The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley

want to see me again: I burned with humiliation.
    “Why are you a vegetarian?” Hunter and I had compromised on a meal of coffee and french fries. All around us, it seemed, thinner, prettier girls in tight black turtlenecks and perfectly tattered Levi’s were drinking cappuccinos and reading annotated copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Only one of them wore glasses, the fake little black kind models wear when they want to look intellectual.
    “I don’t like the idea of supporting the meat industry.” I was wearing a navy sweat suit, and my hair was unwashed and rolled into a messy bun on the top of my head.
    “All those poor little battery-raised chickens without beaks? All those innocent little overfed veal calves with ulcers on their eyes and hooves too soft to stand on?” Hunter ate another french fry.
    “I see you’ve dated vegetarians before.” Before! As if this were a real date!
    But Hunter only laughed. He had brown wavy hair that curled at the ends and wonderful dark eyes that sort of drank you in. He sat like an athlete, muscular thighs spread wide; later, I found out that he played soccer for the school team. When he took off his sweater I could see the shadow of his pectoral muscles through his thin white T-shirt. “Hey,” he said, “can I ask a personal question?”
    “Sure,” I replied, trying to hide my nervous ness.
    “How long is your hair when it’s down?”
    This is where I was supposed to pull out the pins and dazzle him. “To the small of my back. But it’s not too clean right now.”
    Hunter leaned back and took a swallow of coffee. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
    He wants to sleep with me, I thought, but by dawn he’ll be back in what ever hellish frat house he lives in and I’ll never hear from him again.
    “I have to get back to the fishbowl.” Which was what we all called the Science Library.
    “Bloody midterms.” I later learned that his family had moved to En gland when he was sixteen. Hunter had managed to retain a sort of Ralph Lauren patina of upper-middle Britishness, which was to grow even more pronounced after we moved to Manhattan.
    Outside, on the badly lit path back to the library, Hunter stopped and gripped me by the elbows. I was dizzy with the smell of him, masculine and Marlboro-tinged, with a hint of verbena soap. “Abra. Are you at all interested in seeing me again, or am I just bugging the hell out of you?”
    I wanted to sink my teeth into his lower lip and kiss him till there was blood. I wanted to sink down to my knees and bite him right through his jeans. Shaken by the violence of this lust, I took a moment to answer. “Interested,” I said.
    “Good.” A grin flashed over his heavily shadowed face like a light going on. Then he lit a cigarette and became moody and unknowable again. What do you see in me, I wanted to ask. Is it the hair? Do you have a thing for virgins? Months later, I finally worked up the courage to ask him what first attracted him to me.
    “Your confidence,” he said. “The way you just sat there in your comfortable clothes, completely consumed by your work. The way you didn’t seem to need to check your watch like all the other poor slobs putting in their study time. With your hair up, and those goofy big eighties glasses, you seemed … I don’t know. Like a little nun, perfectly at peace with herself.”
    When he finally made love to me, two weeks after our first encounter, I was so unused to being touched that I kept laughing. I was so sexually inexperienced that all my erogenous zones were ticklish. I wanted to beg Hunter to be rougher with me, but he was desperately considerate. I’d ridden too many horses as a girl to bleed when he entered me, but there was a little pain as he stretched me.
    I wanted to follow that pain wherever it would take me, but Hunter held himself back until the end, and by then there wasn’t enough time to catch up.
    “You okay, ‘Cadabra