He Waits

Pancho is in Stephanie’s room, where she stands with her back to him, rifling through her nightstand. Rubbing his forearms anxiously, Pancho peers around her room. Ceaselessly cluttered and obscenely pink, a menagerie of stuffed animals lines her bedspread. Pancho is surprised he’s found himself alone with Stephanie, who he knows through a mutual friend, and who has perfect calves. They were the last remaining people at a party thrown for Walter, who will leave for Alaska to research invasive species of plankton. Tonight they are in Stephanie’s bedroom, because they like each other, not a great deal, but just enough, as they both have been drinking and Stephanie’s calves looked especially phenomenal. But Pancho has never been with a woman before, at least never all the way.

He dated two girls in the past, both of whom broke up with him before he could even delve into the complications that came with a sexual relationship. The first, Marcie—a high school girlfriend—had mismatched features; small chin, wide nose, no taller than five feet with enormous breasts. Marcie liked to laugh, laughing in an exaggerated manner, head thrown back and eyes closed. It was laughter far from infectious; shrill and explosive, the kind you observed both in awe and disgust, wanting to study it. She played saxophone in the marching band. When Pancho attended her performances, she pretended not to see him watching, playing with her mouth wrapped all the way around the saxophone, as if fellating it. At the prom, he left Marcie unattended for three minutes while he used the restroom. When he came back he found her being groped without discord, by the tuba player from band. It was the most humiliation Pancho had experienced in weeks.

His second girlfriend was Linda, a pastry chef from Louisiana with the temperament of a Doberman. They seemed a logical match at first because Pancho was mild-mannered and vulnerable, while Linda would not be tolerated by any other kind of man. They met in the cooking section of a bookstore, where Pancho was leafing through the latest version of Cooking for Dummies, which Linda found both endearing and pathetic. She then decided she wanted to cook for him and watch him savor the meal without tasting it herself, she wanted to punish him for not eating everything on his plate, she wanted to dress him, she wanted to be his mother and his father. They began seeing each other, but the deterioration of their relationship came quickly—before any kind of sex could ensue, when Linda emasculated Pancho in a way that could not be forgotten.

It happened at his best friend Jeff’s twenty-fourth birthday party. As the night wound down and Pancho expressed his desire to go home, a belligerently drunk Linda, who didn’t want to go home, unleashed a kind of fury Pancho had never experienced. Pancho’s friends watched in horror as he dragged her from the party, kicking him in the shins with her pointy heels, screaming obscenities into his startled face, and yanking on the neck of his t-shirt until it stretched to expose his collar bone. Everyone agreed that Linda had lost her goddamn mind. She called the next day, not to apologize, but to inform him that it just wasn’t working out between them. Pancho was thrilled. God had acted quickly. He’d been dreading the repercussions that came with breaking up with her, but he also knew that remaining with Linda would’ve been a slow castration.

Tonight is different. The air is electric and terrifying, and somehow, Pancho feels good. Though he was invited home with Stephanie due to mere circumstance—she was drunk and he was there—it doesn’t matter. He’s never seen Stephanie’s house, let alone spoken to her for more than ten minutes at a time. He will likely not speak with her again after tonight. They have no immediate future together, and they both know this. Yet Pancho badly wants to have sexual intercourse with Stephanie, not because he’s intoxicated, nor because she has perfect calves, but because he wants to rid himself, once and for all, of this plague, this curse; his virginity.

Stephanie ceases to continue searching through her night stand, exasperated, and walks over to Pancho, who is tracing the stitches of her embroidered bedspread with his index finger. She reaches for his hand, and without a word, pulls him up from the bed to face her. He stands about a head taller than Stephanie, and she stares up at him, eyes red and glazed and lustful. He wonders if she can see his nose hairs.

“Thanks for bringing me home tonight.”

“Sure. No big deal. I’m glad you asked me to.”

“Me too,” Stephanie whispers

She leans toward him and presses her face into his chest, her hands moving to his waist. Pulse racing, he gently presses his hands into her lower back, sliding lower every second she continues clinging to him.

“I’m so…”

“What?” Pancho breathes.

Stephanie glances up at Pancho with a look of longing so unmistakable that even he could decipher what to do. They lunge at each other with equal certainty and begin to kiss, tongues sloppy and probing, desperately searching for something they can’t find.
Yes! Pancho thinks to himself. This is it. His time has finally come. Gone are the days of inexperience and shame. Hardly able to contain his excitement, his penis presses into his corduroys, like a wooden stick poking through a trash bag. Stephanie pulls back, pleasantly surprised.

“Sorry,” Pancho says, embarrassed.

“Don’t be,” she giggles.

Pancho takes this as a green light, and immediately moves his face back into hers.

“Ah-ah-ah,” she says in a playful manner, waving her index finger in front of his sexually starved face. “I’m going to the bathroom to freshen up.” She nearly takes a CD storage unit down with her as she stumbles out of the room, her heels clamoring on the wooden floor like horse hooves on asphalt.

“I’ll be right here…” Pancho calls after her eagerly.

Pancho exhales deeply and steps in front of the mirror on her nightstand, smoothes down his thick hair and checks his teeth. He breathes sharply into his cupped hand. Breath is decent enough. Plopping down on her bed, he clasps and unclasps his hands, then rubs them up and down his thighs nervously. He looks over at the clock, 2:30 a.m. While waiting, he decides to come up with a plan, what moves to put on Stephanie when she comes back. He must be suave, he doesn’t want his inexperience to be a dead give away. This is his big debut. How will they do it? Missionary seems to be the only reasonable choice. Anything else would just be vulgar and presumptuous. Or would it? He’ll feel it out…Stephanie seems open to exploration. Yes. He’ll make a valiant effort to please her. But what if he can’t perform? What if he finishes too quickly? No, no. Stephanie will tell everyone he’s a lousy lay. That would be social suicide, the end of his fleeting sex life. This may be the first time he gets laid, but he certainly doesn’t want it to be his last. He approaches the mirror on her night stand and looks at his profile. Pancho does a few pelvic thrusts in front of the mirror. He grimaces at his reflection. Glancing at the clock, it’s now 2: 42 a.m. What’s taking her so long?

Somewhere between the sound of the chirping crickets outside Stephanie’s bedroom and the incessant buzzing from the ventilator in the hallway, Pancho faintly hears coughing echo off the bathroom walls. He cringes at the sound. Oh please, no…

Pancho creeps to the doorway, and cranes his neck down the dark hallway. A light faintly emits from behind the bathroom door. After a moment’s hesitation, Pancho starts inching slowly towards the bathroom.

“Stephanie?” he calls out in a loud whisper.
Nothing.

He moves to the door, and puts his ear up against it. He strains to hear something. There’s only silence. It’s maddening.

Pancho taps gently on the door with his knuckles. “Stephanie? Are you ok?”
Still nothing.

After standing in the dark for a few seconds, he gently pushes the door open with two fingers and peeks in. His eyes bulge at the sight of Stephanie, splayed like a buck on the linoleum floor of her bathroom. Her legs are wide open and her butterfly covered panties are peeking out from beyond her jean mini-skirt, now bunched around her hips. Stephanie’s eyes are rolled into the back of her head, and the white’s of her eyes are peeking through partially open slits. Pancho’s heart sinks. While he was dreaming up sexual scenarios and doing pelvic thrusts in the mirror, Stephanie was barfing herself silly. While Pancho savored the moment he would devour Stephanie’s perfect calves with kisses, she was lying on the bathroom floor in an unconscious state of being. Pancho blinks rapid fire. He’s frozen, mouth agape, looking down on a train wreck.

The smell formulating within the toilet bowl starts to set in, and disrupts Pancho’s trance-like state. He flushes the toilet with his foot. Crouching down beside Stephanie, he gives her a nudge. Two nudges. He picks up her arm, holds it for a second, lets it drop. No signs of life from Stephanie. Pancho realizes what he has to do. He scoops his arms under her back and begins to lift her from the cool tile floor. Pancho starts toward her room. Piss! She’s heavier than she looks. Kicking her door open and stumbling to the bed, he single handedly sweeps her collection of stuffed animals to the ground in one swift motion. Pancho drops her down and arranges her limp body on the bed, then pulls off her wooden platform heels and tosses them aside. Stephanie lets out an indistinguishable grunt. After covering her with her pink bedspread, Pancho sinks into a bedside chair to take one last look at her. Though she sleeps like an angel, she looks like hell. Remnants of puke cling to her hair, mascara runs down her cheeks. Pancho sighs deeply. Broken, but not hopeless, he gets up, leans and kisses her forehead, then walks to the doorway, and switches off her light.