Section 6

Chapter 6

But did thee feel the earth move?
- Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940

6

I waited two days and called. I didn’t know what to expect really. A lot of college girls pick up ten numbers a night and never think twice about any of them, so having had two days to deflate, I guess you could say my expectations were a bit low. We talked that first night, I shit you not, for six hours. Six fucking hours! It was fantastic! It was as if we had existed for over twenty years, side-by-side, without ever noticing one another. She knew my friends and I knew hers. She had attended most of the same sporting events I had. She cheered at my basketball games when Claudue would play Maxfield. How the hell had I never met this girl before? On weekends she even used to cruise around my small town, beating the same path that nearly every small-town high schooler eventually finds – up Main Street, around the courthouse, library, or town square, and then back down Main again – repeat about a thousand times.

So how could I have never noticed her? I did have a girlfriend in high school, and was whipped like a slow slave, but the fact is, I still noticed chicks. After all, I can still picture the damned Bungi twins, from up in Clancy. These two were incredible. Tall, blonde, nice tits, small waists, great legs, killer everything… and best of all, they were twins. They were like a damned Double-Mint commercial, all cute and innocent looking, but subconsciously, oozing sex appeal and screaming at the top of their lungs, “Fuck us, please… we need you now!” Like I said, I can still picture them to a tee… and do, for that matter, upon occasion, when the J.O. fantasy material runs a bit on the low side. But the point is, I did notice other girls–so why not Chloe?

It’s a mystery to this day how we passed one another so many times and never met…. Anyhow, what matters is that we were hitting it off, big time. She seemed perfect. We talked like that for about a week. Not every night, basically because we didn’t want to appear too much like a couple of love struck high school pups, but enough. Finally, after about three or four of these marathon chat sessions, at eight o’clock on a Thursday night, I invited her over… and she came.


Twice.