What was going on?  One minute she had been curled up contentedly in my arms.  Then suddenly, we were talking about how upset she was that we hadn't waited until marriage to have sex—which we've been doing for a year, mind you—and then, somewhere in the middle of my reassurances, she had jumped to her feet and was now very angrily storming down the hall.

"Sarah?"

"I can't believe you!" she screamed, snatching her coat and turning back toward me with a very icy expression on her face.  "Goodbye, Jeremy."

Goodbye?  This didn't sound good.  Did she mean goodbye forever?  I reached to grab her arm, but she yanked it quickly from my grasp and disappeared out the door, slamming it in my face.

I was dejected, sure.  But I wasn't going to give up on a fourteen-month relationship that easily.  The question was whether or not she would.  Chances are, if I didn't even know what I'd done wrong, it wasn't that serious.  Sarah and I don't often see eye-to-eye on things, but I knew I hadn't said anything with the sheer power to drive her away from me forever.

I threw open the door to see her marching resolutely across the little bridge that spanned the brook between our homes.  She didn't even flinch at the sound of the door banging shut behind me.  Nor did she award me so much as a glance when I raced to catch up at her side.

"What's wrong?  What did I do?"  I didn't have much time left to make amends; we had reached the end of the bridge.  Better to keep the demands direct.

I guess I knew this one was coming even before the words came out of her mouth.  "If you don't even know, I'm not going to tell you."

"I honestly don't know!" I yelled, exasperated.  "All I know is I was trying to make you feel better!"

"You sure have a funny way of doing that," she grumbled darkly, quickening her pace.  We were now halfway across her back yard.  Twenty more steps and she would be at her door.  If I let her get inside, I had pretty much no chance of explaining myself.

"Well, it's not like I should have had to, anyway.  You're feeling bad about something you can't do anything about.  Why are you so bent on this?  Nobody knows, and nobody should care.  It's nobody else's business, Sarah.  You even said you didn't believe in all this 'waiting till marriage' stuff.  You said you wouldn't last that long.  You admitted that.  Why is it upsetting you now?  It's been almost a year, for God's sake."

She gave me a withering look.  "It's not about that anymore, Jeremy."  Her eyes flashed, and her icy cold look killed any slight display of compassion.  "Think back to what you said in the house."

I honestly couldn't remember saying anything that could have upset her like this.  I thought hard for a few seconds—all I could sacrifice at our rapid pace of approach—and sympathetically shrugged my shoulders.

"What you were saying the second before I got up and left," she persisted.

My panic had blocked out the recollection, it seemed.  Again, I could only shrug pitifully.

She sighed, one of those long female sighs of frustration with the presence of males on the planet.  "Let me assure you that you'll have plenty of time to think about it," she snapped.

We were at her doorstep.  She started up the stairs with an indignant jaunt.

I reached out again for her arm.  This time I caught her elbow.  She didn't pull back, only glared at me with a fire in her eyes that said, This had better be good.  I took a deep breath.  I had no idea what I was going to say to her, but I had to say something.  The guilt would eat at me mercilessly until I fixed this problem I'd created.

"I'm sorry, okay?  I'm sorry.  I didn't mean for it to come out like that.  I really was trying to make you feel better.  I just lost track of what I was saying, I guess."

"Oh, so you've had the subconscious urge to say that for a long time."  She narrowed her eyes and tried to yank her arm away, but I tightened my grip, and hoped that I hadn't hurt her.

"No.  I just—I don't know, okay?  I just thought I was helping you.  I didn't know you'd take it so personally."

A cruel smirk adorned her lips.  "You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?  Can you remember what you said?" she challenged.

I had been caught.  Feeling like a small animal in the dawning glow of headlights, I stood there, two steps below her, lower lip between my teeth, eyes staring stupidly, pleadingly, into hers.

Her only response was another of those long female sighs.  Almost softly, she withdrew her arm from my limp, defeated grasp and proceeded up to the deck.  Scuffing her feet absentmindedly on the bristly welcome mat, she opened her door and stepped inside, disappearing from view.  I imagined she'd lock the door behind her, but no such luck.  My compulsion to follow her could not yet rest assured.

Cursing my probable stupidity under my breath, I took the rest of the stairs in twos and burst through her front door.  She was standing in the kitchen, running a glass of water from the tap.  I kept a safe distance, staying close to the open kitchen entryway, knowing fully that she could and would throw that water in my face, maybe even break the glass over my head.  She had never been an overly-rational person in a fight.

"Please?" I repeated.  "I'm dumb, okay?  Please tell me what I did wrong.  Tell me what I said.  Please."

Although she seemed to have known that I was there, she inhaled sharply, and I caught the obvious tremble in her breath.  Was she crying?  I could use that to my advantage.  From past instances, I've learned that I at least have a chance when she starts to cry.  It signals that her temper, which she uses to mask her feelings, has faded into resignation to all other emotions.

Before I could open my mouth to resume begging, she asked of me softly, "How can you honestly not remember?"

"Does the fact that I have ADD explain anything?"  My question, to my surprise, sounded serious, not sarcastic, angry, or impatient—which was probably a good move on my part.  By this point, she probably didn't have the energy to put up with any shit from me.  She just wanted me to listen and grovel, and I intended to deliver.  Anything to get her back.

"A little.  Just so you know, I honestly don't see how you could have thought your comment was helping me at all.  It just made me feel even more . . . greedy, I guess.  More susceptible to give in to temptation.  At least when I could pretend that I did it all for you, I had some shred of hope left.  I could blame you for it.  Now I have nobody to blame but myself."

"Blame for what?  Something completely natural that's nobody else's business but yours?"  The impatience had begun to creep into my voice, but, fortunately, she didn't seem to notice or care.

"I don't know.  I guess."  She sounded a little defeated.  Only then did I realize that she was running the glass full and dumping the water down the drain, over and over.  Waiting for the water to get cold, I presume.

"Look, if it bugs you, we can stop.  Okay?  We can stop, and not do it again until marriage.  And if we don't get married, we'll just never do it again.  I can live with that, believe it or not."

She shot me a look that suggested elation and disbelief.  "Of course you can live with that.  That coincides exactly with what you said to me at your place."

"Can you tell me what that was?!" I pleaded, just to get back on the topic at hand and hoping to end this wallowing in her self-pity.

Stubbornly, she remained silent.

"Sarah, how do you expect me to explain what I meant to say if you don't tell me what actually came out?"

That got her.

"Okay, Jeremy, do you want to know what you said?  I feel so stupid having to do this, having to recite back to you what you said.  You made me feel stupid.  Just like at the house."  She paused for a long moment, staring hard down into the sink.  Then her voice rose.  "Well, God, Jeremy, if you didn't want to do it, why didn't you just say so?  I wouldn't have used your dick as proof.  You don't have to go along with it every time just because I want to or just because you're hard.  You are allowed to be tired, contrary to what you might think.  I wasn't going to think that you didn't want me because you were too tired one night to do it.  But I do think that now, because you were so nice as to tell me about so many incidents in the past where you haven't wanted to do it, and now because you told me that basically you could go without it.  What, do you not want me anymore?"  She was crying now.  Oh, shit.  And every word of what I'd said had come flooding back into my head.

I mean, come on, Sarah.  Why deny your body something it wants if there's no harm in having it?  Nobody knows what you feel but you, nobody can just TELL you to wait.  Nobody else knows when you're ready but you, you have to make the decision yourself.  You have to look at that promise you made to yourself so long ago and ask yourself, honestly, if you would have lasted.  I know you regret our first time.  I agree, the timing was bad, we were hardly even a couple, and it totally sucked, we both admit, but it happened, and we can't change that.  Everyone gets horny, Sarah, and, I mean, I'll admit there have been times when I've sort of pushed you into it, and I will take the blame for those.  But there have been times where you've pushed me into it, too.  Just because I'm a guy doesn't mean I'm constantly walking around with a hard-on thinking of you.  And yeah, there have been nights when I've been tired or sore or just didn't want to bother with the whole thing, but I went ahead anyway because I'm a guy and you just gotta take those chances when they come at you.  I mean, come on, I never expected to get a girlfriend, ever, much less one willing to screw me.  And because I love you and want to always make you happy!—

And that was as far as I got.

"You remember now?" she pressed.

Slowly, sadly, I nodded, feeling a huge weight of guilt and sorrow pressing in on my body from all sides.  "I'm sorry, Sarah," was all I could get out.

"I had to leave when you said you went through with it to make me happy.  You weren't even thinking of what I would think, were you?" she accused me, not even waiting for a reply—which, knowing me, would have been something stupid and incoherent.  "You made it sound like you were making this big sacrifice, you know?  Like you were the big hero, the best guy in the world because you screwed your girlfriend even though you weren't in the mood just to prove that you love her.  Like it's your obligation.  And therefore mine.  Like I somehow love you less because I don't just 'go through with it'," she concluded angrily, shaping her fingers like quotation marks, "when I'm not in the mood to have sex."

"I didn't mean that at all," I protested wearily.  I felt physically exhausted.  I so desperately hate fighting with Sarah; it sucks all the positive energy from my body, leaving me wanting to just slump in a corner and sleep off my depression.

"Then what did you mean?"

"I meant—"  I had one chance, I reminded myself.  After that, I would be too taxed to argue my case further, and she would probably throw me out.  "Sarah, I don't know what I meant.  All I can say for myself is that I love you.  And if our doing this is upsetting to you, we can stop.  I'm not going to sit here and say I don't want you, because I do, but I don't want you to ever feel pressured by that.  I can wait if that's what you want.  And if it isn't, then, I'm okay with that too.  Basically, all I want you to know is that it's your decision to make."

"But I don't want to make you wait if you're going to be unhappy with that," she argued.

"It's more important to me that you're happy with yourself.  If you're sacrificing your self-esteem just to keep me happy, that's just going to drag me down.  Your happiness is more important to me than whether or not I get laid!  You should know that by now, Sarah."

"I'm sorry," she mumbled.  "All I want is to start over, is all.  'Cause I didn't have the perfect first time I wanted . . ."

"So you're thinking the wait will make it special.  If you want my opinion . . . every time with you is special.  But this is your decision.  Don't let me be a factor in it, because I have no opinion, okay, Sarah?  This is your choice," I stated firmly.  "All I need from you is your love.  If you want to cut out on the whole sex thing, I have no problem with that."

She dumped the contents of the glass down the drain again, and didn't bother to refill the glass.  Instead, she set it on the counter next to the sink, and slowly but surely approached me.  And then, to my total surprise, she leaned forward and pulled me into a hug.

"Thank you," she whispered in my ear.

What good had I done?  I only had her to thank, for going easy on her wrath.

"No problem," I whispered back.