The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

Author:Sarah McCammon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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By my junior year of college, I was becoming impatient. I’d slimmed down and gained some confidence, but still had never been kissed. Casual kissing was frowned upon, and I hadn’t met Mr. Right, but my emotional and physical desire for men was becoming harder to ignore. I went on a few dates with a cute transfer from Liberty University but that didn’t really go anywhere. He wanted to be a youth pastor; I didn’t really want to be a pastor’s wife. And he was still getting over another girl back at Liberty.

Later, I flirted with a friend from choir. There’d always been a little spark there, but I was never sure what I wanted. And, in that world, agreeing to date a good friend was tantamount to getting engaged. One night, when he came to visit me in the newspaper office while I was working, I was inches away from letting him kiss me before I changed my mind. A furtive make-out session in the Trinity Digest office might lead to a ring, I reasoned, and I wasn’t ready to sign on that particular dotted line.

I still held out hope that, like some of the most pious girls I knew—the thin, bubbly, unassumingly pretty, elementary-education majors who seemed to have been created for the glossy pages of the Trinity prospective student brochures—my first kiss would be with my husband, maybe even on the day of our engagement. But a husband didn’t seem to be materializing, and my lust and curiosity were quickly exceeding my patience. Not to mention that it was a little embarrassing to be approaching my twenty-first birthday with virgin lips.

I met a guy I’ll call John around that time, the second semester of my junior year. I noticed him immediately in my literature class: tall, with shiny, dark hair and a muscular build. He was different from the aspiring youth minister types: twenty-eight years old, a full-grown man. He’d come back to get a degree after a few years of playing semiprofessional soccer, I learned.

We had very little in common: I wasn’t a sports fan, and he showed no sign of being particularly religious. But I felt a heat when he sat near me in class, and I hungrily thought about him later, alone in my dorm room.

Within a few weeks, he was picking me up for a first date to watch football at his off-campus apartment. It didn’t seem like a very romantic date idea, but I let that go. As we walked up the stairs to his second-floor flat, I was nervous, on guard, full of fantasies and terrified that I might follow through on one of them. His one-bedroom apartment was a den of potential iniquities: hard lemonade in his refrigerator, technically forbidden under the code of conduct even for students living off campus, not to mention his bed. He opened his bedroom door and gestured toward it as he gave me a brief tour. “This is where the magic happens,” he announced.

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