But when I knew him at Lipscomb he was a good looking guy with wide brown eyes, black hair and pale white skin. He looked good with a nice five o'clock shadow, and his arms were thick with muscles that I never saw him use. He was slightly mousy looking with an upturned nose, and he had an air about him that suggested he might approach sex the same way a five-year old approached Christmas morning: wide eyes a twinkle and a grin with much excitement and little understanding. Childlike, even innocent.
And I hated that. The world is not innocent, and I couldn't stand the way his view of romance was so smooth and clean and reliable when I clearly knew it wasn't. Even as he drove me down the backroads of Green Hills trying to explain to me how much fun he would have making love to his wife whoever she ended up being, I couldn't listen to a word of it. He was so full of ideals. All of which I knew weren't true!
It didn't help that Ben Roller's Tau Phi crew looked at Matt's crew like they were space aliens. It didn't help that Michael Metzger smiled at me from his seat on the floor during chapel. It didn't help that all these people looked at me strangely when Matt brought me a rose after chapel on Valentine's Day.
"Oh. Thank you. How sweet!"
But after I put the rose in my backpack with the bud sticking out, I noticed Michael and his friend Chandler milling around on the bottom bleacher of my section, and I ditched Matt for them. We went down to the side of campus by the road and smoked cigarettes.
Matt never contacted me again except to look sadly over at me during chapel, and once to send me a three page letter in my mail cubby about how much I was selling myself short. His friends wouldn't talk to me either. They gave me looks like I was a leper. Like I had made my choice. But I was having too much fun, and in the end the looks didn't last very long because by the time Michael and I were an item, I had reached the beginning of the end. Of that chapter at least.
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