The sun was setting and it just looked so romantic. Steven wasn’t thinking about the actual location of where he decided to take the plunge on their first kiss. He just knew he had to kiss her, right then and there. That was the extent of his thought process, never presuming to strategize about what the potential “consequences” might be. But if he had been thinking more clearly, with a slight bit of more focus, he would have realized that Jeanette was highly sensitive to such details as “location.” She was always very precious and fragile about “environment.” In short, she was what many would euphemistically call prim.

Steven, in contrast, was boorish and rough-hewn, which is part of why his relationship with Jeanette had set tongues wagging throughout the halls of the school. It seemed such an incongruous combination… In any case, Steven had only parked the car in the lot outside the hospital because all the parking at the shopping center across the street was full, nothing but wall-to-wall steel, glinting in the sun’s rays. Steven and Jeanette were going there to get coffee and dessert. And since most everything in California is located in a shopping center, there was no avoiding a certain lack of romance anyway. After all, what was romantic about “commercialism”? Unless you happened to be dating a raging capitalist… (on second thought, that’s not a very difficult feat). Steven was, in truth, just that (another way in which he vastly differed from Jeanette). In fact, Jeanette was often threatening to break up with him for his material displays of affection. She told him that the only thing she wanted was someone who was “sweet” to her and who she could “philosophize” with over, what else, coffee and dessert. It was all Steven could do to keep from replying that, sure, he could philosophize all day with her…if it was about her tits and ass. Those were the two things that kept him motivated when it came to pursuing someone who had put such a fortress up around herself. 

It was this very fortress that served as the key reason why it took him so long to finally secure a kiss from her. After weeks of careful “courtship” and doing his best to prove he could be that “gentle intellectual” she was looking for, Steven could wait no longer for anything resembling an “official” sanction to do what he had been yearning to from the moment he laid eyes on her the first day of seventh grade (they were now sophomores in high school). 

Thus, after two hours spent using their mouths for nothing but pontificating, Steven was ready to use his for something far more pleasurable. Though he had no plans to “let loose” with his restraints just yet, when they got into his beige Honda Accord after all that time spent gabbing about he-honestly-couldn’t-tell-you-what (because he had been so busy staring at her lips for most of it and imagining them wrapped around the head of his dick), he saw an opportunity. Jeanette had pulled down the sun visor to check herself for “oddities” or whatever in the mirror, the light hitting her face in just such a way that made Steven certain she was an angel sent down from the heavens solely for him. Through her passenger-side window, Steven also saw an ad next to the bus stop that read, “The fun has just begun.” He had no idea what it was supposed to be advertising. As far as he was concerned though, it was an overt and direct sign from God, smiling down on his decision to take things to the next level with Jeanette, his “angel.”

Noticing Steven’s stare out of the corner of her eye, Jeanette glanced over right as he decided to “go for it”—sucking her face as a vampire might a neck—and also right as an ambulance pulled into the front entrance with its sirens blaring. It was the antithesis of “romantic” in every possible way, further confirmed when Steven was pushed away by Jeanette and a shot-up body on a stretcher was wheeled into the hospital right before her very eyes. She would always associate Steven with blood and force after this outing. Which was the last thing Steven wanted or could have imagined would happen. Despite his numerous attempts at apologizing for what she deemed his “violent, untoward” behavior—complete with the even worse stalker-y behavior of showing up to her door unannounced with flowers—Jeanette was unmoved by his pleas for forgiveness.

Yet his obsession with getting her to like him as she had before the hospital parking lot incident would not subside. It was driving him to near madness that she wouldn’t excuse him for what he did. Wouldn’t bother to give him a chance to prove that he was a person of good character. Just because he had let the inner wolf inside every man pop out that one time didn’t mean he was going to again. He would make sure of it if only she would give him another chance. But Jeanette had made up her mind. What kind of person thinks it appropriate to kiss someone maulingly in a hospital parking lot? It was almost worse than doing such a thing in a church. Place mattered. Or it still did to someone like Jeanette—call her “conservative” if you want, but that was how she felt.

The excuse Steven had given about being “so consumed with passion” that he forgot about where he was altogether was not viable to Jeanette. Never in a million years would she be capable of “forgetting herself” or her whereabouts in such a way, therefore it was impossible for her to understand Steven’s reasoning (or lack thereof). Maybe some people might find her overly rigid and cruel for being so merciless toward a person who was merely trying to express his deep affection for her, but Jeanette didn’t care. Her principles were her principles. And she found out that at the top of the list of those principles was never allowing herself to be in a car with a man in a hospital parking lot again. A woman, on the other hand…that might be interesting.