A few months later I graduated from high school and Chris finished his junior year (yep, he was a younger man). We bought plane tickets to visit each other. Chris came to see me first. My parents loved him and I loved him. We laughed at my dad because Greek was his native language, so he would say "cone of ice cream" instead of "ice-cream cone," and he would stop at yellow lights because he thought they were red. It was the only heaven I'd ever known.

Later that summer, I visited Chris in Boston. To pay for my plane ticket, I saved every penny I had from babysitting and teaching aerobics. But I also sold some gold jewelry and borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend (charming, I know). Chris picked me up from the airport in a green station wagon. We hung around his parents' big Victorian house and ate his mom's food. One day we drove to his family's beach house for the day. That afternoon, he lost his virginity to me on a boat adrift in Duxbury Bay. (I wished I had my virginity to give to him.) We went back to his house and held each other until we just had to go back to Boston. A few days later I went home. And then, I went to college.

I was there for a month before I had a chance to visit Chris again. I drove from New York to Boston to see him. It was normally a three-hour trip, but I left in the middle of a hurricane so it took longer. There were power lines and trees down across the highway. I left my wallet on top of a phone at a rest stop. All this just made me want to be with him more. And yet, I was afraid to see him. Because I had fooled around with another boy a few times. It was silly really--I didn't care about the other boy the same way I cared about Chris. It was almost out of boredom that I kissed the other boy. We were really just friends. All the excuses went through my head. But I felt like I needed to tell Chris. I couldn't just act like nothing had happened. Lying didn't have a place in our relationship. Not when we had been so honest with each other, so bare with our souls.

The electricity was out in Boston that night so we went to a party that was lit by candlelight. It was so romantic. I simply couldn't tell him there. So I waited until the next day when we went to see the new house his family planned to move into in a few weeks.

We lay on the floor next to a rolled up carpet--there was no furniture there yet--and I told him that I had to tell him something. Then I just said it, as fast as I could, as straight-forward as I could: "I slept with someone at school. But it doesn't mean anything." But it did mean something to Chris. It meant that he cried. And that he didn't want to touch me anymore. He couldn't understand and neither could I, how I could have broken his heart when I loved him so much. But I did. And he could not forgive me. Then, or ever. It was as if all the openness between us, all the trust and the faith, all the vulnerability was gone. I don't think I would have told him if I'd known that he wouldn't love me anymore. Even though I know now that things would not have been the same, and that they weren't the same from the minute I talked to him on the phone for the first time after I had been with the other boy.