Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [27]
One time, as we lay naked in the green depths of Wadsworth Park, his slim brown back formed one arc, the spray of his semen another, a dark and a white crescent against a background of thick ferns and the violet evening sky; I had to twist my two hands deep into our blanket to keep from leaping on top of him, holding that beautiful, bucking power inside me.
The last sunlight came through the leaves overhead, and Huddie looked up from between my legs and flung himself forward, sliding between my wet thighs so quickly I couldn’t roll away, as I always did.
“I want you to feel me,” he said, pressing down on me heavily, from chest to thigh. “Baby, please, just a little. Just the head, that’s all.”
It was wonderful. Better than fingers or tongues, this perfectly shaped, perfectly smooth and full plum flesh, moving into me, moving me right to the edge of my skin.
Leaning back for one wet, mindless moment, I felt his penis move forward, balanced with me on an inner fulcrum. Instantly I saw myself weeping in the girls’ room like poor Celia Sheehan, and I pushed at Huddie’s hips and slid him out of me, feeling the awful cool narrowness where he had been. He came on the blanket and cursed me and began to cry, fists to his eyes, like a little boy.
“I don’t want to fight about this, I don’t want to fight with you. You want to, don’t you? I know you do. I know it. Can you take the pill or something? You know I’d take care of it if I could.”
I did know. He spent a week wearing a condom, trying to get used to it. He put one on before he went to school and he wore it all night long, but at the first grip of latex, his penis softened into a scared purple curl cruelly swallowed by a big yellow dunce cap. “No condom, no sex” took care of my pregnancy fears, except for the ones about armed and fanged sperm, swimming and gnawing through my cotton underpants, but it drove Huddie crazy. He’d started having sex when he was fourteen and wasn’t planning on giving it up just three years later.
Huddie dropped me off at the Planned Parenthood above the A&P, where I met with a series of enthusiastic, slightly disapproving women, happy to have the business, not at all pleased that I was it. I filled out forms and took off my clothes and handed the forms and a Dixie cup of urine to a woman who looked so much like Greta Stone I accidentally splashed her with half the contents. I held my breath during the internal exam and wondered how a woman could put cold metal into another woman without even flinching. The speculum clicked inside me, opening me up to the nurse’s eyes and fingers, not unkind, just saying “This is what you want? This is how it is.” The birth control counselor gave me a free first month’s supply of tiny yellow pills and a row of little pink ones to be taken during my period. I couldn’t remember anything she told me that wasn’t about killing sperm, and I didn’t listen to the part about side effects. Breast cancer and blood clots don’t mean much to teenage girls. Social ostracism and pregnancy were the only real disasters for us, and I had lived through one and was planning to outsmart the other.
I came back to the car, and Huddie watched as I ceremoniously swallowed the first of the yellow pills. He clapped and I laughed and stuck two fingers in his mouth, his sharp teeth against them, the slippery, warm insides of his lips around them.
I don’t know how it worked for other girls. I know the nurse told me to wait thirty days, to use “alternate modes of contraception” while the