When Top Gun Sex Feels Like Top Shelf Love
Guard your heart or you’ll get goosed
Gabe and I fell for each other so hard we couldn’t feel the sting of pavement when we hit.
It was April 1999.
Gabe always got drunk before he came to see me. He’d show off when my roommate and I had people over to our apartment. He’d strut like a cock in front of our friends after he and I had sex. Gabe’d walk out in jeans and a white tank top, grinning from ear to ear.
When I finally emerged, he’d say, “Hey Sweetie, can you scratch my back?”
He could be a real dog, even had dog tags on to prove it, but we were feeling together and anything was worth feeling again.
When I met Gabe, he was on a short leave for the first time in six months.
From Bosnia.
My roommate was friends with Gabe and invited me to his off-on-leave party. I don’t remember how they knew each other. My roommate and I hung out more by accident of circumstance than by having much in common.
When I met Gabe, he reminded me of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. He also spoke French.
Swoon.
Gabe was friends with the Foreign Language Association kids. The night I met Gabe at his on-leave soiree, we ended up drinking from red Solo cups and smoking cigarettes at someone else’s apartment filled with conversations in multiple foreign languages.
Double swoon.
With his body language and embellished storytelling, Gabe told me about Italy and art.
When I took a cigarette from behind my ear, he pulled out a tattered match pack and lit my smoke. He was old-fashioned and odd.
Triple swoon.
Gabe’s storytelling and mannerisms drew me to him. His eyes were light blue, cold and distant. I sensed he was shut off and longed to make him feel. I thought I was ready to have my vessel of feelings broken open with someone else. Maybe him? Maybe Gabe?
I craved challenge.
Feeling as confident as Marilyn Monroe, I told him I took Italian and was minoring in art history.
I lost my virginity to Gabe the night we met, but I didn’t tell him.
Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” played on my boombox. I saw colors and squeezed my eyes shut. I was no stranger to self-pleasure, but this was different. It ached and felt good and ached and I gazed at Gabe’s perfectly proportional body in awe and smiled.
Finally, I’d become a fully sexual adult.
I was almost 21.
Gabe’s leave was short.
And we were both hopeless romantics, in our minds, if not our hearts.
A week or two in April.
That was all the time off Gabe got.
He graduated high school in 1995, a year before me, and chose to join the Air Force directly after graduation.
We’d met in April, feeling like we were in Milan or Rome or Paris even though we were in Norman and Oklahoma City (OKC), Oklahoma.
By May, he was back to work, and I was wondering how worried I should be. Would I lose my first boyfriend to the Army?
“I’ll be back,” Gabe tried to comfort me.
He wanted me to be okay. Hunched in my front doorway, tears stung my eyes. I tried to hold them back.
It hurt, but I knew it’d make a good story.
Our story. Hell, I was living the good story.
“You’ll write me, okay? And, I’ll write you, too,” Gabe said.
Through tear-blurred eyes, I looked up at Gabe and nodded.
Words were my thing. English major. Poet. Reader.
I don’t remember who sent a letter first.
Waiting is what I remember.
I waited and waited for a letter, wondering if I was worth the time to write letters, feeling my confidence sink.
The first letter finally arrived three months later in August 1999. The letters were sickly sweet and sticky, spider’s silk, a trap, a spell.
In July 1999, on another leave, Gabe proposed. Sort of.
“Aimée, let’s get married!” Gabe hollered, slamming his empty glass on the bartop and asking for another.
Stunned, I said, “Really?” He looked me in the eye and nodded yes.
“Okay.”
Because I’m me and I was young and in love with the idea of being in love, I went all in.
I happened to be working a summer job at a Catholic preschool. Gabe was Catholic. I’d have to be Catholic. I began going to the classes.
I’d assumed a ring would follow the impromptu proposal.
Where was the ring?
Did I want to get married based on a drunken proposal, while the jukebox serenaded us with the 1970s song about Brandy and her sailor?
By the end of summer, I still didn’t have a ring, just promises I didn’t trust, but wanted to.
Where was the ring?
We stayed engaged until November 1999. I felt I’d been patient enough. Depending on which one of us you talked to, we broke up, or I cheated on Gabe.
I’d tried to break it off. I told Gabe it was over. That I didn’t believe he really wanted to marry me. Or I’d have a ring.
And more letters.
So, yeah. I did sleep with one of my friends. I knew we wouldn’t make it long-term, but it’d get the message across to Gabe that Gabe and I were over.
It worked.
Even though I’d broken it off, I felt like a tangle of lacerated emotion.
They say it’s always hardest to let go of the firsts.
I loved for the first time with Gabe.
They are right.
It is hard to release your first into the wild.
By 2000 I’d moved on from the friendship relationship and was now in my second relationship with a guy who was the polar opposite of Gabe in many ways. Moose was big, covered in homemade tattoos, and dealt soft drugs with his roommate. We’d met through mutual friends and while my best friend was busy crushing on Moose, I was busy snagging him. Not usually my MO, but it’s what I did.
Moose was rough. He’d been abused as a kid. He hadn’t gone to college. He barely worked.
We were both hanging on by the proverbial thread, emotionally.
By the spring of 2000, I’d dumped Moose too.
We must’ve met in the fall of 1999. I remember sleeping over for New Year’s / Y2K and waiting for the moment all of our machines freaked out.
They didn’t.
Moose and I hollered at each other on his front lawn. I didn’t like how he treated me. He was lazy and he was mean. I didn’t know how to have a real adult conversation about relationships.
So, I cried and yelled. And dumped Moose.
I dumped Moose and had a breakdown that landed me in the suicide-watch wing of Norman Regional Hospital.
By May of 2000, I’d learned for the second time I wasn’t great at choosing or being a roommate. This time, I messed up running the AC so high, ice cube trays full of water left out on the countertop froze. I had friends over all the time and hardly ever cleaned.
My roommate and I didn’t work out.
I moved back into my mom’s new home, the third rent home she’d lived in on the same street in Norman since I was four or five years old.
In my new room, I typed letters on a word processor my stepmom’s sister handed down to me. I watched TV while eating copious amounts of gas station junk food.
Gabe wrote more often now that we’d broken up. And I wrote back.
On one such junk food binge, I got a call from Gabe.
He sounded a bit unhinged.
“How are you, babe? I went up to Monterey Friday, spent the whole weekend there at a Jazz Festival where the local school kids showed some real talent. Maybe good jazz will survive.”
“That’s cool. Sounds like fun.” I wondered which women he flirted with. We weren’t together anymore, but maybe…
“Aimee,” Gabe’s tone shifted to argumentative. “I’m so mad if you were here you’d see devil horns poking out.” I imagined my blonde-haired blue-eyed ex-fiance sprouting horns — veins gone wild and renegade while he ranted and raved.
“No! No!” he screamed out of nowhere and then played it off like he was joking, but I knew he wasn’t.
“What’s going on, Gabe?” I asked, trying to understand.
“I really went to Monterey to get away from people while I didn’t have my B12 pills. I’d been snapping at everyone.”
Chemical imbalance? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? Manic Depression? Bipolar? I wondered.
Hell, I didn’t even know what my mental health diagnoses were back then.
“Look, I have anger issues. I’m in an anger management class. It’ll get better, Aimée. I promise. I’ll be back for a visit later this week. Sorry I blew up at you. When I get home, we can go swimming, chill out.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
It didn’t take long to figure out Gabe was drunk. He said he wanted closure, he felt like he had no part in the process of breaking up. That I was hard and cold, steely like the metal hoops in my nipples.
I told him after much thought, “Look Gabe, we were two kids in love with the notion of being in love. That’s all.”
Gabe’s line filled with silence.
Satisfied, I felt like I’d pierced him and hung up the phone. Payback for his neglect: missing letters, phone calls, sentiments.
The ring.
I concluded my love for Gabe no longer existed. I was sad. At first, he had asked me to be with him again, promised that eventually there would be a classy proposal, and swept up in the moment, I would give him a chance.
He could go ahead and just try to win me over.
In May, we saw each other briefly. The day he was scheduled to leave for California, we went to the park and I said look, I’m sorry, but this just isn’t gonna work out. Hurt him again, felt like hell. We drove back to his parents’ house. In front of my car he gave me a sweet little kiss, said he was still going to send letters and that believe it or not he would win me back.
May through June, I received 10 letters. Beautiful letters with the kinds of sentiments that would make a girl with the slightest bit of heart swoon. I marvelled at the change, astonished. The letters we wrote were sweet and romantic. I wrote one letter using a magnolia leaf and ink, writing on dark brown recycled paper.
Gabe came for another visit in July 2000. I’d noticed when the letters stopped coming, that the calls were fewer and shorter than before. I was skeptical again, but I went up to OKC to see him, to enjoy a summer afternoon.
To maybe figure this thing out.
I had a midterm in my new summer school class, History of Science, that morning. I filled up a blue book and as I rose from my seat to head towards the front of the class for another blue book my hands shook uncontrollably.
They shook all the way up to the city and when I saw him sitting on the hood of his Buick, The Widowmaker they called it, my hands were still trembling like mad. He was wearing a white sleeveless shirt and some khakis, Adidas tennis shoes, and his white-blonde hair was cut close to his head. The muscles in his arms bulged out and his stomach was flat. He had warned me he’d been working out.
“Can I get a hug?” I said as I walked up to him, a raspberry flavored drink in my hand.
Gabe hugged me before we went through the house out to the patio in back. There were twenty or so green apples rotting on the picnic table, apples off the tree in his parent’s backyard. The apples were bitter he said. Empty beer bottles and CDs also littered the table. There was a stereo set up on a bench.
“I’m in such a mellow mood today,” Gabe told me. “I’m sorry about that last phone conversation, but I’m calm today and you should take advantage of that.”
“Okay,” I said and smiled coyly, eyes drifting downward and then peeking up at him.
Gabe started to play jazz music and chat incessantly, a nervous habit. He lit a cigarette for me with a childproof torch lighter.
I’d straightened my hair and put on makeup. I wore jeans and a t-shirt, not wanting to look like I had dressed up for Gabe or anything suspicious like that. His older brother, Sam, was sleeping in the house and so was his best friend who had just come back from a year in France. They were all hungover.
I guess Gabe had already begun drinking his hangover away. He grabbed me a beer. All that I’d eaten was a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin and the shaking continued, but I opened the beer anyway and it started to soothe my nerves.
I used my hands to rub my arms, to calm down. Gabe reached for a CD out of his brother’s best friend’s case and the whole thing came crashing down on the pavement, the three CDs spinning on the ground and then halting to a stop. He rescued them and then fidgeted with the stereo. He couldn’t keep his hands off of it, switching an old CD out for a new one about every five minutes.
“This is the most sensual music I’ve ever heard,” he said and put in a French CD. “I’ll interpret it for you.”
A woman moaned in the background, and Gabe said, “The man is saying he’s kissing the river between the two hills and the woman is saying ‘I love you’ to the man. The man is saying to the woman, ‘Me neither.’ You see the woman is so caught up in the man who is buried between her legs that she thinks she loves him, but really she only loves the feeling he is giving her in the moment. The man realizes this and that is why he says, ‘Me neither.’”
Gabe continued, “I think it’s so beautiful and erotic.”
Caught up in the moment, afraid of what might happen next, I slipped out from under the covered porch and began to wander around the small landscaped backyard.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Just stretching my legs,” I replied as the song penetrated the thick afternoon air.
My heart began to skip beats as I heard the woman’s moans and the man’s whispers and my ex-fiance slowly wandered up to me and looked into my eyes (something he had never done those first few months we were together). Gabe put his arm around my neck, his face next to my face, his lips next to my lips and he began to plant a lingering kiss. He lifted me up wedding style, carried me through the backyard, into the house, down the hall, and to the bedroom where he was staying.
Gabe assured me his parents were out of town for a few days before laying me down on the bed, his hand wandering over the nook between my neck and shoulder and over my left breast, heading downwards.
I pushed Gabe’s hand away.
Longing to reach out and feel every crevice, kiss every inch of Gabe’s skin, I hesitated.
“I’m sorry if I’m being a tease, but this isn’t going to happen, we can’t do this,” I said, and as I said it, Gabe pinned me down to the bed.
He said, “I’m not going to try anything, but you always run away when anything like this happens. You need to lose yourself in the moment for once. We hardly ever get to see each other, why don’t we just enjoy it for the day?”
“I’m not trying to run away,” I replied. “I just don’t like being held down. Let me up!” I was trying to use a firm tone, but couldn’t help the smile from spreading across my face, never having been quite this wanted by someone.
We tossed and turned for about 10 minutes. His brother had gone by the bank and his best friend had slipped out earlier. We were alone in the house.
Finally, I glared at him, “Let me up now,” I managed to say with a convincing amount of anger, I suppose because this time he let me up from underneath him.
Sam walked into the bedroom.
“Sam, will you please beat your brother up for me? He needs it!”
Gabe took me back out to the patio.
“Look, can we just have a day where it’s like old times, we don’t have to sleep together or anything, but let’s just have one last time like this, okay?” he said.
I walked up to him, and playfully shoved him, he shoved me back. My cigarette fell from my mouth and burned the inside of my elbow.
“Man, look at that. Are you trying to burn me or something?” I said through a smile. He caught me up in his arms and gave me a quick kiss.
Gabe and I agreed to go out with Sam and his friends, who I found a bit obnoxious. They were always concerned about who they were seen with, who was wearing what, and making sure that they were being seen in the right spot.
I was nervous.
Sam mixed a drink he let me sip. It tasted lightly of licorice. After downing the first, Sam made another. He said the yellow color made it look like lemonade when we were on the road.
After we’d sampled the liquor, we all piled into the car to meet two of Sam’s good friends at some restaurant I had never heard of in OKC. Gabe sat in the front seat and fumbled with CDs, making fun of his brother’s taste in music, as I sat calmly in the backseat, sliding my sunglasses over my face to hide whatever emotions decided to cloud my eyes.
“Can I have some of that lemonade, big brother?” Sam handed the faux-lemonade over to Gabe and he took a big swig, leaned over to Sam, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Stop it, dammit, I told you not to do that,” Sam said, feigning anger.
After about forty-five minutes of driving, Sam recklessly swung his small car into a parking lot packed with expensive cars. I couldn’t help from counting the Corvettes, but there were so many I didn’t have the time to stick around and get an accurate tally.
The three of us headed towards a restaurant that overlooked a manmade crystalline lake with a stark white lighthouse. The restaurant interior displayed dark, heavy stones, and there were wrought iron tables and chairs on a patio that could seat about thirty people. A stylish fireplace was lit in the summer heat, adding to the already scorching day.
The patio was to the side of the enclosed restaurant which apparently required reservations or more money than any of us had.
Gabe ordered a Long Island Tea and a sloppily stuffed pepper with an elegant eggplant name. There were only three food items to choose from on the menu if you ate out on the patio. It seemed, however, that Sam and his newly arrived friends were solely there to drink and discuss the happenings at the restaurant.
Gabe shook from all the alcohol he’d consumed. I felt like throwing up, though I wasn’t about to let anyone know that. Sam and his friends raised their eyebrows when they discovered I was drinking a plain old Coke. Not Rum and Coke. Just Coke.
Gabe caught me by the wrist, “Sorry we ended up here. It’s stupid. I wish it was just us again.”
I smiled and shook my head in agreement.
I was concerned about the time because I had class the next morning at 9:20. Gabe told me not to worry about it, that I would get home at a decent hour. Soon, my worries slipped away. Gabe whisked me off the patio onto the grassy knoll to its side where a girl about 10 years old was chasing fireflies.
Insects harmonized with the jazz drifting onto the lawn. Gabe was sweet on the driest red wine he had ever tasted. He lay on his back, gazed up at the sky. I sat by his side and looked down at his face, like a child’s, like a moon. He was so tender, and I felt myself losing ground, falling down.
Gabe reached into his pocket and removed a photograph. It was of me. “Look how worn down this is, Aimée. I keep it close to my heart.” The photo had lived in the pocket of his flight suit all over the world.
Swoon.
My mom took the photo the previous year, when I took Photo I at the University. I developed it myself, a black and white picture of a girl in a sequined black dress, sitting in an armchair and smiling softly.
Gabe confided he thought of me in times of distress. We talked. We concluded that us would never be possible for he was the type to always leave, his first words ever being, “be back,” and I was the type who clung to my roots. I let him know that I was a person who wouldn’t be happy if he was leaving me behind all the time.
The finality didn’t strike until we were back at his house. Until we were inside, and he asked me to hold him because he was so lit up with liquor. He asked me to go back to his bedroom.
Sam was saying, “You’re still on for the game tomorrow night, right?”
“Yeah, I haven’t been to a baseball game in ages,” I said back.
And there we were in Gabe’s room, by his old bed, with the three-step wooden ladder to climb on. Again, Gabe asked me to get on the bed.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said.
We must have been in the room for an hour. “Please don’t go, Aimée.” Gabe asked me not to leave every time I started to get up. Most often it was to go to the bathroom and get toilet paper to blow my nose and soak up my tears.
When I returned, Gabe said in a drunken mumble, “This is the last time, just let me hold you. A little longer, this is the last time.”
Sam and his friends were in the living room, oblivious to Gabe’s heartbreak. We were in thick black darkness. Finally, I heard Sam and his friends leave. Gabe and I said we loved each other one last time, and I rose from the bed, sobbing.
“Aimée, you haven’t shown this much feeling since that first time we met and I had to go back to base. Then he quieted, drifting off into a drunken sleep.
I let myself out at 11:42 PM. I raised my hand to brush the tears away and headed toward my car, opening the door. No light came on. I hadn’t been able to shut the interior light off on my way up there, so I ripped it out from the ceiling.
I took back roads along the countryside all the way home. There was hardly a soul driving on the back country roads.
I cried and cried, swerving here and there, thankful that I wasn’t crashing into anyone.
I rolled all of the windows up because I was so cold. It was hot as blazes and I was freezing.
White wisps of fog raced up to the car and I hurtled through them. Oklahoma spirits. I couldn’t believe that was the last goodbye. We had broken it off before, but we had never decided that we couldn’t see each other at all.
This was it. The final goodbye.
And it was. I got a letter from Gabe after my then-partner, (now-husband), and I moved in together in 2002. He didn’t want me to write Gabe back, so I didn’t.
