Kirsten thought he was the perfect guy. This could be pretty cool, and sometimes made him feel like he was ten feet tall. Most of the time, though, he just felt like a huge fraud, waiting to be exposed.
She thought he was unbelievably cool and popular. He was pretty sure that most people thought of him as dorky but funny enough. Most people were nice to him, but, then, he was a basketball player, so they just assumed he was cooler than he was.
She thought he was fabulously good-looking. He knew that a lot of that was because he was two years older than she was, and that if she had been there to see him back when he was a Freshman, before the help of tetracycline and a growth spurt…..well, she’d know. He went out of his way to be sure that his mom had up-to-date photos of him around the house.
She thought he was amazingly patient and sensitive and moral. She was adamant that she wasn’t ready to have sex, and so they didn’t. And he was always understanding and never pressured her, because, well….yuck. But, Jim suspected that her opinion of his character might drop considerably if she knew the things he imagined doing to her as he jerked off when he got home after every single date.
She thought he was very loyal and trustworthy. And, he was. He left for college and promised to be true to her. And he was. But, when he came home for Thanksgiving break, he learned that since late September she had been dating a short, cocky little soccer player with piercing blue eyes. She’d been sleeping with him since October. She told Jim that she couldn’t live with the pressure of being the girlfriend he deserved. She never thought she was good enough for him, she said, but she knew that she was better than Bryan Crowell deserved, and it felt good to be free of the strain of Jim’s doubtless superiority.
Feeling like a total schmuck and a jackass, Jim got really, really drunk and went back to college still feeling like he wasn’t ever going to measure up.
Kirsten thought he was the perfect guy. Turns out, that was a problem.
