the wetted elastic of her panties. Their eyes met, and she nodded in the nervous permissive way that only virgins do; a nod he suddenly wished he hadn’t already gotten from other girls. As he slowly pushed inside her, she bit her lip, tensed her neck, and closed her eyes for the stinging initiation. He pulled out, against her ready assurances, and sat up against the back of the couch as his thoughts softened him up. He tried to make it about not having a condom, but she admitted to having started taking birth control. So he just sat there silently in the windowless basement darkness, numb to her adorably amateur invitations. Finally, he kissed her forehead, buttoned his jeans, and jingled his mother’s car keys in his hand. He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t the kind of girl who should lose her virginity to a guy like him, but all that came out was “I can’t.” Propriety kept her from begging and pride made her tell him to leave. He hated his obstinate silence, but knew that an explanation wouldn’t do either of them any good. How do you tell a girl that you have to hurt her a little so you won’t hurt her a lot?
When they started back to their different high schools, the thing they had together that summer didn’t end with a fight, but just quietly went away with no words at all. They’d see each other at parties during the school year––her with other guys and him with other girls. By Christmas, he stopped wondering which one of them had taken her virginity, and she stopped whispering distressfully to her girlfriends whenever they found themselves in the same room. By the time the next summer rolled around, the Daltrys were no longer active members of the Shreveport Country Club.
Tonight is the first time he’s seen Kelly in three years. As he watches her across the room, he holds a stare until she looks back, and goes through this unspoken exchange a few times to test if he’s on her mind or not. But it’s hard for him to know if he actually is, or if she’s just reacting to being stared at. When it’s time for speeches, he tries to enlist her in a few smirks and eye rolls, but she doesn’t play along.
The best man rambles on about his fraternity’s honor code and its application to marriage, causing visions of frat house date rape and initiatory ass paddling to float through Cam’s head. The father of the bride toasts the groom’s family and spills champagne on his patent leather pumps. The maid of honor uses the platform to brag about her own engagement and upcoming wedding with the ruse of using it as a way into the mind of the bride: “I know she’s never been happier in her life because that’s how I felt when my fiancé, Michael (then she smiles across the room to Michael) asked me to marry him,” etc. By the time everyone expected to talk has had their way with the microphone, the guests have learned more about the maid of honor’s fiancé, an SMU Greek chapter, and the father of the bride’s blood alcohol level than they have about the newlyweds.
Kelly gets up from her table and walks to the ladies room in the foyer. Cam waits a few minutes before excusing himself from the table to go after her.
He crosses the foyer past the restrooms and hides himself in the darkened entrance to the closed south wing. Kelly steps out of the ladies’ room.
“Kelly.”
She strains her glance into the darkness.
“It’s Cam.”
“Afraid you might catch the garter?”
“I just wanna talk to you for a second.”
“I don’t know… I’m really into the speeches.”
“Just for a second,” says Cam.
“Come over here then.”
Cam steps into the light and walks towards her. “I didn’t want to be rude,”
“Then maybe you should’ve waited.”
“I wanted to talk alone.”
“Well here we are,” she says.
Cam rehearsed his lines a few dozen times during the meal, but can’t come up with much of anything on the spot. “It’s… really good to see you,” he says, disappointed in the words before he even gets them out.
She smiles a tad, but doesn’t give him anything more than that to go on. The tables in the main gallery erupt in cheers as the bride and groom put the three-tiered cake under the knife.
Kelly starts back to the room, “I should…”
“Yeah…”
She heads back in for the cutting of the cake. As she passes Cam, he reaches to touch her arm but stops himself, and simply watches her slink back to her table as the bride and groom work forks into each other’s mouths and then kiss the smudged icing off each other’s lips. The caterers hand out cake as the band starts gradually back up with a snare and a sax, and Cam wanders off into the quiet darkness of the closed wing towards his favorite childhood exhibit.
It’s a small room, ten-feet square at most, with all four walls covered with floor-to-ceiling glass cases displaying Mr. Norton’s gun collection. Cam does a quick inventory of his old favorites, knowing where they are even in the dark: a single-shot Deringer, a Revolutionary muzzle-loader, a pair of flintlock dueling pistols, a Confederate rifled musket, and a World War II M1. The nobility of the collection isn’t tainted by anything from Vietnam. Standing in this room always made Cam feel part of a lineage of brave gentlemen. Depending on who had taken him there, he always got private lectures about the guns from his father or his grandfather, because Andrew hated the gun room and would always stay in the antique china and silver hollowware gallery next door until they were finished.
Standing here tonight in the dark, with just the guns’ angular black forms in the darkened glass––only the occasional pearl handle or mirror-polished barrel catching the distant light from the foyer––he feels a little bit a part of that lineage again. Not like he did as a kid, standing here wide-eyed while he listened to stories about every gun in the room, but just enough to give him sufficient pride to go back in and ask Kelly to dance.
Back in the reception room, Kelly is already dancing with her groomsman. Cam’s eyes lock on his hands––one is holding Kelly’s hand while the other rests on the arch of her waist. He gives her a spin, and she ducks and twirls with a smile as he pulls her in close again.
The guy is even with Cam on looks, but his jaw moves as coolly in the conversation as his body does in the dance. Cam doesn’t know his name, but he knows by the clever eyes, toothy smile and high forehead that he’s a McConathy boy, heir to an oil dynasty his father made on his own. “No lineage to stand on,” as Munna would say, but their new money is enough to secure a place at South Highlands’ school for any McConathy child, a membership at the new country club, and a prominent pew at the First Baptist Church. He and Kelly look like the kind of couple who send out photo Christmas cards with their pretty children; the family with a five-bedroom mansion on Richmond Avenue and a duck camp on Lake Bistineau that’s nicer than any home Cam will ever own.
As the song winds down, Cam gets up from his chair to ask for the next dance. But they don’t stop, they just slow down and wait for the next song. The McConathy kid cracks a joke and Kelly laughs and touches his bicep.
A flash goes off behind Cam. The photographer is trying to get a decent shot of the preschool ring bearer and flower girl, struggling to keep a calm voice as he orders them to stand still. The girl is sitting on the floor, unbuckling her Mary Janes, and the boy is standing up pinching his crotch. Cam approaches the photographer.
“The groomsmen want another group shot,” says Cam.
“Did Chad send you
