Crushed
Paula M Shackleford

 

 Love isn’t something I know much about. I’ve never been in love. Never even had a real boyfriend as such. Oh, I have often shared a drunken snog with a complete stranger in a nightclub or, in the past, a guy from my registration class at a party, but never went out with them afterwards.
   Some of them did ask me out, to the cinema, to another party, back to their house even. I told them I didn’t like commitment. In most cases, I think those words had more of a turn-on effect than a turn-off. Most guys I knew weren’t into commitment anyway.
   So then I wouldn’t know how to turn them down. I’d avoid answering the question next time they asked, not wanting to insult them by telling them that I simply didn’t like them all that much, that I’d only kissed them in the first place because I was very drunk, or desperate. That there was no chance I wanted to see them again (which was pretty impossible in the case of the guy in my registration class unless I was marked absent for the rest of the year) and that I certainly didn’t want to sleep with them. Why is it that the guys that like you are totally unattractive to you? You may kiss them, pretend that you find them attractive, maybe even have sex with them in a drunken haze . . . but you will never want them even half as much as they want you.
   This has proved even more true in my life. All my high school crushes were on the popular guys - Paul Devenney in first year, Eddie Beggan in second, Paul Grant in third. The same guys that the majority of the female population fancied, and we could all giggle together as one of them walked past us and examine his lovely bum, then dissect how gorgeous he had looked down to the very last detail.
   For some reason, I always thought I might be in a with a chance with these guys. I never was - they laughed at me, the very idea that someone like me, a frizzy haired girl with bad dress sense (although that could have been attributed to the school uniform), thought I might have even a glimmer of a chance with them was absolutely hilarious. Not to me, of course. I would go home and cry because I felt so unloved, so unlovable. I was 15 years old, almost 16 and was still a V.L. (playground talk - Virgin Lips meaning I had never been kissed).
   Some point between fifth and sixth year that changed. I had attacked my medium brown hair with several bottles of extra strong Sun-In and this somehow rendered me more attractive to the opposite sex. Suddenly, the best looking guy in school began to ask my friend about me. At the same time, his best friend developed a crush on me too, he being a Scottish-Italian bloke who I had known since I was very young and hated for most of the time in the way you tend to hate members of the opposite sex at that age. Both of them seemed very attractive to me, but the first guy definitely won in my book. I had had a crush on him for several years and the fact that he finally returned my feelings was a welcome change from the usual scenario. However, nothing happened between us and I started to get discouraged, knowing that the longer either of us left it, the less likely it was to happen.
   Eventually, in desperation, I snogged his best friend at a party. He was only the second guy I had kissed and that was one of the few snogs I don’t remember with a shudder of horror and disgust. He was a nice bloke, he was extremely good looking, and he really liked me. And the added bonus was it instantly got back to Guy Number One. Just what I wanted.
   Still nothing happened. The school year drew to a close and both the guys, a year older than me, left Holy Cross. Life went on, I gradually got over the love that never actually existed, put to the back of my mind the diaries I had filled with mentions of his name, pleads of “Please God, let him speak to me tomorrow” and any encounter where I exchanged a brief but meaningful glance with him. Those diaries are still upstairs, hidden in a drawer in my bedroom, but I tend not to look at them now. The memories of such a strong crush are still painful to me. The reason why will become clearer in just one moment.
   There is one thing that stands out in my mind, one diary entry I remember making which pondered on the way this guy was rumoured to treat girls. Several of my friends had personal experience of this treatment. He was supposedly a total bastard to them. I wrote in my diary:
   “I would like to give him a taste of his own medicine. I would like to kiss him and then walk away, never talk to him again and make him feel used.”
   Realistically though, I knew I could never do that. If he kissed me, I wouldn’t be able to forget it in a hurry.
   Something else I remember, sort of bitterly given what happened to me later, is that I wrote that if only I could kiss him once. It almost wouldn’t matter if he never talked to me again, it would be worth any amount of pain to be able to say “I kissed him.” I recall the way I put it was “to be one of the lucky ones”. Hey, I was pathetic, I admit it. I liked the guy one hell of a lot, more than I had ever liked anyone.
   Last year, my sister bumped into him at the swimming pool where he had a part-time job as a lifeguard and, after talking to one of his fellow workers, uncovered that he still remembered me. And he had recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years. This was my opportunity and my sister seized it for me, inviting him to come to an 18th party that we were going to the next night, effectively setting us up on a date.
   Suddenly, my dream was being fulfilled. The guy I had desperately fancied for more than six years was sitting next to me, and my usual shyness evaporated as he made me feel totally at ease with him. The amount of alcohol I consumed also helped, the party was in a church hall and the price of booze always seems to be much lower there. After the party, my sister and her then-boyfriend drove some friends of hers home, and we waited on the street for them to come back. We kissed and it was exactly what I had been waiting for all my life. I had known that he would be a great kisser and my instinct (and my friends who had the same honour) was absolutely right. He was amazing.
   As he got out the car to go into his house, he said he would call me during the week.
   He never did.
   I spent a long time fantasising about him over the first few weeks. More than I had before. I’d spent so long thinking of him as a bastard, but he’d seemed to be a genuinely nice guy. And I still liked him after I kissed him, I actually wanted more from him. I longed for him to call me and ask me out. I thought he could be the guy that I lost my virginity to. He was the only guy I had felt that way about.
   As the months went past, I began to lose hope, but I continued to take the optimist’s view. Maybe he was still interested, he’d just been too nervous to phone and now he thought it was too late. My little sister had spoken to him and he’d said that, having just came out of that long-term relationship, he wasn’t interested in anything serious, but that he was still planning to phone me. But the phone continued to just sit there, the only people who rang me were my friends.
   I went back to my old tricks. I snogged one of the other lifeguards at the swimming pool one night when I was out at the local nightclub, hoping it would get back to himand make him jealous. To this day, I don’t know if he found out about it or not.
   I was seriously on the verge of snogging another one of the lifeguards not long after this, for exactly the same reason. However, this lifeguard was the one who gave me the devastating news that the guy I liked so much had gotten back together with his ex. They’d reunited a couple of months before.
   I’d turned twenty the week before, but I ran home and cried for days like a pre-teen. It was worse than I’d felt when the guys had laughed at me for having the audacity to have a crush on them. I felt the rejection all over again. Then, although it took me several months to do it, I forced myself to get over him, once and for all.
   My sister has bumped into him in the pub several times and has seen this girlfriend - apparently, the cow is not a patch on me, but this could just be sisterly love at its most loyal. My sister also tells me that the girl looks like a total bitch. It doesn’t comfort me, because whatever this girl’s faults may be, she is still the one who has Him. And He obviously sees something in her that he thinks is worth sticking around with her for. Even if it is probably just a lot of rampant sex.
   Only recently, I have started to think of him again. How ironic it was that I said that I would rather have been kissed by him, than not at all. When, all along, I had known that the kiss would not be enough, that I wanted more than that from him. The fact was, when he left school, I had pretty much got myself over him. After that kiss, I was back to square one - my high school crush had returned with a vengeance and turned me back into the insecure girl I was back then. If I’d never seen him again after he’d left school, I’d have coped, I WAS coping, honestly I was. Now he had used me, just like he used my schoolmates in the past, I can’t find a guy. At all. Any guy that seems interested in me, I compare to him. And the poor guy who is trying to chat me up falls sadly short.
   In the 14 months or so that have passed since that kiss, I have kissed four other guys. I have found no one to have a relationship with and no one to have sex with. I still think about him, every time I go down to the shops, I expect to bump into him, I wonder what I would do if I saw him. Act casual? Brush past him as if I didn’t even notice him? More likely I would blush bright red, stammer “Hi Steven” and then he would look at me as if I was mad and hurry past me.
   But I haven’t seen him since the night I kissed him. And part of me hopes that I never see him again. That night, I’d finally got together with the guy who had been the object of my crush for so long. But I’d never realised that it would be me who ended up crushed.
   Is it any wonder that I am totally wary of falling in love?

 

 

Copyright © 2000 Paula M Shackleford
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"