the worst mistake of my life. I told him I couldn’t; he put his pants back on. This had only been two weeks ago.
I hadn’t told Zoë. She only spoke cryptically of her own experience—or inexperience. While she and Michael did not sleep over at each other’s places by rule, I had no idea what they did when alone. Sex for Marriage was our mantra, but Zoë tended to have more lenient interpretations of just about any belief we shared. She was the daughter of a travel writer and a nurse who had met through the Peace Corps. The Walkers listened to NPR; they voted Democratic; they were open-minded. I was the product of a culture that considered the phrase “open-minded” anathema.
My childhood was carefully policed by the powerful mandates of the First Fundamentalist Church of God, which discouraged fraternizing with nonbelievers. I had to save a boy before I could date him and even then there was little fun to be had without sinning, so I placated my hormones with fantasies and fueled my hopes with novels. I ascribed to the True Love Waits campaign without any real dilemma, having confused scriptural mandates with my own outrageous expectations: I believed God was the Divine Author and my life the story of an ultimate romance.
I quit the First Fundamentalist Church of God soon after attending college, exhausted by its