Sophia and I were good friends in high school. She decided to marry her high school boyfriend when we were all in college, and I was a bridesmaid in their huge Italian wedding. She was part Italian, part Portuguese and didn’t know that she had been one of my teenage crushes. The summer we graduated from college, I moved into an apartment with a roommate, and they had an apartment in the same neighborhood, often inviting me over for dinner and conversation. We were adults, finally, free to do whatever we wanted with the lazy evenings of summer in front of us.
What fascinated Sophia about my life was my adventures with women. She made the comment one night driving me home, “I’ll have to live vicariously through you now that I’m married,” which caused me to pause and wonder. Her curiosity seemed to extend beyond the usual straight friend’s. She wanted to know everything about the ones I was interested in and acted competitive with my celebrity crush, Sarah McLachlan, whose poster was above the desk in my room. I felt I could never reveal to her that I had come of age liking her. She had gorgeous Mediterranean curves, long, wavy hair, and was really busty. She was the one I had wanted to go to prom with, not with the guy who had been a cover. Poor fellow, I thought now. He had no idea why I had been such a bitch to him that evening, secretly wishing I was with her across the dance floor. I had always had to watch her with her boyfriend and now husband.
He was getting rid of dozens of his old Playboy magazines and brought them over to my apartment one night in brown paper bags, thinking that I would like the eye candy. My roommate was right there, and I was in the closet with her. “Thanks?” I said to him, appreciating the gesture, except I wasn’t exactly turned on by a lot of the air-brushed images intended for men, especially in strange submissive positions. I liked more of a natural look and if I wanted to see boobs, I could just look at myself in the mirror. I had to hide the stacks of Playboy magazines in my closet, panicking a little over what my roommate would think if she discovered that I had three dozens Playboy magazines. She would get the wrong idea!
He had to work more evenings, and Sophia was left alone with me on many nights. I was playing the guitar in my room with her when she initiated the first kiss. Her lips were so soft, and I caressed her soft skin and curves. Thus began a summer of her sneaking around with me behind her husband and my roommate’s back. She unbuttoned my shirt and kissed every inch of me, and I had my hands full with her double D’s. We talked about how this had to end because she was married to him and I couldn’t face him without feeling guilty. To her it wasn’t cheating all the way since we weren’t sleeping together yet. We were fooling around and making out, and she told me that she was in love with me and with him at the same time. Lying next to me topless in my bed one afternoon in only our underwear, my roommate knocked on my door and we had to quickly place our shirts back on and act as though nothing was going on. Her husband was waiting outside to pick her up. It got so bad that whenever the three of us would have dinner at a restaurant, she would follow me into the bathroom to secretly makeout with me.
We officially stopped the intimacy in August, as hard as it was, and she told me that her husband expressed wanting to develop a closer friendship with me. “I think he’s feeling a little jealous of our friendship,” she said. “I would love it if the two you could become best friends too.” I had reservations about it but thought that maybe we could all simply be friends and the affair would be behind us. He asked me over for dinner when Sophia was out, after which he said, “I know that you and Sophia are having an affair. I want you to tell me everything that’s going on.” I knew that Sophia had never breathed a word to him about us. No. She had been too worried about him discovering. I denied it, because we were no longer physically involved, and said if he was having doubts, shouldn’t he be asking her?
I received a message from her after I arrived home that he had somehow hacked into her email account and found the emails between us the entire summer. She wanted to divorce him and be with me. “I’m in love with you,” she said through tears over the phone. He walked in at that moment. I will never know exactly what transpired, except that he forbade her to ever see me again and she chose to stay married to him to have children. She desperately wanted children at a young age, and I wasn’t ready for that at twenty-two or for a serious relationship. And I never heard from her again. I heard that they moved away from Austin to Chicago that year.
My dad was on a flight from Chicago to Austin last year and was coincidentally seated next to Sophia and her husband with their ten-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son. “Has Zoe found herself yet?” she asked my dad. “Did the two of you have some sort of falling out?” he asked me. “I remember how you used to be such close friends. You were in their wedding.” Yeah, I answered. We grew apart as friends after their move. That’s what happened.
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