Water Under The Bridge
Eve Marx
Word Count 627
I was born under a Water sign; I’m a Scorpio. We’re secretive; we’re loyal; we make terrible enemies. Our memories are long and we’re notoriously vindictive. We have a hard time letting go. Scorpios are also known for their hyper sexuality. As wet as we are and dark as the night, there are no surprises there.
Allow me to tell a little story about a raven haired Ken doll of a boy–“Hot Rod”– and “Cass”, a blonde Barbie doll of a girl.. Cass and I were fourteen. Rod, two years older and in possession of a driver’s license, seemed like an older man. Cass fell for him hard but her parents said she was too young to date. As her best friend, I helped engineer their furtive meetings where she said they soul kissed. He wanted more but she resisted and he threatened to break up with her.
To slake his ardor but maintain her virgin status, Cass got the idea to keep his interest going by writing him a string of love letters. She couldn’t write, so I wrote them for her, borrowing and improvising on the tawdry dialogue I lifted from purloined copies of the Harold Robbins novels I stole off my mother’s night table. It fell to me to hand deliver these notes which meant I spent time alone with Rod, eventually skipping school to drive away with him in his Corvair convertible to a secluded beach where he surfed and I sunned myself on hot sand in the tiniest of bikinis. For months we engaged in a secretive dry-humping ocean front affair that took place on a nearly deserted beach in a town called Strathmere. Rod’s slim athletic build and Pepsodent toothpaste perfect smile were intoxicating and when he emerged, glistening, from the ocean wet and lay down on top of me, I turned to mush. When Cass found out about it, she was naturally furious.
Our friendship was over and then, happily for me, she moved away.
Cass and I connected on Facebook many years later when we discovered what we shared in common was not Rod, but our love of dogs. It felt like everything that happened that spring and summer so long ago was just water under the bridge. Rod also found me on FaceBook. We planned to meet at a nice restaurant when he was passing through my town for work.
When I arrived a whale of a man was at the bar waving at me. I would have never recognized him save for his still-dazzling smile. That surfer boy who I’d spent hours with enjoying the Atlantic Ocean was gone, washed out to sea. At lunch, he shoveled a huge chef’s salad piled high with charcuterie into his mouth. He was much chattier than I recalled. He mentioned the letters I’d written for Cass and said he wasn’t surprised I’d become an erotic writer. He announced he was Born Again and renounced his past and implied I’d seduced him with the letters I’d written. (Or, more truthfully, Harold Robbins had written.) Before our meeting, I’d imagined our shared past was ancient history, more water under the bridge, but my mind was changing. At some point in our conversation, he started slut-shaming me. That’s when the Scorpio in me popped up and, inflamed, I was consumed with thoughts of grabbing his fork and stabbing him.
I ordered dessert just for the pleasure of watching him piggily eat it and drank a second glass of wine. I declined his offer to walk me to my car and averted my face when he dove in for a farewell kiss, suddenly genial, just like we were old pals.
It’s all water under the bridge now I thought, pulling out of the parking lot.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
