It was a pure sexual crush. I've had two, the first when I was in junior high and all he had to do was stand behind me to make my entire body tingle madly. And this guy. We both worked in the mall over a still summer. I sold CDs and stole personal information, he sold pizza, or gave it away. He never made me pay. He would wear a white uniform shirt covered with grease stains, nothing underneath, and his hair was always tousled and he had a scar on his face, from poorly done surgery on a harelip. I can't remember his name. But jesus, I wanted him.

I got my lunch from him every day he worked. I stole surreptitious glances out into the food court. I pined. I fantisized about sex in the stock room. And when I spoke to him, when he took the orders, he looked right into me and the intensity made me breathless. I had a co-worker do the dirty work. He went and asked for a phone number, I watched from the front of the store and he looked over with this wicked, wicked smile. So you want me? Oh really..

He didn't have a phone. I got an address, useless since I lived too close to justify writing a letter and was too young to consider going to his house. Though I imagined it, and what would follow. But after that, he would come into the store and steal me away outside for cigarettes and conversation suffocated by innuendo. And his eyes would bore into me and the time it takes to smoke a cigarette became an eternity on another plane. The kind of eye contact you can't make in polite conversation, small talk. The kind you don't make talking to your friends. The kind you make during sex, when your rythyms are precisely in synch and your bodies are operating automatically, but not mechanically and the feeling is not just in your hips but in your mind, in your soul.

He wasn't intelligent. Or attractive in anything approaching a conventional way. I didn't care. I forgot whatever standards I'd silently vowed all future lovers must meet.


It never happened. I realized the secret of those eyes, that they were the eyes of a stalker, one prone to obsession. Before our flirtation, he had followed another co-worker to her car, her home, tried countless times to convince her to see him. Though he called me once or twice, there was really nothing there. I had led him to believe I'd be easy to sleep with, and that illusion was gone when I left for the other coast. I came back a summer later and he still worked at the pizza place. He seemed much younger, less intense by far. I think his name may have been David. I pretended I knew, but avoided saying it. And I walked off and wondered what I was thinking a summer ago.