Maybe Tomorrow
Matt S Stemerman

 

My girlfriend and I have been dating for almost two years now and I couldn’t ask for anything else. We started dating in high school in our junior year and at that point we were both set out on going to college. We both had the same college in mind and thought that would be great because of how in love we are. We both got into the same college, Florida State University, and tried to get similar classes and everything was going our way. Finally, when we got to Tallahassee and moved into our apartments, her dad took me outside and told me that he trusted me and hoped that I would never be “unfaithful,” but he didn’t know that promise was already broken.

Her mom’s Spanish heritage shines through beautifully, giving her the most beautiful long brown hair a girl could only dream of. Her nose has a mole in the corner of it; almost as if it is trying to hide it, but I touch it all the time and tell her how it is her beauty mark and no one can take that away from her. Her brown eyes match her hair color and her shoulders are a little wide for a girl but I don’t mind it. The sides of her curve inward until you get to her hips. Her hips burst out and give reason to her having such a big “rear end,” which is her sexiest aspect. I can’t keep my hands off that thing, maybe it’s because I’m an eighteen year old predator and those kinds of things get my juices flowing.

I thought that going to college together would be awesome and being able to spend every day and night together would be the best thing for the both of us. The first thing we did was go down to Wal-Mart and had keys of each other’s apartments made.

She falls asleep fast, she passes out in ten minutes or so once we lay down in bed and then I go on the computer until my eyes burn. Some nights are spent at her apartment and some are spent at mine, we like to keep it equal. Her apartment is nice, but she has to share her bathroom with one of her roommates, which gives me the fucking creeps because a guy doesn’t want to use a girl’s bathroom. One night I went in her bathroom to take a piss and as I flushed the toilet, I saw a tampon wrapper in the overflowing garbage can next to the dirty ass toilet. I looked up at the ceiling and noticed that these apartments were pretty old and needed some renovations. Seeing water spots above my head while I piss is not the first thing I want to see.

Her roommates are caricatures for stereotypes. Two of them are sorority girls and could be the poster girls for air headed blondes. The other roommate is a pothead who smokes out in the living room. People like her piss me off because I realize that somehow that person got into the same college as I did.

Her living room has two suede couches, one red and one blue, but the corner piece that connects them is the ugliest fucking material you could ever imagine, but despite its unwanted appearance, it is the most comfortable seat I’ve ever sat in.

Her room is square with a bed in one corner and a mirrored closet in another with a TV just adjacent to it. She has paintings on her walls from her trip to Santa Fe from last summer, which I was invited to but what the hell is in Santa Fe anyways? She has some Van Gogh’s across the room, which I know because of the large print at the bottom of them, and a flower design made out of pink leis.

My apartment is totally different than hers. I have my own bathroom and only one thing hung on any of my walls. It’s a Sin City montage that glooms over me while I sit on the computer. There’s something about the black, white, and red in that montage that really sets the mood of my life.

The apartment was brand new when I moved in so I had no cable or internet for the first two weeks of school, which was a pain in the ass because every eighteen year old kid needs to watch some TV or go on the net. My bed is never made and the three hundred dollar comforter my mom bought as a going away gift is always on the floor. I can never do any work on my desk because there is too much shit on it and I am too lazy to just organize everything.

I lucked out with my roommates, all nice guys who don’t really party so that makes for a much quieter setting. I don’t have any problems with them. I just hope that they can’t hear us sometimes when we fool around; the walls are so thin I can’t help but make the TV just a little bit louder.

I remember this one particular Sunday morning, when my girlfriend was still asleep, I snuck out and went down to Bagel Bagel and got us some breakfast. I brought it back and put it in the bed and woke her up. She is a deep sleeper, and when she rolled over she slapped me on the head. I opened the Styrofoam box and showed her the breakfast. She was in awe. She gave me a huge hug and then kissed me on the lips, which I’ll never forget because that taste of morning breath is something that could scar your taste buds.

“This is the sweetest thing you’ve ever done for me,” she said.

“You’re welcome, I just wanted to show you some love.”

For our first Christmas I bought her a white-gold ring with diamonds that shaped a flower. It was beautiful and the price tag held that up, but I didn’t care, she was the girl of my dreams and I wasn’t about to let her go.

I remember our first major fight of our college lives. It started because her roommates invited her to Chubby’s, a typical night club that was the hotspot on a Saturday night, and I wouldn’t go.

 “Why won’t you just go for a little bit,” she said.

“Because I don’t feel like paying ten dollars to just stand around a bar where I can’t order any beer. Why the fuck would I waste my money on that?”

“You never wanna go to clubs, all you wanna do is go to parties, you have to get out sometime.”

“Well what the fuck would you know? You’re only doing it because of your roommates. How bout all those times when you say how annoying they are or how you wish you could have different roommates?”

“Ok, but what’s your point? I wanna go out, I wanna have the college experience and if your not gonna let me then I don’t know what to do.”

“Well then go out to the fucking club and dance with all those guys who don’t give two shits about you. They only care that you’re beautiful and they wanna know how you are in bed.”

“Whatever, I don’t care. I’m gonna enjoy myself whether you like it or not.”

I walked back to my apartment as she was driving away. I sat on the curb outside my apartment for about thirty minutes. I pictured us back in high school, our first kiss, how that night on the way home I had the biggest smile on my face and I was singing but the words weren’t right at all and I couldn’t help but crack the smile a little more and just enjoy my life for once. Maybe it’s all the want I had for her built up inside me all those years. Having such a beautiful girl as a friend in my life killed me; I always wondered what it would be like to date her. She always dated the biggest assholes and I couldn’t help but intrude and tell her that they didn’t deserve her. I was always the good friend to the girl and then I finally got my shot and in one night all of that disappeared.

She called me about an hour later after they left. I was relieved to hear her voice. I didn’t expect her to cheat on me, I just never saw it in her to go out to a club and get drunk because she was never drunk around me. She told me that she loved me and that she was sorry and swore it would never happen. She asked me to come pick her up because it was too hot in the club and she felt uncomfortable. I picked her up, of course, brought her back to my apartment, and she fell asleep in nothing but a small white T-shirt and a pair of pink underwear. The next morning she woke me up by grabbing my crotch.

“Baby, wake up. C’mon let’s go at it. You know how I am in the morning,” she said.

I had no fucking clue what she was talking about.

“C’mon girl, it’s early.”

“But babe, I want it.”

That’s when she started to go down on me. I finally came to my senses and got the full feeling of the situation.

“Jesus Christ, why do you do this to me? You leave me high and dry last night and now you can’t keep your hands, and mouth, off of me.”

That got her attention and she stopped and looked at me.

“Something must’ve happened last night for you to be showing me this kind of affection. You’ve never done this to me so I’m curious why you’re doing it all of a sudden.”

“Nothing fucking happened. What the hell? You never believe me. You never have and you never will, will you?”

“Don’t turn this shit around on me. I didn’t do anything, I just don’t get why you would all of a sudden start sucking my dick while I’m sleeping if we’ve never had sex when we first wake up. God damn, sometimes I think you are a fucking schizo.”

The first few months of our college dating-life were rough, really rough. All of these plans I had in mind for us were washed down the drain. We were back at square one trying to find trust in one another. This same fight kept happening throughout the first semester.

I remember at some point in the second semester when I just got really fed up with this shit of us always being at each other’s places. I went to cook a frozen French bread pizza in the little toaster oven I had in my room and all of her bathroom shit was blocking it. I had told her all the time that she needed to keep all of crap confined. I couldn’t take it being everywhere, I know that my apartment was messy but it was usually my mess, not someone else’s crap just laying around and having it be her shit, I just couldn’t handle it. When her crap got in my way, I just felt so cluttered and claustrophobic. One thing that always pissed me off was her hair straightener. It had the longest cord and she never wound it up because the hair straightener was always “too hot,” so I always wound it up. One day I tripped on the cord and stubbed my toe. I turned to her and started screaming at her. I couldn’t take it anymore; she just didn’t listen to me. I tried to put up with it for a few months but it never processed in her head. She never got the fact that I was trying to improve our relationship. She probably thought some outside stress was making me blow up on her, but it was these little things that pissed me off more than anything. She never really got that part of me, how I tried to change her, make her into a better person but she just wouldn’t let me.

I told myself that I would give it one last shot, about a month or two to see if it would change and maybe regain what we used to have. It was almost there once, I felt as if we were back to our good ol’ high school days of just loving each other and not having to worry about anything. We went driving around Tallahassee for about an hour, seeing the more residential side of the state capital. I turned down Blair Stone, which is a recently renovated four lane highway that rolls along the hills and takes you through some very calm forests of oak trees. I turned down one road and then another. I glanced at the clock in my car and noticed it was 7:30 p.m. and I figured that there was nothing to do so why not just keep driving.

About ten minutes passed and she finally turned to me and said, “Don’t you know that American Idol is on tonight? We have to get home to watch it; I have to see how Taylor performs. God! I love him, he has such a great voice, don’t you think?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah he does have a pretty good voice.”

What the fuck was she thinking? Interrupting this drive was the last thing on the list I wanted. I liked driving down these roads that were unfamiliar to me; it gave me a great sense of getting to know the things you never see. I didn’t want to piss her off; I just shrugged my shoulders and found a way back to her apartment. I made it back just in time for the opening performance by a hash singer that was somehow on this show of “the next big thing” in the music industry.

Later that night I didn’t know what to do. I just waited ‘til she fell asleep and then I went on the computer for a little bit. I left her a note that said I wasn’t sure about us anymore and that we needed some time off and I probably wouldn’t be coming back to her. I walked out of her apartment and locked it with the spare I had. I put it under her doormat. I walked down to my car and pulled out. I started heading north toward the Interstate. I got to I-10 and took that east, I didn’t know what I was doing but I didn’t care. All I knew was that it was the right decision and I wouldn’t be the same from there on out. I just sat behind that wheel, drove down the unfamiliar highway and put on some music and started singing along, “So maybe tomorrow, I’ll find my way, home.”

 

 

Copyright © 2006 Matt S Stemerman
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"