Please, Scan Again

"I don't wanna have sex. Like ever."

I hovered outside her dorm room door, about to say good night sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite or some other cheesy bullshit to ease the disaster spreading over her face.

"Oh." Nikki whispered.

Her joyful caramel-eyes tenderly morphed into a confused barcode scanner.

Embarrassment flooded through me like body heat after a marathon. Fuck! I'd utterly failed to mention how my V card had no expiry date because I'm unrepentantly sex-free. Asexual. The label lingers in between my gums and incisors, too shy and awkward to self-actualize.

My response felt as elegant as a baseball player striking out and then tossing the bat into a crowd of kindergarteners. My horribly worded answer had nothing to do with her.

Muscular and radiant, talkative and sensitive, gritty and plainspoken her. Sunbathers could tan under every one of her imperfect qualities and not get cancer. Nikki's tomboy features continued to beep like I was an unclassified item in an inventory at Farm Boy's.

"I guess, you do you then?" she sighed, almost begging me to let the conversation die out like a sloppily ended campfire.

Her hurt body language still Morse codes me every so often in dreams.

I wish I'd mentioned I didn't hate sex. I wish I'd told her I love to chat at 3AM and play Explosive Kittens. I wish I'd relayed how much I wanted to wrap my brain around her witty tongue. If only I'd said I like conversational penetration more than physical.

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