We Sleep Together

Clean Up.

2012-01-25T19:13:00.001-08:00

There’s going to be a sex scene in a shower. I’m telling you so you know. There are two people in the shower and they have sex with each other, mainly because showering with someone else and not having sex is a bit like going into a ice cream shop to buy some bottled water.

So.

We couldn’t leave each other alone in the car. We really should have died. We should have been an embarrassing headline in the paper about a frisky couple who died in a horrible fiery wreck, and people would pretend to be sad but still giggle at the phrase “impaled by the umbrella of a struck pedestrian while performing oral sex” and they would be wrong to do so, because we are really good people who should be remembered for more than our hilarious and titillating deaths.

We couldn’t leave each other alone and there was nothing to do but touch each other since we agreed we wouldn’t talk. We didn’t even talk about not talking. She got into my car, bouncing into the passenger seat with a sort of furious excitement she rarely showed. She turned the music up immediately, just loud enough we would have to turn it down to have a conversation. She seemed worried that someday I would have to write dialogue. She seemed to know that I hate writing dialogue, so it was agreed.

She sat and bounced. I mean, she was still, totally still, but moving as much as a still person can, if that makes sense. Her energy was absolutely everywhere and the music filled all the space between us and made us feel like we were in a movie. So it was like a movie when she reached over and grabbed my hand and our hands did a hand-swimming-sexy thing as she pointed left, left, straight ahead and it was everything I could do to point the car while she pointed us to her place.

We got to that one road with all the grass on the one side and all the crappy businesses on the other side and we would not be turning for awhile, which is when she moved her hand between my legs, which was the first time we could have crashed and died horribly and happy. I didn’t think she would, but she started to undo my pants. It was the first place her hands did anything anywhere but on my hand. She looked hard down the road. She judged distance, judged time, and ducked her head under my arm and started licking very slowlywarmlytingly from base to head of my cock. I thought she said something like, “Nice Honda,” but the music was pretty loud still.

I really hoped she would and she took my cock into her mouth. She sucked it hard, which usually isn’t a thing. You know. Sucking a dick is rarely exactly that, but it feels really good sometimes. In cars, anyway, it’s great. Also, it can be short, because the person sucking your cock is the only one in the car who knows how to get to their place, and has to put her head back up to point directions. She kept one hand on my cock, but not for anything serious, just because she wanted my cock to know she was there, I think.

It was aware.

So we drove and there was another left and a right and a straight, straight, straight that meant the next three traffic lights and a good chance for me to put a hand on her thigh. She slid down her seat to move my hand up and I applied pressure while she bounced, for real this time and in slow motion and looked for all the world like a woman in a passenger seat doing her best to get off.

But there is male nudity, which is cheap and easily attained and covered back up, and there is female nudity, which is much the same in skirts (which always makes skirts so fucking good looking), but which is a struggle and elusive when wearing tight jeans. But then she is a hard worker, and at some point (and I was starting to think that point was just before she got in the car) she must have decided “fuck it,” and so she unbuttoned her own pants and squirmed and slid them down to her ankles and spread her knees across the dashboard.

I touched her long enough to feel her wet before she brushed my hand aside. She touched herself and I found it difficult to come up with a good reason to watch the road for a full count of five-one-thousand. We should’ve died, yeah. Whatever. She started touching my cock more seriously now, not just announcing her presence but her intent, which was not to jack me off there in the car, but to get me hard and keep me hard until we got to her place and we could fuck properly and without threat of speeding tickets or the eyes of drivers in tall SUV’s.

So she got us home, taking breaks with her right and then left hands to direct us to a house that looked like a house and why the fuck would I describe it to you? We’re almost at the shower scene.

She got out of the car, somehow with her pants completely on immediately, and ran to the door with the same energy she used to bounce into my car.

I stretched my jeans over my erection and followed behind, walking like a cowboy-monkey. Her front stairs were a total bitch.

By the time I got in and locked the door behind me, I could hear the shower running and see her head poking out to make sure I followed. Her clothes made a trail to the door of the bathroom. Her bra was very last.

I waited to undress until I was in the bathroom. The only noise was the water against her and falling to the tub. There’s a difference there worth thinking about, the difference between the sound of an empty and occupied shower. It’s a sexy sound when you think of what it means.

I looked in at the shower and she was facing away from me. She was doing this on purpose of course. It’s not like we were there to get clean and it’s not she didn’t know I was coming. She just knew how sexy it is to see hair wet and straightened by water into an arrow down the back of a woman. The water curling around her calves was not a bad thing either.

So I stepped in and stepped towards her. I put a hand around each hip and fit them in that spot around the front of a hip that hands fit so nicely. I stepped closer. She bent back and touched her ass to my cock and water streamed through her hair and between her shoulder blades and down her back and over my cock and it was the only part of me that was wet. My hands moved up her hips and over her nipples and if nipples and cocks could scream we would have had a very loud shower.

Everyone was happy.

She kept rubbing back against me and I pulled her whole body towards me and we both stood under the water and found ways to kiss and touch each other while standing back to front. She did that thing where she was rubbing my cock with her hand wrapped around it, and then pointed it down so it would slide between her legs. She stood over it, closing her legs and sliding it back and forth across her pussy. I bit her bottom lip. I think she liked that.

She stepped forward and took me with her, stepping under the spray of water, bending and putting her hands against the white tile of the bathroom wall.

I told you there was going to be a shower sex scene.

I reached up and pointed the water away from us, onto the wall on our side. We were sprayed with the mist of water exploding against marble. I could hear her moaning now, clearly, as I fucked her into the wall.

Her hands slid up, her whole body pressed against the tile as I fucked her. She reached back and grabbed me by the small of my back. She pulled me harder into her. She put one hand between her legs and I could feel her fingertips as she rubbed her clit tightly, up and down. I kept her nipples between my fingers and tried to be gentle while really wanting to be evil. I didn’t try that hard. I think she liked that.

She started to shake and I could feel her shake surround my cock. I could feel her tighten around me and loosen and swell and her pussy did its best to moan all around me. Her fingernails dug into my back and my cock filled her pussy and my mouth was pressed just under her ear as she came and came and came against me.

“Oh fuck,” she said. And so there was dialogue.

Then she was on her knees and she was sucking my cock and I thought about how much my cock would taste of her come and she looked up at me with the gorgeousness of the recently orgasmed and water splashed new droplets across her cheeks and lips and her eyes looked up like please oh please oh please.

It didn’t take long, is what I’m trying to say.

She felt me about to orgasm and she pulled me from her mouth and pointed my cock like a shotgun at the bottom of her chin and pumped and pumped until my come ran down her neck and between her tits.

“Oh fuck,” I said, because I forgot already that she had just said it.

Epitaph (fiction)

2011-12-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

Looking at her now, focusing mainly on the heel of her crossed feet to avoid looking in her eyes, it’s hard to remember that we were ever in love. She bounces her feet up and down, nervously. We talk like this every few weeks, and each talk is almost as miserable as the weeks of not talking that precede it. I’m on autopilot when I say, “I just know you as someone different now than I did before.” I’ve said it so many times before. She counters, as she does so often, having completely missing the point, arguing that “I just don’t think we’ll ever be the same as we were.”

“That’s what I’m saying. There’s no part of me that even wants that anymore.” I even slow down in the second sentence to be very clear.

“It just wouldn’t be good for me personally to go back to where we were.” She talks to me like she’s interviewing for the job of not being my friend.

“Thats... yes. That’s what I’m SAYING. I am not interested in that.”

I am four, apparently, when she says, “I hear your anger.”

JesusFuckingChrist I hate her. Yes, you hear my anger. You ARE my fucking anger. It’s like we’re talking at each other through a long, long tunnel, and only little pieces of anything make their way from mouths to ears. Still, it feels good to get things off my chest, even if I end each conversation swearing to myself that it is the last one.

I think I loved her within minutes of the first time we met. I don’t know that we realized we fell in love though, until after we broke up. In fact, we didn’t even admit to dating until half a year after we weren’t.

Absolutely everything about everything about her is completely fucked.

We met at the Christmas party of a mutual friend that could, except for our meeting, be best described as “inconsequential.” We met at the party leaning on kitchen counters and drinking earnestly at one another, each daring the other to make the first mistake. We were both dating other people and shouldn’t have been flirting, except that’s what nearly everyone does away from the people they are dating all the time. We flirted until we were friends.

This was fucking forever ago.

About a year from meeting, a year spent riding bikes and smoking too much weed and acting as just-friends who also-kinda-wanted nothing but to fuck each other until the whole world ran out of fuck, we gave up and started just loving each other.

We loved each other like we were at summer camp.

We loved each other enough that it started to hurt that we weren’t touching, and so we started to touch all we could.

We were just friends, remember. Except that when we got drunk I pulled her hair and she turned the color of turned on.

We were just friends. Except that we’d watch movies laying front to back on a couch and feel so good laying next to each other we’d watch another movie after, and then maybe something else, or maybe just fall asleep like that for a bit.

We were just friends, right? Except that we help hands when we drove together. Except that we were embarrassed by our closeness when caught by total strangers. Except that I’d get lost during conversation while staring at her neck. Except at night I went to bed with her behind my eyelids, and in the morning I woke up aching from my fingertips.

Neither of us was dating anyone else. Neither one of us really even kept in touch with our mutual friend anymore. Neither one of us really kept in touch with anyone but each other, even when we were at parties full of people.

We kissed for the first time because it was raining outside and it was night and we were in a car that had not been started yet and the night all around us told us it was about time to start.

In our haste, we forgot to worry about clothes and touched each other over everything we had on top of everything we had been really reaching for for months. My hand slid under her hair and across her stomach. Her hand slid up the inside of my leg and grabbed my thigh. Kissing that night was like the very best moments of our best conversations without the pauses or the silly wastefulness of words and meaning. Kissing was everything right we had with each other, and we kept kissing until we were drunk from it.

It’s funny how you can be so close to someone for so long and touch them so much, but never learn how they like to have their nipples touched. I learned there in the car. She liked to have her nipples touched in lots of different ways, but there was this certain way that was a little like pulling and a little like twisting and rolling that involved my pointer finger and thumb working together. She really liked that. She growled at me. That was new.

She sat her hand right between my legs, moving it just enough to feel how hard I was getting as we kissed. My fingers ran up and down the line of the stitching between the legs of her jeans, feeling warmth and little else of what my kissing was doing to her. She slid her hips down, pushing herself against me so I pushed harder, rubbed more. I could tell from her shoulders when I was doing something right. She rolled them backwards when what I did felt good, slid them forward when she wanted something more.

She came so quickly it didn’t even count. She came a little release of an orgasm and we grinned the grins of drunken morons and made unspoken promises about next time and next time and next time.

I slept soundly that night, wrapped in the wonderful thing that was about to happen.

It’s hard to remember now, sitting across from her while we disagree on how best to not like each other, if things ever got that wonderful again. As she continues on her parade of “there’s just no place in my life for a friendship like we had” and I, for the thousandth time in the last few months wonder if she’s deluding herself or just lying to me, I glance at the bump in her shirt from her nipple and think again about the finger trick I know works so well on her. The response from my stomach is immediate, and it does its best to curse me with anger and spite for thinking of such things.

Mainly, when I think about the sex we ended up having, I just wish that we didn’t. Mainly, I can’t remember having any impulse to touch her, though I know somewhere it was a lot stronger than an impulse. I know I felt sick when we went too long without touching. The sex we had was perhaps the best I’ve ever had in my life, and is certainly my least favorite to think about.

Shortly after the night in the car, and with some short stolen moments between (quick kisses in the hallways of parties and one time when we met on our lunch break she kissed me right before I went back to work like she was daring me to think about anything else for the rest of the day (I didn’t)), I went over to her house because of Space Invaders. She had a Super Nintendo and had recently purchased the 1979 classic, re-released for Super Nintendo in 1991. It was to be a night of double-layered nostalgia for an era of gaming neither of us was ever interested in.

Yes, if you’ve noticed, I’m intentionally avoiding saying her name. I hate her fucking name.

Anyway.

I came over and we space invaded and it turned out that video games from 1979 are absolutely ridiculously impossible. We space invaded poorly, so much so that it became a bit of a race to see which of us could pass even the first level. At first we cheered each other on, but the cheering quickly became shit talking and then outright subterfuge. During a turn when I was doing well she stood up calmly, walked to the the television, stood and faced me, and took off her shirt. Pow. Dead. More disappointingly, the shirt was back on before I really got a good look.

During her turn then, I did the same, calmly walking to the television, letting a brief moment of anticipation fill the room up with energy, and then removing my shirt. Laughter. Pow. Dead.

It was always understood that she was the hot one. Like so many of my relationships with women, it was my humor and not my appearance that got me through the door.

There were many turns taken before I started doing well again. Enough that I was starting to wonder how anyone ever learned to like video games until Excitebike came out. When finally I did start to do well, clearing the first three layers of whatever-they-are’s from the screen, she flashed me again, this time from right next to me on the couch. I was ready though, steely-nerved and dead-eye-locked on the screen. I saw movement in the corner of my eye that I imagined or hoped was her playing with her nipples, but remained focused on invaders.

She reached over and grabbed my cock through my pants, but I was ready, smiling as I said, “You’re welcome to, but it’s not going to-” Pow. Dead.

I didn’t wait for her to do well. I matched her bet immediately, kissing her neck as soon as her turn started, finding her nipples through her shirt and putting my thumb and fore-finger right where- Pow. Dead.

“No fair. I was winning.” She wasn’t, but whatever.

“Sorry. Them’s the rules,” I started reaching for the box to the game, “they’re right here in the rule book. Nipple touching wasn’t off limits until the N64 version.” Did I mention I had no girlfriend at this point?

“Your turn.” She was on her knees next to me on the couch, and as I picked up my controller again, crouched as if ready to pounce. She invaded before the space thingies, and had my pants open before I hit start on the game. As the first alien/purpley-blob things drifted down in the range of my tank/shooty-blob, she threw her head under my arms and my cock went from underwear to cold air to warm mouth in less than a second.

I fought orgasm from the first moment. I’d been wishing for this since just before the first time I saw her, been sick with desire for this since the first time we held hands on a long car ride, had imagined this happening so many ways it was most shocking that I hadn’t seen this coming until just before it happened. The orgasm I could see from a mile off, but couldn’t get myself to steer off course. It would have been easy, just a matter of playing slightly less awesomely than I was playing that round, but the aliens were kneeling before my might just as she moved to kneel in front of the couch.

Holy shit. I mean, holy fucking shit she can suck a cock.

So I waited until just after the last second of when I should have made her stop. So she stopped, she looked up all proud and mischievous and what’s-next and I felt my cock pulsing and pulsing and tried every trick I learned since I was 10 to keep from coming. With my cock the only exposed part of either of us, and shiny and swollen from her mouth, she made me come from two feet away, leaning back on crossed ankles.

Pow.

I caught it in my hand like it was stolen candy. I took my flannel off and rubbed my hand clean. We shared our first, very very first, awkward silence.

“Your turn.”

She laughed, thank god, and reached across me for her controller. Before she could grab it, I grabbed her sides and lifted/threw her to the couch. I said again, as sexy as I could manage without sounding silly, “your turn.”

She undid her pants for me, slid them past her ankles and to the floor. I kissed every part of her that stood still for more than half a second. My lips found arms and her stomach and her neck and her legs and her lips and her lips and her lips.

I lifted her shirt up, did my best to replicate with teeth and tongue and lips the thing I was doing with my fingers. I ran my hand through her hair and balled it into a tight fist at the back of her head, pulling her hair back because I liked the things she did with her lips and the noises she made when her hair was pulled.

As my lips moved down her body and over her thighs and up her thighs and between her thighs, I thought about her squeak of an orgasm in the car, I hoped the both of our first orgasms were get-it-out-of-the-way orgasms and that our number twos would be better.

Once I could taste her I knew things would be different and this would be no squeak. She grabbed my hair and her hips jerked under me as I sucked her clit between my lips. There’s nothing in the world so hot as a woman enjoying sex, and nothing so good for one’s ego after a humblingly fast orgasm.

My hands found her breasts and nipples and her neck felt so like sex as my fingers ran up to her lips. She sucked my fingers as I sucked her clit, bit and licked her pussy as she growled encouragement and something that sounded like Romanian swear words.

She came hard enough for aftershocks to be felt some three miles away, some months and months later. She came hard enough to stop time, to stop me breathing, to stop us from being the anything that we are besides human animals in orgasm.

She pulled me up to her and we kissed the way people kiss when they’re scared of what might come out of their mouths if they stopped.

She felt me hard against her as we kissed and sent her hand on a friendly mission of exploration. She found immediately and undeniably that, yes, I was ready to try again. As she unzipped my jeans again, I straddled her just above her hips. She reached between us, still close enough to kiss, palm up towards my stomach, and started to touch me slow. Our lips were linked somehow with my cock and I felt the power of our kissing everywhere her hand didn’t cover. This was her. This was her and she wanted me so bad to come again for her. This was her, and we were kissing and our mouths tasted like her pussy and she wanted me so bad to come onto her.

I came onto her stomach as she smiled into our kissing.

We cleaned and cuddled against each other and stared at the paused screen of a 1979 video game from 1991 for almost an hour. We hummed into each other’s necks and shoulders and said almost nothing else.

Sitting across the table from her at the most boring coffee shop on the planet, I am not curious, not in the littlest bit, who she’s fucking now. I hope she’s having great sex with as many people as she wants and I’m happy as hell that she’s not having sex with me.

As we started getting more naked more often, started spending nights in each other’s beds and making breakfasts that took hours to make and hours to eat, we were still friends. I thought we understood that. Thought we understood that we were friends who wanted to fuck each other’s brains out and were almost certainly, probably, completely in love. I thought we could be like that forever if we felt like, because it worked so well for us.

I guess I should clarify that we never really fucked, either. We really wanted to, and talked openly and often about it. She would talk about wanting to get fucked by me. I would talk about how great it would be to fuck her. This would happen randomly. We would be out drinking, and she would wait for whiskey to hit my lips and say, “don’t you wish we were fucking right now?” I would cough a “yes” out through Jameson. We never really fucked though, because we never really dated. You’ll either understand this completely or not, but we fucked like friends for months and months, and it was always clear to both of us we would never be more than friends with benefits in love with each other.

See, even though we were all of these things to each other, we would still often go a few weeks without seeing each other. We bored the shit out of each other when we talked about anything in our real lives. We openly encouraged each other to date other people, and both worked effectively (sometimes spectacularly) as each other’s wingmen when we were out places where cute people were. When one of us felt like we were maybe going to date someone else, we cooled it on the getting each other off.

I thought we understood that’s how things were. I swear we talked about that’s how things were, but it’s hard to remember now if we did. It’s hard to imagine she didn’t understand that I wanted her to find someone to be really happy with, that I was willing to give up the sex when that happened to save the friendship. It’s hard to imagine she didn’t understand that because I distinctly remember saying it all the time, and I’ve never once lied to her about anything, even when it was hard as hell not to. I encouraged relationships, and so did she. I asked after the doofy guy who painted shitty paintings as if neither of those things were true about him. I acted worried when they were having troubles. I offered helpful suggestions that served to keep us from having sex more often. It’s impossible for me to imagine she would be worried about dating other people.

I’m sure it’s not difficult now to imagine where things went wrong.

I saw her out at a bar. She was with her girl friends, all of whom I thought I was pretty cool with. I was with the drinkers from work, out drinking after work. She lit up when she saw me across the bar as we walked in. She waved and I waved and I held up a finger like “just a sec” because I wanted to sit and I wanted a fucking drink because I was drinking after work.

I sat with the work drinkers and we got our drinks ordered and by the time I looked back up to her table, maybe five minutes later, she and her friends were gone. I texted her “?” and kept checking through second and third drinks and she didn’t respond.

The fuck?

The fuck.

Sitting across the table from her, far away from couches and retro video games, far away from the time when we met when it was dark out in places that were fun, I find that I hate the way she picks at the muffin at her plate. I want to scream at her to just fucking eat the thing already. I also want to explain to her again how she fucked all this up, but I can’t imagine her caring anymore.

Besides, she’s made it my fault that she brushed off the bar thing when we talked next, and when we talked on facebook the next week and I asked her if she was up for some Space Invaders sometime soon she called me a ‘perv’ and changed the subject to something the opposite of sex. She’s made it my fault that she fucked up. She’s probably partially right, though to this day I can’t figure out how.

A few months after the bar, I was laying on the floor at work. I was in the little kitchenette off to the side of all the offices. No one goes in there after noon, so I figured it was a decent place to lay down. Not until I had been laying down for five or ten minutes, in the dark, on the small patch of carpet on the opposite side of the room from the sink, did I ask myself exactly what I was doing there. It had something to do with emails, I remembered. I also knew I didn’t feel like standing up anytime soon.

I had been walking through months of uncertainty with her. There were flashes of flirty texts and then days of silence, of coldness. There was one party where her mean-spiritedness towards me led three separate people to come up to me and ask what was “up” with her. I had no answer. I had no idea, except one day I would have (and did) trust her with any secret in my life, and suddenly I was being treated like a stranger who spit on her sandwich. There was a knot, like a peach pit, in the top right of my stomach. It never stopped hurting, dull and sometimes sharp, for two straight months. I named it after her until carrying something named after her that close to me just made it hurt more.

After walking through months feeling like the bad guy in a very special and emotional episode of Saved By The Bell, I sent her an email. The email was a few pages long, meticulously edited and re-worded. It said, effectively, “What the fuck?”

I refreshed my email so many times while waiting for her response that when it finally showed up, bold and foreboding, I hit refresh twice more just to make sure it was real. This was her “I’m sorry” letter. I would quote lines to you except I’ve deleted everything sent and received from her so I would stop going back and re-reading it. It said, effectively, “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

She met a guy. Fine. She met a guy and decided that she couldn’t be serious with this guy and still mess around with me. Fine. She did, like an adult, decide to tell me that was the case. She did, not like an adult, wait for three months until telling me and only as a reply to my reaching out. She said she still cared about me. She said she wanted to talk. I read the email 10 times and then went to lay down somewhere dark and as quiet as I could manage.

We got together at the same coffee shop where we are sitting now. We have been here five or six times, you know, “to talk.” The coffee shop has tables spaced comfortably far from each other. They play crappy music lightly, their coffee sucks (though not worse than their muffins) and there is always plenty of spots to sit down. There are always other people here having conversations like this, because this is a place where relationships go to die.

My thing was: It’s not that you met a guy. That would have been a bummer for me, but the kind of bummer I would get over in a week. It’s the not trusting or caring enough to come tell me. It’s the getting distance from me by treating me like shit instead of saying you need distance. It’s the months and months of waiting for a best friend to show up because I didn’t know what had changed.

She got that. We talked for two hours of angsty, emotional crap. Had we stood and puked all over the coffee shop and each other it would have been less gross, and likely more pleasant. Still, I walked away with that knot in my stomach feeling better, and with some hope that things would really get better. I could take a few pages to explain the next few months after that, but I can spare you that garbage and sum things up clearly in five words:

Things did not get better.

It’s now about a year since Space Invaders, and across the table couldn’t feel more distant a space than it does. I watch her talk, because listening stopped helping months ago. I spend the time thinking about the what-was and not the could-have-been. I watch her talk about moving forward but not knowing where forward is, but knowing it’s not where it was, but not being okay where we are (but not wanting to do anything to change it).

I think about the last time I watched her orgasm. She and her roommates threw a huge party at their house for someone’s something, and we spent the whole night pulling each other into dark rooms and kissing our drunk all over each other. We sat on the couch, and as the last guest left and the last roommate went to bed, she let her head fall into my lap. I played with her hair and we talked about who was there and what they said, and how what they really meant was something else and all the anything people talk about after parties.

With one hand in her hair, my other hand played along the hem of her shirt and down her arms. My fingertips traced the line of her jeans and as I got to the middle of her waist she dipped her stomach down to say, “please go touch.” So I did, unbuttoning her jeans enough to get my hand flat and down. She closed her eyes when my fingers found her clit and I rubbed slowly and gently, drawing out the night as long as I could. She kept her eyes closed and moved her mouth as if talking, with only drowsy mumbles finding their way to my ears.

She came and I carried her to bed because I’d never done that for anyone before. I slipped my shoes off and curled up next her. It’s hard to say most nights if the drunk is really worth the hangover. I’m still not sure.

When she gets up to leave from the coffee shop, I don’t get up to go with her. I don’t watch her walk out. I stare at the speckles of the formica and the little crumbs of muffin littering her side of the table. I stare for a long time and think about how long ago this all was, and how long this has been fucked. I think about all the things she’s done I see as crappy and self-centered and childish, and I realize, just like that, that I’m not angry anymore.

I’m not angry anymore.

Instead of the anger or the saddness or the lust or the love or the fun or the friendship, instead of the anything, there is nothing. It’s all gone now, and I know when I get up to leave that I’m not coming back here again.

New Things, Old Things

2011-12-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

The Smitten Kitten's rather fantastic website just posted an essay by me about the labels we use when talking about sexual identity. It's here: Smitten Kitten HotDish

I've got some fiction on the way soon, a few small fun pieces and a few larger darker things that are in the final stages.

Also, if you're planning on doing some driving during the holidays, why not do it with my voice saying dirty things and attempting complex layered metaphor? My audio project "Dirty Bits" is available on iTunes and at CDBaby.com. Get.

Vacation

2011-11-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

If I packed for vacation, my wife would know I was going. I have to pretend like everything is normal.

I leave the house with my computer bag, a few sandwiches tucked into the side pocket for lunch. I dress as casually as work will allow, give my wife a kiss as she leaves the shower, I pat the head of my dog, who is laying on the ouch. She doesn’t lift her head for me as I pet her, and is asleep again before I open the front door. I take a deep breath of home, and each step after is taken in a straight line away.

The highways to the airport are much the same as the highways to work, but they feel larger, more important. The crash barriers grow up and around me like fingers threatening to pull my car back and down. I speed. The faster I go, the less angry the world seems about where I’m going. It’s that simple. The cars around me seem unaware. I feel like I am sneaking among them, all these people on their way to days like I had yesterday and for weeks before that.

The feeling does not leave me until I get close enough to the airport. Near the airport, I am surrounded by other people who woke up this morning intending to go somewhere else. Some of them are going for business, but have hidden dark hopes of what might happen. Some are going on vacation, and have plans for the same sorts of dark things. I imagine the college girl next to me is going to South America, and will convince herself she belongs. She will be looking for a South American boyfriend, the sort of boy that will be with her for the two weeks she is there, who is dark, whose accent is thick, whose English is good enough for her to imagine him as supremely intelligent and artistic. They will have sex on the beach, perhaps, or perhaps will go to the village where his family lives and no white people have been before, and they will have sex there I imagine she has this planned out. She will convince herself that he loves her, that she loves him. Good for her.

Vacations are bits of magic in our lives. Vacations are places where we act like the person we wish we were with the life we wish we had. We often need to be somewhere with buildings that look different and languages that aren’t ours before our bodies really let that sink in. That is, I imagine, why airports have that sort of feeling they have. Those planes really can take us somewhere, you know?

I guess I don’t really know. I hate planes, and rarely ride them. I come to the airport for the parking ramps. Today, I am heading to Ramp C, which has the nicest views, the best vending machines, and the worst bathrooms. Today I’m taking a vacation.

The key to a parking vacation is to get as high in the ramp as you can. I suppose I should say that the key to a parking vacation at an airport is to get as high in the ramp as you can. Normal parking ramps, in downtowns and large malls and such, are too high-traffic, and cars parked too far up too early attract too much attention. At an airport, you simply look like you’ve been parked there for days, or that you may just be waiting for a brother-in-law to arrive from Phoenix.
So, I get as high as I can in Ramp C, which doesn’t have a roof level, but does have some natural light (Ramp A has solid walls, which makes for a crap vacation, if you ask me). Up near the top, there are few cars around, so very little to look at while I wait. I’m always early. I take the time to finish my coffee, to lean back in my seat, and to look hard at each inch of the ramp I can see as if it is a brand new and wonderful thing.

There is a fire extinguisher in a red case. The bottom right corner is rusted completely through. I decide that I would bet $60.00, and not more, that the fire extinguisher inside does not work. I look hard at the fire extinguisher like it is something wholly new and exciting to me. I try to appreciate it as a thing of beauty and intrigue. I am on vacation, so it works.

I am waiting for something, but I am on vacation, so waiting is relaxing and not boring. I do not have to wait long though, before the large black SUV finds its way to the parking space next to mine.

I look hard at the woman who gets out to make sure I’ve never seen her before. She is wearing an expensive-looking skirt and a cheap-looking top. She has taken time with her hair, but not her makeup. She is on vacation. I have no idea why I was waiting for her. I have no idea how she found me.

I get out to meet her, and we stand close enough that the nervous energy between us is visible in the same way that, on vacation, static and hunger and drunkenness are visible. She pulls me into the back seat of her SUV without talking and begins to kiss me with her leg wrapped over mine. We kiss slowly. Exploring. She kisses like my first girlfriend, with her mouth open and her tongue swirling in ways that suggest her mouth’s talents are wasted on just kissing. Our fingers follow our lips, but with more hesitation. In the back seat of a car, touching feels more intimate than kissing. We’re both unsure if we’re in love or in danger.

I touch her over her shirt, finding bumps of bra I think are nipples until she buttons down her top for me. There is nothing in the entire world like new nipples. Every woman’s nipples are her story, are a secret she carries around just inches and miles from constant reveal. Every woman’s nipples are a discovery when touched for the first time. There is nothing so like a vacation like nipples, pulled from under a bra, pinched between thumb and forefinger, twisted gently like beach waves, the crest of pressure at the point of turn back and forth. There is nothing in the entire world like nipples on vacation.

My mouth creates a path down her jaw and down her neck and down her chest. My hand tries to find its own path from knee to thigh to up to up to up from thigh, but the path is blocked. She doesn’t want me to touch her, not yet, not there. She doesn’t want me to touch her, but she wants to be touched. She puts her hand to the bottom of her skirt and slides it up just enough to touch up and up and up, and as I keep my hand on her thigh, rubbing and pressing, her fingers find her. I can’t tell if she’s touching over underwear or not wearing any, but as her fingers slide further up and up, it seems impossible that there is any fabric in their way.

I want so badly to touch her, but she’s been clear. I focus on her nipples and all the old tired tricks I do with my mouth for her will be new and exciting. She bites her bottom lip and I do the thing with my teeth and I’m pretty sure she likes it. It would seem awkward now to ask a stranger if they like how running your teeth and tongue against their nipple. I do not ask.

She slides forward, her knees press dimples into the back of the driver’s seat. Her hand is moving fast under her skirt and her lips press against me with the fury of the fucking we both wish we were comfortable enough to do. My hands are on her, a breast in each, following the suggestions the movements of her hips are screaming to me. She likes nipple pinching more than twisting, and a pinch between fingers while rubbing the tip with my thumb seems to have the intended effect.

When she moans into my bottom lip, sucked between her teeth, I remember that I’m not just on vacation to get someone else off, or to help them get off, or whatever it is that we’re doing. I take a hand from her and try to move it to myself, but find the path to my own cock blocked again by her hand. She grabs me by the wrist and moves me back to her nipple. She didn’t come on vacation to leave one nipple free to the wind. I am arguing in my head about arguing amidst the kissing, but her hand finds my cock over my pants and starts to pull at the button of my pants.

I doubt that a new cock carries with it the magic and mystery that nipples do, but she is game. She is excited, creative even, with her fingertips and the trailing up and down, the wrapping around. I can feel her get wetter from the way her tongue starts to move between my lips. I can feel her start to orgasm from her breath, from the way she is jacking me off. She starts moaning to screaming and the noise of her orgasm bounces around each and every concrete edge of the parking structure. She came hard in the back seat of her car. A vacation orgasm carries with it absolutely nothing. Vacation orgasms are just wonderful times to be alive.

She had hers, so I am concerned mainly with mine, but she is buttoning her shirt back up and I am now just concerned. She smiles at me in a “don’t worry” sort of way, as if we’d been communicating for long enough years we didn’t need words to say such things. Funny how quick you can get to know someone when it’s the only thing you have to do that day.

She pulls me on top of her, straddling her, and continues to jack me off. The kissing part of the day is over, and we are, both of us, in the business of a handjob. She’s working as hard to make me come as I am to stall the ejaculation. Her hands move like they know what I want, but do things I’ve never had anyone try before. She jacks me off like no one ever told her you don’t have to work hard on guys.
I understand the cheap top. It is meant to be disposable.

I perform admirably, doing as is expected of a man having his penis stroked repeatedly. I make a fantastic mess all over her chest. She unbuttons the top again, completely this time, and opens the door enough to throw it on the ground below. She follows after, closing the door behind her and immediately opening the front. She slides into the driver sheet, taking her keyring from the cup holders and turning the ignition. All vacations must end.

I don’t even have my keys out of my pocket before she drives away, her bare shoulders and bra visible through the side window. I do not watch her car as it enters the spiral ramp down and down and down.

For lunch, the final act of vacation, I take myself out for a burger and a beer. I eat and drink slowly, replaying the morning in my head. I wonder who the woman is, I wonder what she’s thinking now. I remember her body, her breasts. I remember and remember her orgasm. I think it’s time to go home.

I walk through the door, and my wife is home from work too. She’s pouring herself another glass of wine. She’s still wearing the skirt from vacation, and the worn t-shirt she has added compliments it nicely.

Drunk

2011-10-03T19:02:00.001-07:00

Yes, of course it was because we had been drinking, but still. And of course it was kindof a irresponsible thing to do, but still. And sure, a lot of it had to do with her big tits and her tattoos, but still. Goddamn it was fun.

Of course it was because we had been drinking.

Still, we didn’t get drunk from all the teeny glasses of beer flights after beer flights. I mean, yeah, we did get drunk from all the teeny glasses of beer flights, but not the sort of drunk it takes to do what we did with each other. We all got drunk from different things to get drunk enough to do as we did.

I got drunk from the way her shirt stretched across her chest. I got drunk from her smile, the way her eyes lit up when I said something just over the line. They both got drunk on my jokes. My jokes are really the only booze I’ve got, so thank god they work.

Oh, I was with the two of them, with both girls. Were you imagining one? One with the tits and the smile and the tattoos and the love of dirty jokes and sexiness and the willingness to do this dirty thing I have yet to reveal? There were two, each with some of some and all of some of those things.

We all need to get a little drunk to fuck each other. Not because we’re all hideous, but because sex is ultimately such a weird thing. Nothing else in the rest of our lives is anything like it, which can be said of almost nothing else in our lives. There are things that are sex, and there are things that are not, and only certain very good chocolates and beers exist in the grey area. We need a little something to get us on the other side of that line, something to say to ourselves and each other that nothing is more important right now than the touching we’re about to do. Sometimes, it’s actual drinking, but more often we are drunk on sexiness, on possibility, on a night that has gone well enough to make it feel like a night apart from all others, a night able to contain experiences wholly different than the rest of our lives.

Sometimes we are drunk on the excitement of experience.

Sometime during the night, we were all drunk enough for the touching that started under the table. Like all under-table touching, there was an accidental brush, and then another, and then knees that stayed together longer, legs that met with relief for each other and small movements up and down.

They were both across from me, and my knees touched the inside of each of one of theirs. Once my knees sat there for long enough for three laughs, a few smiles the curled at the corners, a little twinkle in each eye, I pushed my knees slowly together, touching their legs to each other between mine. There was a hiccup in conversation, a debate held in the hesitation of the suggestion. There was a laugh that was too loud, a laugh at the joy of the evening, and we redoubled our drunk. The legs were ok. The touching was good.

In short moments, in the clinking of glasses, I felt a hand over my leg and over her leg and over her leg and then stop, a hand between both of our legs then. I felt a new hand travel the path in reverse, find the space between my leg and her leg, slide itself slowly up and back, slide itself under a dress edge. I couldn’t feel but could tell when fingertips touched skin on the inside thigh of her.

More beer? Yes. We’ll be staying.

Hands matched hands and I felt their hands against my legs traveling up the thighs of each other. They slid forward in their seats, leaving just enough room between my knees and themselves for a hand to fit, and hands were fit.

They had been good and pretending towards conversation up to that point. Our conversations stopped when their hands made it to the top of my knee.

Above the table we grinned like morons into beers we weren’t drinking. They both looked over at me but at nothing. She bit her lip, and she kept a small smile she struggled to control. I could feel the ways their hands moved against my knees. I could feel their knees squirm as they pressed their hands against each other, could see their lips and teeth and tongues and tits react to the touching in small ways; in beautiful and imaginary ways. I kept my beer to my lips and smiled at them. There were tight circles, there was fast rubbing.

She came. She came right at the table. She pressed her palms down in front of her, tried to push the table to the floor and press her hips against the booth. She shuddered against my legs and sucked breaths like hiccups while she came. There were slow circles, there was pressure and loose rubbing.

We sat and smiled at each other a bit like we had invented something amazing and a lot like we had all spilled something on the floor and were amused with ourselves about it.

There was a moment.
“Fuck this,” she said.

She stood, and walked to the back of the bar. We followed, through the crowds just big enough to be busy, and out the door just easy enough to unlock. There was a patio there, but it was far too cold for patio sitters. Smokers went out front because that’s where smokers go, and so we were alone. So she sat and hiked her dress up, and so she sat next to her to keep touching, but we were alone and too cold for watching, so I took my chance to jump in. Her fingers were replaced by my lips and I found warmth in her growls when my tongue found her and found her and swirling swirling found her.

They talked about me while I played. The talking started as jokes, but jokes are hard through moans, so they started talking about me in sex. She talked about how good I was, and she said she’d have to try soon, but she was ok for now (and thanks for that, no problem at all I always wondered how I’d do). They talked until she couldn’t talk anymore and she sat back and watched as I sucked between my lips and slid fingers and pressed tongue and brought her to orgasm. As she got close she tasted like copper and breath. She came around my tongue and past my lips and tasted exactly of orgasm.

I may never have been more drunk in my entire life.

We walked back through the bar throwing cash onto our table. We walked out to our cars and walked past our cars.

We talked about how we never go for walks anymore in the dark on cold nights, but really we were too drunk to be driving and too drunk to be doing anything but finding a place to play some more.

We found a playground overlooking a lake. We found a tower with four walls and no warmth, we found the lips of each other and found orgasms to share. We found the noises of birds in the darkness and the silence of night water. We stayed far beyond the point that we were sober without finding ourselves any less than completely drunk.

I'm For Sale

2011-10-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

Hello all.

If you did not read the piece I wrote for the Smitten Kitten (linked below) you should. I liked it. It also mentions, for the first time on this blog, that I have a kid now. I’ve actually had a kid for over a year, so, you know, THAT’S why I haven’t been writing so much.

I did manage to record an audiobook of my favorite fiction pieces from the blog. It is called “Dirty Bits” and is available on CD Baby and iTunes. I wanted to talk about that project quickly to everyone here since I haven’t done much by way of “releasing” it.

Dirty Bits is my favorite fictiony things from the blog. I chose stories that, for me, have layers to them, have things to discover if you’ve already read them that you may have missed the first or second time through. They are stories that are sexually charged, often in ways that are intentionally sexy, and sometimes in ways that made me uncomfortable to write. The stories in ‘Dirty Bits’ represent the best of what I’ve written to date, and together form the arrow pointing the way I’m going. I hope you buy it. I hope you like it. I hope you tell other people to buy it so I make money. I need money, you know, for diapers and shit.

There should be some short stories posted in the next few weeks, and, towards the end of October, the conclusion of my zombie-dirty-sexy-story, “Runners.”

Thanks for reading, for forwarding my stories and posts on, and for supporting my writing.

-John

More of Me.

2011-09-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

I have a new article up on the Smitten Kitten Website

I Have a Small Child, and a Good Sex Life

You can also purchase some John Stark for your home:

Buy my New AudioBook "Dirty Bits" right here

I should have a new story up here sooner rather than later, but, you know, I've been busy.

Elippsis

2011-08-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

Ready?

Ready.

Ok. Well, I guess start by standing.

K?

Why don’t you show off for me a little bit.

Like, how?

Move around a little bit, lift up your shirt or pull it down a little. Bend over for me, move your skirt up a little.

Like this?

…

That ok?

Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

Oh, wait! The light is blinking.

No, that just means it’s recording. We’re ok. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Mmk. What do I do next?

I dunno. Surprise me.

Surprise you? Like, by doing this?

Yeah, that’s a good surprise. I bet you could do better though.

I’m sure I could... but maybe I’ll wait just a little bit.

That’s fine, that’s fine.

Hmm...

Why don’t you take the rest off though.

All the way?

Yeah, all the way.

…

Wow.

What?

You just, you really look good.

Well, thanks. It feels weird that you still have clothes on.

But we’re not filming me, remember?

I know. Just feels weird.

Well, why don’t you get on the bed? Maybe that will feel less weird.

Ok...

…

… now what?

Play with your nipples.

Play... k...

…

This is awkward.

Ok. Try this. Close your eyes, ignore the camera for a second. Now, show me how you like having your nipples touched, just me. Show me so I can try later.

…

That’s... that’s really hot.

Yeah?

Yeah.

I like it when people do this too.

Oh?

Think you could do that for me?

Once we’re done with this, I can definitely do that for you.

…

…

...

Alright, now start touching yourself.

Touching myself how?

Start on your back and bring your knees up. Spread them a little bit and let your hand come down your stomach.

…

Perfect. Slide a finger down, slide it up and down really slowly, let it find your clit. Stay slow, stay slow.

Sorry!

No need to be sorry. I just want to take our time. This is fun.

This is fu- mmm... this is fun.

Yeah, touch it just like that. Move your hips with it.

…

You make sexy noises.

Mmmm... thanks.

How about sliding a finger in now...

Yes, please.

God, that looks so good.

It feels good.

Two?

Mmmhmm.

Keep that going. You can go faster for me. You can fuck yourself for me.

MMMHMM.

Bring your other hand down, rub your clit while you fuck yourself.

…

…

…

What if I twist your nipples while you do that?

…

…

FUCK.

Wow.

Oh fuck.

That was so good. That was so sexy.

Oh god... holy shit...

Keep touching. Touch slow.

Mmmm.

Bring your fingers up. Suck them clean for me.

… Like that?

Yes. Very much like that.

Mmm. That’s nice.

You like showing off?

I do... I do...

Want to show off more?

mmmm...

Get on your knees for me.

Like this?

Perfect. Keep touching yourself.

Like that?

Yes. Touch your nipples too. Show me. Fingers inside again huh?

Mmmhmmm.

Do you want this?

Please.

Do you want it in your hand, or in your mouth?

I want to suck it.

Show me how you suck. Show me how good you are.
…

…

Shit. You’re very good. Look up at me. Keep looking up. Show me how much you can take.

…

Keep going. Keep going like that. You’re fucking yourself so hard again. Are you going to come with my cock in your throat? Do it. Come again for me.

…

…

That’s so good. You’re so fucking sexy. I’m so close.

I want it.

You want it?

Yes. Please, please. Give it to me.

Where do you want it? Point it where you want it. Jack me off.

Right there.

Right there? Are you sure?

Please, please give it to me.

Keep looking up at me. Keep looking up. Fuck I’m going to...

…

...

Worlds Apart

2011-08-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

Dan walks into a bank. It is a Wednesday evening, but the bank is conspicuously (and predictably) empty. There are a few plastic ferns placed hastily in the corners of the room. Dan is looking to open a checking account. The woman behind the counter, a busty young brunette with her hair tied back and two inches of bra showing in the cleavage of her blouse, looks Dan up and down slowly before asking, “how can I help you,” as she bites her red painted fingernail between her teeth. Dan says, “I, uh, would like to, uh, open an account, uh, you know, for checking.” The teller opens the drawer below her and closes it in one quick motion. “Oh no,” she says, “it looks like I’m out of those brochures. Would you follow me into the back please, where I can give you everything you need.”

Dan lets out a soft, tired sigh and says, “well, I sure do hope you can give me something to be excited about.” Dan doesn’t know why he talks like this. As the teller steps out from behind the counter, showing a skirt short enough to show her uterus, she looks him up and down again and trails her hand down her neck and chest. She says, “oh, I don’t think that will be a problem.”

They head to the back room and the teller bends low at the waist in front of a cabinet she does not open, “now where are those brochures.” “Oh, I think I found what I was looking for anyway,” Dan puts his hand on the ass that has been thrust to the world. He knows he really hasn’t. He knows he really needs to open a checking account.

They have some sex in the back room. First, she goes down on him, then he goes down on her, then he fucks her while she lays on her back, then he fucks her doggy style. Then Dan, the veins straining on his forearms, masturbates into her hair while she moans wildly in delight. “I hope I’ve earned your business,” she says. He looks down on her, still kneeling on the floor and looking up at him with pouty lips. “Yeah,” he says, “and there’s my first deposit.”

Dan walks from the bank with sweat covering his back under his shirt and, once again, without a checking account.

* * * * *

Sally is laying across her couch, her hand aimlessly and absently playing her nipple through her shirt. The television is not on and she has nothing to read. Her living room, which she decorated herself, consists of a white couch, a glass coffee table, and a plastic fern by the door. The doorbell rings and Sally says, to no one in particular, “that must be the pizza.” She gets up from the couch and opens the door. “You must be the pizza guy,” she says to the guy with the pizza.

“Uhh, yeah. So, 16.83.” The pizza delivery guy looks either too tired to not be a little stoned, or too stoned to not be a little stupid. He opens the heat bag and takes the pizza box out, handing it to her with a reciept pressed between his hand and the box.

“Oh no!” Sally runs her hands over her breasts and skin tight shirt then turns to show the delivery guy her ass as she rubs herself over her skin tight shorts. “Where’s my wallet? I can’t find it!” Sally doesn’t really sound that worried. Sally pouts and puts her finger between her teeth. “Why don’t you come in a sec.”

“Uhhh.” The delivery guy seems uncomfortable as he takes one short step into her apartment. “Yeah, checks or whatever work too.”

Sally takes the pizza and puts it down on the coffee table. She opens the drawer in the table, which is empty, and looks under the middle couch cushion with no effort or luck. “Darn, I just don’t know where my wallet is.” She turns to face the driver and undoes the top button of her shirt while she attempts to purr at him, “do you think there’s any other way I can pay you?”

“Uhhh... checks, like I said. Or, umm, you could call in with a credit card.” He looks over his shoulder at his car that carries two other deliveries he’s supposed to make in the next fifteen minutes or else fucking Rich, his asshole manager, will write him up again. “I really need to get going though.”

“Really?” Sally has heard nothing he has said as she focused on the second button down, which was giving her some trouble. “You can’t think of any other way I can pay for my pizza?” Sally walks over to the delivery guy and puts her hand on his crotch.

“What the fuck lady!” He jumps back towards the door.

“Can’t we help each other out?” Her shirt is fully unbuttoned now, and she has begun kneading her breasts like they were made of bread dough.

“I just need sixteen bucks lady, I’m not trying to get into anything.” He thought about how much he and his clothes and his car always smelled like cheap pizza. “Look, if you just give me the pizza back I can just say you weren’t here, and if you find your wallet, you can call to...” His words trailed off as Sally slid her hand down the front of her shorts and started to rub herself. She was instantly moaning like captain of the varsity fucking team was going down on her. “Jesus Christ.” The delivery guy thought about how he really didn’t need this shit.

When Sally went over to him and dropped to her knees saying, “give me that hot sausage,” he turned and left, spitting under his breath, “every fucking crazy in the city needs a fucking pizza tonight.” He realized he didn’t take the pizza with him, and knew fucking Rich would be fucking pissed.

* * * * *

Dan was home, trying to concentrate on a book about WWII aircraft. The subject fascinated him, but he had trouble finding the time to sit and do anything. He made a bit of a ritual about the time he had to himself. He brewed himself a cup of relaxation tea, set a few dry bisquits out next to his worn grey couch. He took the book from its place on the couch-side table, finding the bookmark with his fingers and lifting the page slowly open, timed with the long, slow release of his held breath.

The door bell rang, almost on cue. Fuck you Dan thought, to whatever force in his life had decided he would never have peace. Fuck you for the fucking doorbell, and if this is another time when I have to... He opened the door to find a woman whose age, which showed in the corners of her eyes and lips, was forced awkwardly into a girl scout’s uniform and pig tails. Damnit.

Twenty-eight minutes later, he had already forgotten whatever meaningless excuse had gained her access to his home, or how she managed to almost instantly spill water down the front of her shirt, which was already nearly see-through. She took her shirt off and everything became a blur of every day of his life since he turned barely legal.

They had sex on his couch. She went down on him for a long time and he went down on her just long enough for her to pretend it was enjoyable. They fucked with him on top, then doggy style. She went on and on about how big his cock was and called him “daddy” even though they were roughly the same age. She went down on him some more and then jacked him off all over her face. Then she looked at him, blinking through the pain in her eyes and said in a falsely pouty voice, “does this mean you’re going to buy some cookies?”
As soon as she was gone, Dan decided he was too tired to read, and just went to bed.

* * * * *

Sally remembers class in 4th grade when they brought out stuffed bears to show all the kids where they shouldn’t let anyone touch them. One of her more precocious classmates asked if touching someone’s special place is where babies come from, because that’s where he heard babies come from. “Well,” the teacher raised her eyes to just above the heads of her students so it looked a little like she was looking at them, “sort of. Babies come when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse.” Another student, little miss tries-too-hard in the corner, asked, “what’s that?”

Sally never raised her hand in class, but she knew the answer to this one. The teacher called on her, “Sally?,” accidentally sounding surprised that Sally knew anything. “Intercourse is when the girl bear puts her head between the boy bear’s legs, and then the man bear puts his head between the girl bear’s legs, but for not as long. Then the boy bear gets on top of the girl bear, then the girl bear flips over so the boy bear is behind her, and then the boy bear sprays stuff onto the girl bear’s face and that’s where babies must come from.”

Sally was sent to the Principal's office. He had a fake fern by the window behind his desk, and Sally thought it was pretty.

Club Rules (fiction)

2011-07-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

We were not strangers who met on a plane, no one’s apartment blew up, and not a one of us had six-pack abs or chins sharp enough to cut glass. Other than that, and the whole fighting and end-of-society-explosions-stuff, yeah, I could see how everyone says it’s a lot like Fight Club.

We did start in a parking lot, though in a suburb-shitty bar and not a urban-wasteland-shitty bar. There was lots of drinking first, and a walk out to cars and a goodbye that became a one more thing that became us standing in the night long enough that we felt at home leaned against cars that weren’t ours talking about lives we wished we had. Every ten minutes, someone would look at a watch a phone and talk about how they needed to go soon.

There were three of us.

There was me, and I was Glasses, and there was Skirts and there was Boots. There were the three of us, standing amongst the cars as a thin blanket of karaoke floated harmlessly above. We talked about house projects and home security, about how we should all retreat to an island or farm, and then how that was a bad idea. We talked about childhood and how light your shoulders must be when you’re ten, and how they’re suddenly heavier by twelve even though not a single interesting thing has happened in your life yet.

We tried to mark down the significant moments, and found the ones that were supposed to meaningful, like graduations, always felt hollow. We talked about how some moments, like the time Skirts’ parents told her the star of the 70’s re-run she was watching was dead now, stick with you forever. We talked about how we wished we could do our first kisses again, now that we know what we’re doing.

There was this awkward, drunk, dark silence, like the volume of the night we were having had slowly crawled to its peak and then was suddenly muted, suddenly naked around us. Skirts, who is never quiet for long, announced to both of us, “Fuck it. Let’s kiss.”

We stood in the summer night, pressed against one another, mosquitoes devouring our ankles and knees as we relaxed into the goodness of kissing like we didn’t know we shouldn't.

The first rule of Fuck Club is you do not talk about Fuck Club

Meetings are Wednesday nights, generally. Sometimes we chip in for a hotel or someone arranges for their house to be suitably empty.

We call ourselves Fuck Club because we’re funny people, and because as we tried to figure out some general rules, we found we couldn’t do much better than Chuck. We also call ourselves Fuck Club because we have a club where people come and fuck and get fucked. We define “fuck” pretty loosely to include many things that feel good.

Of course we were supposed to talk about it. After the parking lot did what the parking lot did, we almost immediately starting making lists of who else would be fun. By the first real meeting, there were seven of us, and a lot of our talk revolved around how we could talk a few more into coming. We didn’t really talk all that much though.

Fuck Club started, in its very first night, as a place where people got together to only worry about what was happening in the walls that surrounded it. Skirts and Boots were the first, and though everyone knew they were among the founders, I think everyone assumed they wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic about each other. Wrong. Very wonderfully wrong.

There are two appropriate reactions to two beautiful women kissing with their hands up each other’s shirts and skirts and down pants. You can watch, which is not bad, or you can find someone close to do something similar with.

This was not supposed to be Watch People Fuck Club, so people paired and grouped up quickly once Boots and Skirts started making each other moan. Everyone came to Fuck Club because fucking is good and nearly everyone needs more of it.

The second rule of Fuck Club is you DO NOT talk about Fuck Club

More people showed up to the second meeting, and by the third, following chains of friends of friends of “this one friend”s, there were almost as many people there whose names I didn’t know as people I did.

The third meeting was the first time I fucked someone without talking to them at all first. There were eyes that passed over Swoopy Bangs going down on Sideburns, eyes that met and said, “why not?” I remain a firm believer that “why not” is one of the strongest arguments out there to do a great many wonderful things.

We met at the couch against the wall between us and started kissing. We watched Swoopy Bangs suck cock, we fell to the couch next to each other, our hands introducing ourselves to each other’s most fun places.

Her shirt came off as she straddled me, kissing down my neck and up behind my ear. I took her nipple between my teeth as my hand moved up her leg, under her skirt. She rocked her hips against my fingers, buried her face in my shoulders. I watched Swoopy Bangs jack off Sideburns onto her chest while Ponytail kneeled behind her, reaching around to rub her clit.

Ponytail and Swoopy Bangs, coworkers, don’t even like each other, not that it matters really. Swoopy Bangs had her head backwards on Ponytail’s chest as she came. Ponytail was rubbing Sideburn’s come into Swoopy Bangs nipples with one hand, was working quick circles with her other. They would probably go back to not liking each other by the next day, but for now were both smiling recklessly.

It’s unbelievable, the amount of smiling that happens at Fuck Club.

The third rule of Fuck Club, if someone yells stop or taps out, the Fuck is over.

The third rule adapts loosely from fighting rules. It means, mostly, that no one does anything they don’t want to do, and anyone can stop anything at any time. It also means we keep condoms and dental dams and lubricant and saran wrap in ample quantities wherever we’re fucking.

We don’t use the third rule that much. In fact, there’s a few rules in a row after that that we blatantly dislike and ignore.

Number four: Two guys to a fuck.

Nope. I mean, there can be two guys in a fuck, but there can also be eight girls or four boys or any combination of anyone who is there.

Number five: One fuck at a time.

Nope. Unless someone is showing off a new trick, which happens ocassionally. In fact, we’re a bit more like a book club than a fight club. People come dressed neatly, for one, and don’t generally go home with any marks that will last, plus we usually have snacks.

A book club is where a lot of us say that we go, and is code around a few offices to talk about Fuck Club. “Going to book club this week?” “Wouldn’t miss it!” “I hope that guy with the tattoos and the big cock shows up again.”

Occasionally a fuck is spectacular enough to draw pause from everyone around them. Skirts and I, the first time we fucked, were show-stopping. We’d been building that fuck piece by slow piece over years of flashing looks and jokes that risked real intent. We kissed awkwardly because we are both the same kind of awkward person, and things seemed stalled without Boots there to even us out, but with Skirts, hair pulling works like an on switch. Within moments she was pulled down to all fours in front of me while I kneeled behind her. We fucked like we just discovered sex, we fucked hard until we broke every little piece of everything we had built. We fucked until we wrecked each other for the night.

People come to fuck and share fucking, and since it’s not so serious and there’s lots more fucking for everyone to have, no one feels shy about pausing something to ask questions or give pointers. And yes, sometimes, one girl will serve as volunteer while a few people talk about the best way to give oral to women, each trying different things and showing their best moves. These volunteers are not difficult to find.

Also, one time there was a blowjob race, because it’s Fuck Club, damnit, and that’s how we roll.

Number six: No shirts, no shoes

Well, right. And no socks.

Number seven: Fucks will go on as long as they have to.

This is a great rule that has, on occasion, required some team work. Team work is okay.

Number eight: If this is your first time at Fuck Club, you have to fuck.

The last rule is one we’ve never needed to enforce, since people generally come to Fuck Club more for the Fuck and less for the Club, and we’re a bit more discerning in our invites than fight clubs must be (though I don’t know why they’re not, since who would want to fight with a bunch of weirdos and assholes?).

Book club has blissfully resisted evolving into something other than a place for fun people to have fun. People leave their lives at the door and take a few hours of vacation from everything other than the things they spend most of their lives wishing they could do. Why wouldn’t you have more sex more often with more people if you could?

Still, we feel it’s important to let people know that this is not a club for spectators. This is a club for fuckers.

Music, Please, Re-posted

2011-07-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

I wrote this originally in 2008 after listening for the millionth time to the Back to Black album. I thought I'd post again on the day Amy Winehouse was found dead. I'm a little distressed about how much of a joke she has become only hours after her death... not because of anything about her, but because no one deserves to be ridiculed for having serious addiction issues. I stand by the fact that the Back to Black album is one of the best pieces of music released in a decade. So there.

On my way home from work today, I was listening to Aesop Rock. He was, for many years, my favorite rapper. His lyrics are poetic to a fault (way past the line of comprehension or the sparseness that so often makes rap lyrics more powerful than prose or written words, but not so far that I won't follow him there), his beats are okay, but not nearly dusty enough to match his voice. Can a beat be dusty? He needs more dust in there, and space. I guess I think rap needs lots of spaces to be really good.

I was listening to Aesop Rock, and after skipping wildly through his 'Labor Days' album, which actually has pretty decent spacing, and far dustier beats, I decided I wanted to listen to 'Float', since somewhere on there is the line "I'm just a survivor of the wooly mammoth population bottle neck effect," which is a line I could listen to over and over and over again and grow increasingly calm and happy with myself for being a scruffy guy.

After turning from one highway to another, seeing the snow around the water of Theodore Wirth Lake (pond?), I decided I wanted some singing. Some days I feel like singing. Let me clarify: I never, ever feel like singing myself, but I sometimes feel like listening to singing. Today, after seeing the lake (pond?) I felt like singing. I did that stupid and dangerous and all-too-common thing of scrolling through my Mp3 player to look for some singing. The next singer down my list was Amy Winehouse.

Why not?

Now. Amy Winehouse has gotten a lot of shit since she released 'Back to Black.' By the time I had heard it (yes, and loved it), and by the time I had put it on during a small dinner party at my house, there was already one uber-hip friend who had to sigh audibly as it started, and when pressed as to why, in god's name, she could possibly dislike this album, said with yet another sigh of exasperation, "I've just had a little too much Amy Winehouse lately." This friend must have had a hard six or seven months. This was before major radio play, before grammygrammygrammy's, before tabloids, before Amy Winehouse became known more for being Amy Winehouse than for being a musician.

It's not cool to like Amy Winehouse anymore. She's a joke. People hear about bad things happening to her, or her doing bad things, and they laugh, or they shrug and get sad about it. They say, "so sad," or "look at how skinny she is," or "she's just hideous now." I guess I've said all of those things. The problem is that while we've been saying all these things, it seems like everyone stopped listening to her. We felt guilty for supporting her habit mainly, or we heard the songs one too many times, or we just couldn't take her seriously after seeing one (or twenty) too many embarrassing pictures.

We've all had too much Amy Winehouse. She's a tabloid figurine now, famous for being famous for being fucked up.

By all accounts, she is certainly fucked up.

I listened to 'Back to Black' today, for the god-knows-howmanyth-time, but the first in god-knows-how-long, and listened to her voice wrap itself around and through sounds and words and feelings and push sex and coyness and anger out. I listened to her sing sadness to and ex for getting his dick wet in a way that was crushingly playful. I heard her use the word "fuckery" in a song, over and over, without it sounding ridiculous or overly silly. I listened to a backing band wound like a clock, running tight through every track, dancing with that sultry, strong voice, and having sense enough to let it lead. I got straight-up-stupidly poetic about it. I listened to one hell of a good album. I mean, really, a really fucking good album.

I don't get it. Are Amy Winehouse's problems so much worse than Kurt Cobain's? How come his drug problems made him a romantic genius? How come her drug problems make her a trashy joke? How come his problems add depth to his music, and her problems take depth away? Is it because we're not over the joke yet that, despite what her single says, she ought to go to rehab? Is it because, for a short short time, she was just about all anyone could think about when they had sex, and we love to laugh at sex symbols getting ugly (not that Cobain wasn't a sex symbol, but his whole DEAL was being ugly, so getting strung out only helped things)?

I'm going to go ahead and call shenanigans on how much we hate Amy Winehouse now. Shenanigans. I want an inquiry. I want the Senate involved. It's time to stop being so shocked that a musician has a drug problem. Time to stop laughing at her for gaudy makeup and silly outfits and saying, "how can she think that looks good?" Or, hell, before I sound too much like that kid in the youtube video screaming for everyone to leave Britney alone, go ahead and make fun of Winehouse all you want, but, for fuck's sake, leave her album out of it.

Giggling (fiction) (for now)

2011-07-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

It was a day in the interest of the “why the fuck not,” and of the school of “because it’s summer.” So you can understand, I think, why things got crazy so quickly.

People find time in the summer for other people, for afternoons that turn to evenings and nights and late nights. So we found time for each other. It wasn’t even particularly difficult. The time to do the things we want to do is just laying around our houses, waiting to be picked up and sorted.

So she made time to come to my place. I said, “It’s been too long since you came over.” She said, “It’s been too long since you’ve asked.” I said, “well, I kept wanting to, but just never out and said it.” She smiled at me as she walked through the door, “well, that’s why you use your words.”

We sat on my front porch, which is as enclosed as it can be without major repairs to busted screens. We sat on my couch out there, leaning back, drinking long silences from blue skies, from the buzzing summer. We drank lemonade and sweet-tea vodka, because it’s what summer days taste like anyway. We drank the day until our heads were lighter than before, until our shoulders and necks felt like they did when we were nineteen, maybe twenty.

I didn’t know we were going to have a summer day, one of those summer days that could only happen in summer, that could only happen in nice weather with light heads and long days that allow time the time to be special, until she put her ankles onto my lap and slid herself across the couch to lay down until her knees bent over me.

I didn’t know knees could be sexy just like that, warm and freckled on the sides and (there is no better word for it but) giggling. It was warm outside, which, I think, makes knees look way different than in the cold.

I put my hand on her knee, ran my fingers lightly up and tapped them like I was playing that thing on pianos that everyone plays when they find themselves around one, but don’t know any songs. I touched her like that because that’s how giggling knees like to be touched.

My touching almost immediately elicited that sort of groan, that sort of moan and hum and song and grunt that some girls make when you touch them just the right way. A girl one time made that sound when I pulled her hair playfully at a party, and then again and again as I kept trying. That moan may just be the most powerful force in my life, and I think about if for months when I find one. I know it’s not just me. I get the feeling looking at certain buildings, at certain bridges, at certain books and at certain wings of certain museums that much work has been done by men in the last forever-years to elicit that sound from the lips of lovely women.

The sound says, in no uncertain terms, “I want to be fucked right now.”

The sound says, in some uncertain terms, “It may or may not actually happen, or may not happen with you, but fucking fuck I want to be fucked right now.” It is not a song of romance. It is an ancient song of wrists held tight, of hair pulled, of biting and riding and spanking and twisting, of wetness and choking and orgasms that wake neighbors and start fires and define whole times in our lives.

All that, and here all I did was touch a giggling knee.

So we did this for awhile, we did this thing where I touched her knee in every way I could think to touch it, teased little bits up her thigh, retreated little bits around her calve, and she moaned and she squirmed these little almost in-perceivable squirms and it was a run-on sentence full of sexy.

She did this thing with her hands, where the thing was like her hands were doing just want I wanted to do, which was rub deep paths between her chest-to-shoulders. She did this thing while she kept moaning at me, or for me, or probably mainly for herself. She did this thing that I usually do which is to slide my fingers down the top of her shirt, little swoopy lines under the fabric, innocent enough, but fishing for rebuke or encouragement. Just like when I do that thing there was this moment when she did this thing, this moment of no turning back, this moment of not-at-all-innocence when her fingers found her nipples and stayed there. They stayed and pinched, and tugged and twisted. She lifted her hands to push her shirt down enough to bring her nipples out, to show me how she liked them touched, or probably mainly to touch them how she liked them touched.

So my hands slid up, slid up like very sexy-like, or as sexy-like as I can manage. So my hands slid up, and took with them the flowy-cottony-skirt thing that I could tell hated having to cover her legs. So I uncovered her legs with my sexy-like hands and as my hands found their ways further up, one hand on each leg, each treating its leg like a shrine and a goddess and like its own leggy slut. Each hand was after pleasure.

My hands made wonderful explorers. Hills and valleys and hills and valleys, up her legs and across her stomach, over and under and pushing aside fabrics until they found themselves wet, the kind of wet that can only go with the moans that she was making, the kind of wettness that is unmistakable in its intent and excitement.

I moved my fingers slowly, without any real goal in mind, without any hurrying, I let my fingers do as they pleased and did so slowly. Summer, after all, is the only season that baseball makes any sense.

Her giggling knees moved apart, still giggling madly at all this. Her moaning, in the meantime, had gotten louder, more insistent. I worried for a moment about neighbors and passers-by, but it’s difficult to get too worked up about that when your hand is moved from stomach to nipple and you are beggedbeggedbegged to twist hard, to twist harder, with nipples working like volume knobs for her moaning. With nipples that go to 11.

One finger would’ve felt like an insult, I thought, a complete ignoring of every signal she was sending that this was not to be a playful day, this was not to be cozy and cute and oh-by-golly-I-just-came-a-little-how-fun sort of day, so I started with two but went to three almost immediately. My fingers grouped in a triangle together with my palm up, pushed up gently as I fucked them in to the knuckle and her moans became the guttural groan of a farm tractor having an orgasm. I saw that happen once. I’m from Wisconsin.

Three fingers became four and it’s as good a time as any to say that the real fucking potential of fingers is grossly underrated. Have you ever seen the hand of a man? Not to denigrate the effect of a cock, but four fingers were not only fucking, but filling her. Her moaning turned to mainly expletives, mostly directed at me. “Fuck me asshole, you fucking prick,” and when my fingers slid in past the knuckle and her whole body seemed to flex with the first shocks of approaching orgasm I was called, somewhat ironically I suppose, a pussy. She was smiling while she said it, so I wasn’t about to let it ruin my day.

She was still smiling when she grabbed my wrist to stop me and said, “no fucking way I’m coming without your cock inside me.” That seemed pretty reasonable, so I said, “yeah, that seems pretty reasonable.” Sometimes I’m a bit of a snot when I know I’m doing something well.

We left the porch for the living room where there was air conditioning, furniture, and curtains on the windows. Sweat we didn’t realize we had produced was cooling against our bodies, creating little pinpricks of coolness across our backs and arms and chests. We took our clothes off quickly.

She stood with her back to me, facing the couch, so I did what it felt like she wanted me to do. I grabbed her hair into a tight ball with my right hand, spread her legs with my knee, and shoved her face down against the cushions. For beautiful girls who bend over: Firstly, thanks. Secondly, I hope you have some idea of just how sexy it is to see an ass in the air like that, and the curves of legs, and the sides of your lips with your mouth open in anticipation of cock. I mean, really, penises are such ridiculous things, and attached the absurdity that is a man-body, and for such a powerful force of everything sex to be so ready and hopeful and begging for whatever it is we’re packing behind you, well, thanks again. Thanks, really.

It occurred to me, as I was pulling her head back just to listen to her love it, that I really wanted to go down on her, but the time seemed far from right. We were kind of in the middle of something there, and a break for oral sex would, I thought, ruin the mood. I made a mental note though, stored somewhere near the front of my brain, to have oral sex with her. Under that note, written in a hasty, heavy hand, was a note to have more oral sex in general.

My note taking finished, I pulled her back against my cock, reaching my right hand around to guide it inside of her. As I felt just how wet she was, just how warm she was, she groaned a new groan of accomplishment. Since I first touched her knee, and maybe before, her mind had been reaching for the moment when I would be fucking her. Not to sound too hypocritical, and to speak only from being spoken to and not from personal experience, but though fingers may be nice, there is nothing like being properly fucked by a thick and very hard dick. Lucky for her. Lucky for me.

I left my arm wrapped around her, kept my fingers pressed against her, added pressure and figure 8’s I hoped weren’t too obviously that. She didn’t seem to notice my novice trick, or perhaps wasn’t in a position to argue has her back arched and her head thrashed back and forth against the control of my left hand.

I’m not very good at cooking, especially baking, and I’m terrible at making plants live longer than a week in my house, but thank whoever is in control of these things for giving me the ability to fuck well.

To say she had an orgasm is perhaps understating her experience greatly. She fell the fuck apart like my cock was the key to a room full of orgasm monkeys that all got out at once. She spoke languages that have been dead for thousands of years as she pushed her hips back against mine. She saw and forgot the future. She was everything it is to be alive for nearly a full minute, which is almost enough to kill someone.

She had an orgasm. She has a rather substantial orgasm. I wasn’t sure she’d be okay ever again, and that made me rather proud of myself.

I let go of her hair, let it fall across her face as she continued to breath like her head had just broken water. I kept my right hand pressed hard and still against her clit, letting the last lightening racers of her orgasm flash up her back and neck and rest just behind her ears. I kept my cock as far inside of her as I could move it, felt every flex and shock and spasm, felt her body press down against me, felt myself start to breath like I was getting a tattoo.

I pulled out from her, came across her ass and back. I think it’s sexy, you know, that my orgasms have that physical evidence, that she could feel almost up to her shoulder blades the tangible streaks across her skin of how completely I had come. I think it's sexy too, just how fucking filthy it is.

It’s sexy, you know.

She stood and faced me, smiled broadly and mischievously as she ran her finger across her ass, placed it in her mouth and sucked it clean. “I was hoping you’d come all over my tits,” she said, she challenged, she pouted at me. I watched her lips around her finger, looked at her breasts and nipples and that space between that did look awfully like a great spot for an orgasm, and said, “well, that’s why we use our words.”

I can be a bit of a snot when I know I’ve done something well.

Group Sex, The Ford Motor Company, and Everything else about Life

2011-06-24T20:13:00.001-07:00

I've come to a point in my life where I’ll believe almost anything, just for the adventure of it. I find myself jumping easily onto trains of thought, riding while the scenery interests me, and then hopping to another. It’s like trying on hats.

I’m sure you can imagine the fun of this. For a week or two once, a few years ago, I believed in God like he was the Ford Motor Company. Sure, he’d seen better days, but his power was undeniable and he’d created the Mustang once. I like things with a little nuance to them. A week later I only really cared about the undeniable role of the Cubans in the JFK assassination. God, like everything else, had gotten a little old after awhile.

I believe fantastic things about people on the street or in cars that pass me. A man at lunch just the other day was playing scrabble on his phone and was rather excited at a triple word score. I knew in my heart he had a son he never talked to any longer. I knew he sometimes sat in his car and cried about it. The waitress, meanwhile, could have been a fantastic lover of mine, if either of us were prone to such things and meeting strangers, which we weren’t. It’s a shame really, as I would have loved to have kissed the little mole above her belly button that I couldn’t actually see. She didn’t give very good head though, that much was obvious to everyone, I’m sure.

The thing about all this believing is that it has spawned impossibles all over my life, which is actually how all of this believing came about.

I don’t know a lot of guys these days that talk a lot about having threeways. I think most of them have given up. What a silly thing to give up on!

When I was in college, nearly every guy I knew thought about threeways almost all of the time. We even called our ridiculous attempts at them “giving it the college try.” Most of the guys I knew also flunked out of college, both literally and following this particular metaphor. I finished college, graduating just above mediocrity on my transcript, but with honors in the “college try” department.

It’s amazing, I’ve found, just what can happen when you believe something is possible enough to ask for it.

This is a decent point to mention that, save my week-long flirtation with the car-building God, I’ve never found any religious ideas that really rang true to me. Because of my general uncertainty of what happens after, I’ve become a very firm believer in making the here and now as special, really special, as I can, since, you know, this is the shot we get.

I’ve never been able to figure out why more people don’t live like that. I suppose it’s comforting to believe that there’s not much more out there than we’re already doing. Everything else is fiction.

Do you realize how many things we only fantasize about that are entirely, and often easily, attained? There are things that would bring us pleasure or glory or learning or fulfillment or at least a decent fucking story to tell that take only the will to say, “because why not?” I’ve never been able to figure out why more people don’t ask that question a little more seriously of all the things they deny themselves. They must all think heaven is a pretty nice place, and that the only way to get there is to not have too much fun down here. That must be nice for them, seriously.

Was I talking about threeways? My apologies. I sometimes get carried away when I start thinking about all the fun and love and joy that people deny themselves because they feel like they should. Because there are rules against things that were made up just because a few hundred years ago.

There I go again.

I can take no credit for my first group sex experience. Like Newton and the apple, I was just sitting around and some wonderful shit hit me right over the head. The shit that hit me was a night of movie watching and delicious drinks with fruityness and vodka and enough people in the same room who were all attracted to another.

It wasn’t even a threeway. I jumped right to four people, with myself and four girls. That’s a little like graduating with a double major, right? I’ll stop the college metaphors... now.

So it was me and the three, and they are all wonderful people (well, let’s be honest, one of them truly remarkably wonderful, one who seemed pretty great, and then the other girl who was also there). We were on my front porch, and this is maybe around two in the morning, and the lateness and the drinking and the something in the air that comes with humid summer nights all combined to make us feel like we were in fiction, in make-believe, in a world that was built completely on the why-not’s and what-if’s of the world.

The girl of middle-coolness sprawled herself across the legs of the girl of supreme coolness and asked, “wanna make out?” She didn’t even say it special. Wanna know why? Because it’s not fucking magic people! It’s just asking for what you want.

They started making out, there on the couch that sat on my front porch, and there is no proper response to spontaneous makeouting other than continuing on, which is what the other two of us did. To save us from the awkwardness of two couples making out directly next to each other, hands were moved liberally amongst the couch and landed on soft and warm and lovely places. We bit lips and moaned into each other’s mouths as we were rubbed and stroked and pinched and twisted.

It was the most group sex ever had without any clothing being fully removed. I looked it up in the book.
Three of us had orgasms, two of us more than one, and one of us was also there. It wasn’t really about the getting off as much as it was the getting and getting and getting close and the shared space of it all. Was it a mind-blowingly awesome sexual experience?

It was like messing around, but with four people there instead of two. It was exactly like that.

Also, fuck yes it was a mind-blowingly awesome sexual experience.

The second time though? The second time was way way better.

See, by the second time, I had my legs under me. I had this idea swimming in my head that the only thing keeping many nights from being like the first-time night was everyone’s entire inability to say, “wanna make out?” Of course, you have to really mean it.

And I’ll get to the second time in a second, but before we get too into intercourse and female ejaculation and all that, let’s talk about hard work. Living Big (and that’s what I’ve come to call it now) isn’t just about doing whatever the fuck you want because you want to fucking fuck. Living Big is about recognizing that... well, listen: When I was a freshman in college I looked back on my four years of high school. I looked at how I didn’t do so many things I wanted to do, how I did so many things, I mean, really, a ridiculous amount of things that I didn’t want to do because it was decided in some room at some point that if everyone did these things all the same way it would make the building easier to run. Rules are not made to help everyone’s lives be as full as they can be. So I got done with high school and I thought, “fuck... if I could only go back.”

Guess what we don’t get to do?

So now I think about when I’m 50. I think about doing all the things that whatever role I’m in dictates I am supposed to do. Holy Christ do I not want to look at my life and think, “if I could only go back.”

But the hard work. The hard work is looking back and knowing you lived to do what you wanted, lived for experiences and relationships and fun and joy and pleasure, for fulfillment and expression and realizing the potential of whatever the hell is all around us, and being able to say, “I’m totally not an asshole.” That’s the hard work. That’s the work of having hard talks, of being honest with yourself and every person on every day you need to talk to. That’s making sure you are healthy, your life is healthy, and your friends are taken care of.

But really, you know what? Fuck your friends. It can’t just be about fun, either. There is a whole damn world around you full of people that you don’t know who need you doing your best to make this place better. So, actually, don’t just fuck your friends. Put in the work to do decent things, to build and help and heal where you can. Then go fuck your friends.

Like I did on that second time with the threeway. I was with two friends are we were in a living room that stretched to contain the sheer quantity of comfy couches and big pillows and places everywhere to lay and sit and kneel and stand comfortably. We did all those things. But first we were sitting on couches all around each other and doing this whole night of flirty pushing and teasing and bad, bad jokes. There was this silence. There was this silence that was the sort of thing that usually hangs onto every-one's ribs for a second until someone laughs a half-laugh and says, “aaaaanyway,” and the conversation moves on. But I learned from the time before and this was the time after and so I said, “wanna just make out?”

I believe almost anything because it’s a powerful thing to do. If you do not know that, then you have no idea. There’s got to be some physics or magic or something of the two of them that explains why intention and desire are so often rewarded, especially after the point where those things are voiced out loud.

So I said, “wanna just make out?,” and it happened so quickly after that. Well, started quickly with kissing and then leveled off into kissing and hands and squirming bodies for a long, long time until it felt like, “yeah, why not?” Then this girl on her knees that I love was going down on this girl sitting on a couch who I really loved, and I was behind the kneeling-loved girl and having intercoursey sex with the third person of my entire life, and in that situation.

This is a thing that really happened. This is not fiction. This is a thing that wasn’t even all that difficult to make happen. There wasn’t even magic words other than all the words we already know.

I did fuck like a rockstar of fucking. That really happened too. The kneeling girl had her first ejaculation onto the floor below her, which was a wooden floor of thin, blond strips. I’m not sure that the floor is important except for I have this perfect picture in my head of the floor and all her come all over it, viewed while I was still deep inside her, while she was still face-buried in the couch-sitting-girl. I have that picture in my head and there is nothing that’s going to ruin that picture now.

We’re still all friends, by the way, and that’s a real thing too. Sex doesn’t make everyone an asshole.

I believe a good many things about the world all the time, and so many of them are just for fun. But I believe strongly in believing things, and I live strongly to enjoy life.

And by the way the sexiest thing that I’ve done in the last few days is sit across a table from a face that was new of me, that could have been constructed only moments before she walked into the door of the bar, and we sat across from each other and talked about wizard books and scary friends and the process of being heartbroken when you didn’t know your heart was even hanging out all vulnerable-like. We hugged an extra-long first date hug and she looked at me and said, “you know how special this is, right? Just starting to talk to each other and being comfortable with each other already?”

I just had to believe that she was right, and that it was the most special thing imaginable. The view from that train is awfully nice.

Special

2011-06-15T05:17:00.001-07:00

I tell her neck that I love her too. She tells the top of my head she’s loved me for months. The sheets are soaked in us. We are breathing together. Our sweat and breath and come and joy. We lay next to each other, her “wow” and “fuck” and groans are somewhere between loud thoughts and quiet whispers. I tie the long red strap wrapped around the bedpost to each of her wrists, our lips sliding over each other’s sweat and orgasm.

“I love it,” as I straddle her, her arms stretch over her head, I get harder, grip my hand in a fist around my cock. She moans at me, pleased, content, filthy. I inhale bunches of air all at once as she growls “yes! Fuck yes!” My cock rubs back and forth between her breasts, pulls the wetness from her neck, nipples and cheek, leaving her chest heaving and dry, save a thin trail of sweat from neck to stomach. She begs me and begs me and begs me, like a whimper, “all over me, all over me, I want you all over me.”

I crawl off of her and down and place my lips in half-moon curves over her clitoris. She shudders hard against me, her hips push off the bed and against me as my lips touch her, her body calming as my lips and tongue move and kiss and suck. Her spasms are the vocal, unintelligible language of pleasure and form themselves into “I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to...” loudly, then quieter until her words die into heavy breaths. She squirms and squeals as that trail of sweat makes its way slowly back up her body until it is just a small dot of perspiration at the base of her neck. As I lift my lips from her, she twists and pulls against the restraints around her wrists.

I kiss my way up her stomach, “ohpleaseohpleaseohplease” until my lips reach her ribs. My mouth moves quickly across her breasts, taking each nipple in turn like a question to be contemplated. My lips lift from her chest and move towards her mouth while my cock, covered in her wetness, slides deep inside her. I move my hips quickly at first, slowing as our kissing becomes more playful, teasing her with the tip of my cock as I kiss down her neck. I pull back with my hips and replace my cock with my fingers, two, and then one. I pull them from her, feel her wetness leave my fingers and slide off of her as I move around her pussy in wide circles.

I move to kneel along side her, testing the restraints on her wrists before untying them. I hand them to her and she sits up, then stands at the end of the bed. I slide my clothes back on clumsily, still laying on the bed before she says, “I want to see you naked too.” She bends over and pulls her underwear slowly up her legs and on. Her bra, a little black thing with pieces of red that imply talented hand-stitching, comes from the ground to her hand and is fastened. Her hands still hold the long red silk sash, “I want you tie me up,” she says, as she hides it behind her back, “I want tonight to be special.”

Make My Night

2011-04-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

“Tally’s going to be there?”

“She’s supposed to be.”

“Good. We’re going to make your night.”

Somehow, in the waiting and the hurrying and the lateness that accompanied our making to the party on Saturday, I forgot that little exchange as it happened.

Later, when Jenny sat on the couch in the basement straddled by Tally, and while I stood behind Tally kissing and touching them both, the exchange popped back up in my head. Jenny wasn’t wrong. My night was very made.

This was Saturday, the year-anniversary-party of With Benefits (the non-monogamy social group we help half-heartily run). This was the basement, the floor of the house set aside for such tomfoolery one may engage in at a party full of consenting, sex-positive, open-relationshiped adults. Upstairs was for consenting, sex-positive, open-relationshiped adults who weren’t making out. Upstairs, there was cheesecake.

Downstairs, my wife and my girlfriend pawed and cooed over each other. The kissed like kissing was dirtiest possible thing. Jenny pulled Tally’s shirt up, and each of us, Jenny and I, took a nipple between our teeth. Downstairs, there was teamwork.

Upstairs, there was a dancer. No, not that kind, but splendid new people and wonderfuls of the regulars. There were people talking about open relationships and crazy parents and the beauty and terror of Netflix Instant. Upstairs, there was friendship.

Downstairs, Tally put her hand far enough between her legs to be between Jenny’s legs. They breathed into each other’s necks as I kissed them each in turn. Someone grabbed my cock over my jeans, then someone else. It’s always nice when your wife and girlfriend get along (on your penis). Downstairs, there were erections.

I call Tally my girlfriend again, but that’s just me being lazy. I should really explain that she was in a long-term relationship pretty recently, and that she’s looking for another. In the meantime (and after, if the lucky person who she finds is happy with open things), Tally and I get to show each other just how much we enjoy one another. Specifically, I get the chance again to show her how much I love the noises she makes when she’s very turned on. Jenny is better than anyone else I’ve seen (total people I’ve seen try = 5, I think) at making Tally make those noises. I’m good at watching that happen, very good indeed.

I left the two of them on the basement on the couch, touching each other and grinning madly at the evening. I left them! I did. I wanted them to have some time together. Three people is a crowd, you know, a very kick-ass, wonderful, make-my-night crowd, but there’s something special about two and I wanted them to have that for awhile. It was also a good time standing upstairs talking about goodness of the little potatoes and knowing that downstairs was still downstairs.

They came up enough minutes later to be flushed and radiant blinking billboards for sex. They slid into the couch and into a conversation about either the avoidance of poly drama or the ownership of multiple cats (I only heard pieces of the conversation from the other side of the room, but it was certainly one of those two). For awhile, we stayed upstairs and enjoyed wine and across-the-room fuzzy smiles. Later, we went downstairs and kissed more and wrestled a little, because the hosts had put out mats that said, “wrestle on me” very insistently. Downstairs, there were feats of strength.

Upstairs was generally busier than downstairs. I thought this was neat, because although this fun group that has spent a year growing through word of mouth and Internet really enjoys sexy times, at the end of the night we also really enjoy each other’s company. I think my favorite parties now are going to be the ones that mix the two.

We Didn't Sleep Together

2011-04-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

To those of you who don’t live in Minnesota (or further north), or who have the money and time for warm-weather trips during winter; those of you who have not had snow storms all winter take away your stadiums, half the city’s parking spots, and nearly all of your own will to live; those of you who have worn shorts in the last 8 months, have said, “god it’s hot,” who have been able to walk to your car in the morning, get in and drive away and not think about scraping, warming it up, or digging out. To those of you who haven’t lived through this winter thinking all your friends have started to hate you, that all your talents are imagined, and that each new day just may be the one that breaks you, let me say that you have no idea why breaks are so damn important.

That was too much. Sorry, I’m pretty out of practice writing bloggy stuff. After spending the last year or so focusing as much as possible on fiction, I’ve had a few requests pile up for an update on me and Jenny and the whole cast of oddballs in our lives.

Things are going well.

That was not enough. Still knockin’ off the rust.

Things are going well, so well in fact, that we both planned little breaks this week. See, one of the main rules we have always kept constant in the realm of our open relationship was that we slept together, every night, in our own bed. This means coming home late or leaving a date early to make sure that the bed is achieved safely and consistently, and the space of our bed is important (nearly sacred) to our relationship. As a symbol, and as a reality that it’s nice to sleep next to and wrapped around each other, sleeping together is one of those anchors we have built in to our relationship. However, you can’t go on a cruise without raising the anchors on the boat, right?

After this long winter, we both needed a break. We didn’t have the money to go anywhere we really wanted to go, and didn’t have the time to head back to the elderly-sexopolis of the Villages in Florida, where we went two years ago (My diary of the trip is worth a read if you’ve never heard of the Villages, or enjoy pictures of tricked out golf carts). This need to do something to shake off the inauspicious weather and the pervasive evidence that perhaps this winter would never end, coupled with a few happy reasons for celebration, led us to hoist anchor on what had been our most cardinal rule.

Wait, good things happen in winter? They do! They do!

You see, Jenny’s boyfriend Eric got a new job, a job he had been hoping for and was awfully excited about. Also, you see, John’s girlfriend got to stop being his monogamously-entangled-girl-that-was-his-girlfriend, and though she probably isn’t his girlfriend again yet, at least isn’t certainly not his girlfriend. Ok, so Jenny’s thing was a little more concrete, but still.

So, night-out’s were planned by both dynamic duo’s, and to make things more special, we decided to extend the night all the way until morning, just this once.

At this point, I could give you a short answer to the question of how things are going. Watch: How are things going? Well enough that we can break our rules.

Jenny and I started our open relationship more than a hand’s-full of years ago with a ton of rules regarding who we could see and when, what we could do while we were with them, how often and how detailed our check-ins with each other needed to be, and rules on physical affection so puritanical that it was more like cracking the door a bit on our relationship rather than really opening it up. We needed those rules to keep us calm, to make sure nothing went too far before we were ready, and because we’re both the type of person who tends to over-plan.

As we’ve become more comfortable with seeing other people, we’ve shed rules and pushed boundaries. The central ideas have stayed the same as rules have changed. Our relationship is the most important thing to us, but not so important that we can ignore or manipulate any other person. We went into our open relationship thinking that we could work something out that would be positive and enjoyable for everyone involved. We were totally right.

A few nights ago, I slept wrapped over a girl I’ve cared dearly for for over five years. We started the night eating a dinner she made and drinking too much of the wine I brought. We watched half a movie before we became more interested in each other. We went to bed and read, side by side, falling asleep before 10:30 and enjoying a warm night ignoring the drunks outside coming home from downtown. I woke up missing my house and my wife and with a smile on my face that hasn’t really gone away since. A few mornings before that, Jenny came home from her night with Eric. They went out for fancy dinner at a place where meals cost as much as ipods, then went back to his house for about as much sleep as a middle school sleepover. We figured a night away would give us the break we needed and give us some much-appreciated closeness with some people who really deserved it. We were totally right.

I’m writing this post on Sunday. It’s 74 degrees outside today and there’s a very fuzzy sounding spring storm on the way. It’s been almost seven months since it’s been above 70 in my state, and on the way into the grocery store this morning a cute girl smiled and said hi to me just because. To those of you who don’t live in Minnesota, I hope you have something where you’re from that feels as good as the first spring day.

All of the Chickens (fiction)

2011-03-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

I tried very hard to think something about all of the chickens.

“Euhn.” I gave the sort of non-committal/impressed/man-I’m-thinking-so-deep-right-now grunt that people give at poetry readings when someone says a word louder than other words.

I don’t know. It looked like a bunch of fucking chickens to me, but I was really trying hard. The painting is, apparently, one of the highest regarded of the collection. The museum has placed a special bench in front of it. On that bench, people ponder the chickens, the thousands and thousands of chickens, painted in tight cages and stretching back into an implied infinity. I tried very hard to care at all about chickens. I’m a vegetarian even, so I thought about being a vegetarian and the lives of factory chickens, but that did nothing, really. “Wow, it...” and I knew before I really said anything that I was going to say just enough to prove I had no idea what I’m talking about, “it feels like a city, all of them living so close to each other and so completely alone.” And christ, no it didn’t. It felt like a bunch of chickens in a pile.

She looked resigned to the bullshit of my answer and her “yeah” was a lot less than half-hearted. I failed the chickens test, and things only got worse from there.

As we moved together through different eras of paintings, and messages became more abstract, more statements of emotion of how colors interacted with and over each other, my reactions became more distant, more confused (I did say one, “felt Russian” to me, and found that the painter was born in Nebraska), until I settled on the same little-kid responses of “that’s a neat one,” and “I like how big that one is” that felt a lot like I was filling out a worksheet on a field trip. I waited for the moment when things would turn between us, when our eccentricities evolved from endearing to infuriating.

This time though, my stubborn reluctance at having one single intelligent thought about anything I saw slowly began to turn things more in my favor. Since there wasn’t a single foothold to anchor our conversation about where we were, we started talking about nearly everything in the world that wasn’t in an art museum. This gave us a chance to learn about each other, and gave me a chance that I wasn’t a complete moron, which is all that can be really asked of any first date.

Which isn’t to say that Lindsay and I didn’t know each other. In fact, the argument could be made that the main thing keeping us from real and full attraction was that we knew too much about each other. See, when people meet at their ugliest, their worst, they share that thing forever. Like soldiers at the end of war, they can look back at their time spent and say, “we will always be family, we will always have this.” So it is with Lindsay, who was my very best friend when I was a sophomore in high school and wore corduroys most days that had a patch in the crotch and when I cut my hair like I was a gay German baker from 1923. Lindsay wore nautical shirts and a jew-fro (she isn’t jewish, but there’s only two kinds of fro’s, and white people can only have one of them).

We went to college together, planning to be the sort of friends who act as aunt and uncle to each other’s children and ended up the sort of friends that never see each other’s apartments. As sophomores we went to a party together. There were plastic cups, bad beer, no food, and about two guys for every girl. We had a fun walk over, drinking off-brand whiskey and off-brand coke from a nalgene bottle. We took turns pretending to be each other six years before and yelling our current selves for our premeditated mistakes. We bounced down the sidewalks together in the safety of our last year as teens. We acted inseparable, but were careful not to touch.

At the party we made the immediate friends of 19 years old and sat around on couches discussing how everyone in the world wasn’t as smart as we were. When I talked about a generation of revolution, I spoke directly to a girl with messy hair and hemp jewelry that I had decided was the most beautiful girl in the world for the evening. Lindsay reminded me loudly of when I was a republican for four months when I was 14 (also because of a girl). From there, it was on, and neither one of us could get anything said without the other finding a way to make it funny, embarassing, or dismissing it offhand. It started playful, like teenagers teasing, and ended up angry, like teenagers teasing. Lindsay left with the first group heading back her way and didn’t stop to say goodbye. I brooded on the front steps about being ditched before I could ditch her first.

Our friendship was never easy, especially as we hung out less and less. After the night of the party, we took a break of a few months before contacting, then acted like nothing happened. We stopped inviting each other when we went out with friends, and only got together when we could be alone.

In nearly a decade, we have never learned to synch which of us is reaching for more and which is pushing for space. It felt impossible that she wasn’t constantly avoiding me, or me her. Sometimes I was. Sometimes she was. She was my very favorite friend in the world that I couldn’t count on for anything, including being my friend.

When we did get together, we competed for each other without ever letting anyone win. It’s hard to break the pattern of an immature friendship, even as both people have grown up, and ours seemed only to get worse. So, we got together every few months, happy to see each other, or too happy to see each other, and then happy to drive home and wonder what the fuck had just happened. We both made good theater of showing that we cared about each other and enjoyed each other’s company, but we always managed to ring false to each other, always managed to avoid giving any bit of ourselves up. Still, we were always friends, and when we got together, things were generally very good until they were frustratingly bad. So, it was weird to be in an art museum with here, on our very first date.

A few months ago, we were doing our re-connecting thing at a wine bar across from a movie theater. It was the kind of place with long red curtains covering exposed walls that didn’t get the memo that exposed walls looked neat in restaurants. We sat and talked about where our lives had gone and red wine and winter and black tops with v-necks and warm lights and warm smiles sort of got away from the both of us to the point that each of us forgot to be frustrating.

Somewhere in the night, our eyes had a conversation about being different people now than when we were in high school. We had grown into sexual beings and excused each other from that growth. We spent the night leading each other through all the stories we had kept to ourselves through the years. We talked about the best and worst sex of our last near-decade. We talked about the things that turned us on. She talked about things that made my ribs hurt, like how she just loved playing with cocks, hard or soft, and wished she had one in her apartment she could just take out and touch while she watched tv. That seemed like it could be arranged.

As we drank, we melted all over each other from across the table. Suddenly Lindsay was this new person, this complete mystery. When our legs touched under the table, she put her hand across my thigh, and when I didn’t immediately do the same, she grabbed my hand and put it on her leg, much higher than her hand was on mine. I could feel through her skirt a warmth that meant a lot more than wine and silly conversation. She got up to go to the bathroom, saying, rather romantically, “I need to fucking piss.” I sat at the table and stared at the maroon film at the bottom of my wine glass, wishing it had more wine in it, and wishing wine didn’t cost eight dollars a glass.

Lindsay’s mouth appeared a half a centimeter from my ear, and I could feel the air moving around her lips when she whispered “comeherecomeherecomehere,” and by the time I turned to look she was already two tables away and walking towards the bathrooms. I got up, my knees a little wobbly, not sure if she wanted to make out or show me someone’s super gross poop they left in the toilet. With Lindsay, and with that night, both seemed equally likely.

She stopped in the hallway with a broad smile on her face. “Look!” She said it like she was hiding a dinosaur egg, and so I was slightly confused when she pulled back one of the long red curtains that lined the wall along a corner to reveal “a wall?” I didn’t sound as excited as she was.

“Sh!” I was being too loud. Obviously this wall was a very special secret wall. She pointed up at the curtain rods, which curved around the corner of the wall imperfectly and it occurred to me. It was not the wall she was excited about, but the space between curtain and wall. I looked down at her to smile but she was gone, along with the wall. A hand appeared out of the curtain and pulled me inside to her discovered space. It felt a bit like a fort made of pillows, the sort of thing that transfers the most mundane spot into a little bit of magic.

It took a few moments for me to figure out what was happening and to start kissing her back, and almost instantly from there our lips sent messages to our hands and hips and legs to do what needed doing. She made great use of the small space we had, somehow still finding room to curl around me, to spin us so that her back was pressed against the corner, to wrap her leg around me, dip her head backwards and push her chest up to my lips. My hand slid up the inside of her leg, inside her thigh. Under the skirt, I could feel the heat of her pulse like her pussy was the sun.

In one smooth movement, she dipped my head down, dropped me to my knees, rested her back against the corner of the wall and wrapped her legs over my shoulders so that her feet dangled off the ground behind my back. And so, there we were. It was a delightful moment to discover that, somewhere amidst our lives and experience, Lindsay had decided she didn’t like wearing underwear. She tasted like grape suckers and grabbed my hair so hard I almost screamed. Of course, no one would have heard me because she was pushing my open lips to hard against herself no sound could escape. For minutes or moments or millennia I thought of nothing but taste and tasted nothing but touch.

In the silence of our fort we could hear glasses clinking outside and the same public radio music station on low that every other restaurant in 10 miles was playing. Murmured conversation was occasionally broken by the loud laughing of the group by the door. Occasionally, someone would walk by us to or from the bathroom, but we remained protected by a shield of expectation. No one was looking for people having sex behind the curtain, so how would they find us?

She started rocking hard against me, pushing her back against the concrete wall. I stared up at her over curves and sharply dark hair, saw her pinching and twisting her nipples through her shirt, saw her bottom lip tucked tight under her teeth. She stared back at me, hungry. She pushed my face back down to her pussy and growled at me like she owned me. I sucked in against her pussy, taking her clit between my teeth, pressing on it with the flat of my tongue. I let her own me for awhile. I gave her lips and mouth and tongue. I gave her two of my fingers, curled up, pressing opposite my tongue. I let her have the hair between her fingers, my shoulders under her thighs. I let her have to two spaces on the small of my back where her heels rested, digging in when my tongue found that just-so spot.

Her orgasm appeared like one of those summer storms that you can watch from a distance all day and still get surprised and stuck in the rain when it shows up all at once. So I learned another thing about Lindsay, there on my knees and surrounded by shushes and hiding. I learned that Lindsay, who does almost nothing her life halfway, also orgasms balls out, as it were. So I learned that going down on Lindsay meant Lindsay coming in my mouth, across my face, soaking my shirt, leaving an untidy puddle on the floor of our little curtain fort. So there I was, soaking in orgasm and sweat and satisfaction. With Lindsay’s legs clenched hard on either side of my head, I realized that my soaking was quite by design. She owned me and she knew it, her eyes told me as much, and so she could do as she wished, so screamed the corners of her smile.

Lindsay let me go just enough to get off of me, just enough for me to lean back, look down at my shirt and the dark line of wetness still traveling like troop movements past the line of my chest. “Alright,” she whispered down to me, “one more glass, then we call it a night.” We got up, snuck back out to our seats, ordered wine while my shirt dried unevenly against my skin. When our wine showed up, Lindsay wrote and slipped a note on a napkin across the table to me without breaking once from the point she was making about Minneapolis bike culture. The note, in tight but uneven cursive, “I can smell my pussy all over you. So can everybody else.” She even signed it. So, I learned a lot about Lindsay that night.

A few nights later, she called me. She said she hadn’t been to an art museum in months. “Plus,” and she sounded almost shy about it, “I think we should go on a date. A date date.” A week later, I tried hard to think something about all of the chickens.

We wound our way through the museum, through a whole section full of landscapes of farms that Lindsay “ooh’d” and “aah’d” over for twenty minutes before finally eliciting a “yeah, that one’s pretty awesome” from me, then laughing at me because she thought the farms were dumb and just wanted to see if she could get me to try to like them. This is the kind of shit we always pull on each other that always makes the wheels come off. We both love to fuck with people, and both deeply hate being fucked with. For some reason, in the art museum, it just made me laugh, and made me laugh way harder than I should have, which made us both laugh, because there’s just something that’s ridiculous about being loud in an art museum.

We spent the next half hour finding the lamest shit we could and talked loudly over other people’s conversations about all the different reasons we thought it was an absolute work of genius. We made up stuff to describe what we liked. A painting of a dutch woman was “royalish” and “showed a very blue sort of suffering.” We agreed that a landscape of what could only have been Iceland or Nebraska was “Pre-post-modern” and “linearly obscure.” We nodded a lot at each other and said, “my god, you’re so right.” We giggled our way out of three different sections of the museum until the lack of any audience made the game pointless. Apparently, everyone came to the museum for the paintings, because the whole wing of ceramics was deserted. I thought they were the coolest thing yet, but probably because I rather enjoy art that can do something, like hold coffee.

I was staring at one piece of clay something, trying to figure out if the carvings on it were of dogs with huge penises or of a very early SUV. I leaned in close, examining either the ripples of foreskin or all-terrain tire treads, when a whisper came from the next room, “comeherecomeherecomehere.” I chased the whisper lines across the room and next to her, beating the last sounds to her lips, kissing before I knew not to, because I wasn’t here for clay or chickens. “Nono,” she breathed into me without moving her lips away, “over here.”

Lindsay had found another fort. She led me to the end of the room, following the wall along a display case showing the evolution of teacups, I think. Between the case and the wall there was a space, no more than two feet deep or across, that looked like a happy accident in mis-measuring, or maybe a spot where they used to have a water fountain. She fit herself in the space, back to the wall again, and dropped down in front of me, sitting on her heels and looking up at me. “Enjoy the teacups,” she said as her lip tucked back under her teeth and her hand reached up to undo my pants.

From her knees in front of me, her hand pulled my cock into what felt like the air of a church or court or post office. Air that had never in a long life of people seen a cock before. I was all hers again, and now I felt her become completely mine as she took me deep into her mouth. I tried to practice looking like I was staring at teacups, as if there is any reason in the world why someone would need to look at a teacup for longer than four seconds, but it was no use. Instead, I looked down at Lindsay, watched her head move forward and back, felt her tongue and her lips work together, her hand trailing her lips up and down.

I felt as she gave me her mouth and hand, as she opened her throat and gave me as much as she could fit me down. She gave me a cough and she choked on me, and held her head there, slowly easing me further and further until she pulled me all the way out, her spit stringing from the head of my cock to her lips. She started again with just her hand, wrapping it around the end of me while she moved it up and back down. She sunk herself further down, moving her face under me and staring up at me with the same hungry look she had when she was just about to soak my face and shirt in the wine bar. A barely audible “yesyesyes” was tingling up from her lips and around my cock.

I thought about maybe just coming on the wall, which would be gross but also sort of naughty and certainly one of our very few options. I thought also about coming on her cleavage, letting it run between her chest and down her stomach, a little payback for my little present a few nights prior. But no. She was going to give herself to me and mark herself as mine. She kept her face just under me as her hand brought me to orgasm. She smiled and her “yesyesyes” transformed to a low-grown “hrrrrrrrm” as I came across the side of her face.

She stood, my come dripping down her jaw along her neck, covering her lips and a good part of one cheek. She admired herself in the glass of the display case and said, “you’ve done very well” like she was congratulating me on a well-baked loaf of bread, “now you’re going to hold my hand while we look at a few more paintings.” We walked, each leading and following the other, back to the chickens.

Does "Committed Monogamous Relationship" Work?

2011-01-29T16:58:00.000-08:00

Hi. I wrote this angry. I’m not sure if, like driving or masturbating, it was a bad idea to do so. A friend shared this article (Do Friend’s With Benefits” Work?) from Salon.com’s sex page. I have already written about Friend’s With Benefits relationships and why dumb people are doing them poorly. (Why Your “Friends With Benefits” Relationships Keep Blowing up in Your Face) on SexIsFun.net (I originally titled it “How you are fucking up your Friends With Benefits Relationship.” Really, something about this topic makes me irrational.

The Salon article highlights a number of casual sexual relationships in which one partner is lying to another about their intent, their needs, or their emotions surrounding the relationship. Predictably enough, the relationships did not end well, you know, because they were casual.

Does “Committed Monogamous Relationship” work?

As monogamy has gotten five generations of the Hollywood Treatment, I’m not alone in seeing them suck in the real world.

Movies, forever and always, seem to reflect less a reality about human instincts and happiness and more an easily digested concept or a skewed version of what a healthy relationship really is. In every movie made before 1997 (this is fact, I checked), all the work done in a relationship done by a film’s protaganist is done finding the perfect person, or in committing three felony-level stalking offences in the name of romance. Once the two people get together (and the fifty-year-old woman with the perm and red bead necklace sitting in front of you in the theater gets the chance to lean to the woman next to her and whisper, “I knew it”), a sigh of deepest relief is breathed and a real or implied “happily ever after” is delivered to the audience to be devoured with their “not a lot... but more than that" fake buttered popcorn. So, now that the kids who grew up watching Disney’s The Beast domestically assault Disney’s “The Beauty” into marrying him, it’s time to ask the question: Does it work?

For some, sure. Chad, a 28-year-old gay guy living in... oh wait. He’s not allowed.

For some who have been legally deemed capable of committed partnerships, sure. My great-grandparents, for one, successfully (so far as I know) maintained a single, committed relationship from the time of their late-teens to their 90’s. They died within two days of each other and had a joint funeral, only a few weeks after celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary, and 75 years of walking to the mailbox together, every day, holding hands. They lived the fairy-tale. However, given that in German-Catholic Wisconsin culture placed such an emphasis on no-escape-baby-factory marriage, it was just more feasible, especially in largely rural areas where small children’s hands were constantly needed to fix delicate farm machinery. The couple, however, always maintained on strict boundary: no sex for fun. With all the procreating and raising of offspring going on, it was deemed that sex just for pleasure’s sake would add undo stress on the couple. It would just be too tiring.

No doubt. By the time your number of kids hits double digits, sex has to be just another chore to be fit between feeding chickens and scraping mud from the tracks of your work boots. When you talk to people who have been there and done that-- and even those who are continuing to engage in long-term monogamous relationships-- the response is overwhelmingly negative. As my own father told me when I was about six, “getting married was the largest mistake I’ve ever made, and I’ve made a lot of big mistakes.” Sure, I’m married now, and was even monogamous for the first five year of mine and Jenny’s relationship. I got married just a few months after my father’s cancer death, and now there’s even talk of a kid or two. There’s something comforting about the thought of procreating when faced with the reality of death. When you’re in a crisis of your own finality, there’s something comforting about someone who would have to go through a whole heck of a lot of paper work before they got to leave you to your panic attacks. Of course, when the married couple both rather proudly refer to themselves as “sluts” and invite their boy-and-girl-friends to the wedding -- there’s no ambiguity there.

Except in a lot of marriages, there is. My friend Mark, in his late twenties and married to Jen, has never for a moment intended on staying monogamous during his marriage. He believes that his wife and him have “an unspoken agreement,” based on a conversation in which she said, “If you ever cheat on me, I’d rather not know about it.” So, Mark cheats, Jen doesn’t know (except that she probably does), though Mark is very happy coming home, seeing artsy black and white wedding pictures on the wall, curling their sweat-pants-clad bodies pressed against each other on the couch on a Wednesday night -- their first names pressed together in conversation like they were conjoined twins. He realized he likes the idea of being married. Jen enjoys presenting the two of them as a team and maintaining their joint Facebook profile and constantly writing status updates about how “perfect” their relationship is, though everyone and the moon knows she’s lying.

As with any human relationship, there is deception of self and other, there are fantasies that go un-explored and emotions that much be avoided. (Yikes, I sound cynical. Oh, wait, I am cynical! There is no law of land or human condition that dictates that relationships be based on lies and deception. Yikes!) Mark tells me he really wants to have sex with lots of people, but can’t talk to his wife because, “it would get really dramatic.”

Of course, Mark’s marriage is far from unique and these long-term relationships are hardly new: I’m living proof, seeing as in the mid 70’s my parents felt obliged to settle down and have kids right out of college and ended up with four kids and all-encompassing distrust of people for the rest of their lives.

I could give you ten more examples of people in long-term-committed relationships -- I could use them all as proof that the structure of their relationship, colored with their drinking, working, or emotional state was at fault for their collapse --- and not their common denominator: lying. I could use lots of dashes and colons too. I could wrap everything up in a neat little bow at the end with a short shoulder-shrug “but I guess it works sometimes, right?” I could give you as examples a “gay guy” who pulls it off, you know, because he’s gay and that’s what gay guys do, and a couple that was monogamous until things got complicated and they started dating other people (oh wait, that’s me). I could keep trying to tear this article apart because relationship articles almost always bug the shit out of me, and because I live in an age of writers and commentators where it’s more important to be witty than right, and where a piece of a story is always easier to digest than the complexity of human relations. Well, if simple is what we like, simple I can do.

Let’s be honest here. Seriously... that’s it. Monogamous or not, casual or committed, let’s just be honest here. No one needs anyone (and me least of all) to tell them if something will or won’t work for them, or if something is right or wrong. Be honest to yourself, be honest to everyone involved. That’s it -- and don’t tell me honesty is too hard. Honest is the easiest option that works.

Sort of Beauty

2011-01-22T10:09:00.001-08:00

She has the sort of beauty that is destined for great wedding pictures. Her face is broad and dark and defined, like planets are, with freckles for the black and whites. She will, on her wedding day, whenever that is, make people hold their breath and coo and fold their napkins in anxious jealousy, and on that day she will look perfect. On every day that is not her wedding day, she looks a little like an alien with a rough idea of what it means to look human. She’s still beautiful, of course. I’m just sayin’.

She’s the sort of person that is fun for an hour before all the little things she does that say “me! me! me!” form enough of a pattern to look pathological. When she leaves, it hurts, and you only think about her, her, her for the next few days. If that’s not bad enough, she always talks about women’s bodies like she wants to fuck every piece of them, but has never kissed a girl.

She won’t kiss me at my house because it’s too mine, or her house because it’s too home. We don’t kiss in the car because it’s too high school, or in hotels because it’s too porny. We find our spots one at a time and never repeat. We find our spots fewer and farther between these days.

There was a time we went for a walk in the state park, taking advantage of an 80 degree day before mosquitoes came out. We found one of those small brick buildings, the ones with three walls and half a ceiling, the ones that did something sixty years ago and in twenty years will look like ancient ruins. Like all times, I didn’t see it coming, which I think now is kinda the point. We kissed with my back against a sort-of wall while I touched her, my hand slid down the front of tight jeans, my wrist screaming for blood, please, but not wanting to risk an end to touching until she came, biting my shoulder hard enough to bruise.

We kissed once in a church because a friend was getting married and because neither of us ever had. Both atheists and sinners and cynics, we kissed for five minutes before we felt too guilty to continue. There’s just something wrong about killing other people’s sacred cows that isn’t very fun.

We saw the Beastie Boys once, who fit in the club they were booked in like I fit into my t-shirts from high school. She fit herself in front of me in the crowd and we did that grinding concert thing that always feels like an obvious message until you realize that there’s nowhere else to go but then there was a hand on my leg just then but then that could’ve been an accident only I swear she’s pushing her ass back against me and if she can’t feel my erection than she gets way more wrapped in music than me which could totally be the case. But then she was rubbing me over my pants and then pulling me from my pants and one hand behind her back she was jacking me off in the middle of the concert and I was touching her over wool skirt and she came and then I did and she did this thing where she wrapped her hand just perfect over me until I was done and then pulled it back in front of her and after a moment or so held her hand up, palm facing me, perfectly clean and filthy and proud. It was a night with a lot of run-on sentences and very little punctuation.

I took her once to the art museum in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. We both called in sick to work just to spend the day together. The whole place was empty and majestic and felt like a festival twenty minutes before it opens. We looked at art for a few hours. I fell in love with a portrait of a Russian poet, she found a strange connection with tea-cups and couldn’t stop going back to stand in front of the giant display of them and listen, which was really cute, you know, at first. That was all that happened that day.

She talked me into a New Year’s Eve party just a few weeks ago, saying that only people with kids were allowed to stay home on New Year’s Eve like it was a law of the universe that everyone knew. I said I hated going out for it, because I do, because my dad hated it and so I have to hate it for him now, which is totally a law of the universe that everyone knows. She hadn’t heard that one, but I think she felt a little bad. About midway into the planned drinking of the night, and still hours away from the unplanned drinking, she went out to smoke on a back porch. I went with her because we’re old enough now that almost no one smokes anymore, and we sat out there and talked and drank more until there was kissing and cold hands under inadequate clothes and then she was straddling me on some-one's porch furniture and pulling her underwear aside and we fucked slow and quiet while we heard discussions float through walls about people we didn’t know and how they had stopped dating other people we didn’t know.

We texted the morning after that but didn’t mention the sex because that was a total rule of the universe that we both understood. We said we’d see each other soon, but I can’t figure out where, though I’ve been keeping my eye out for bars with deep booths and stores with changing room doors that go all the way to the floor.

Doppleganger

2011-01-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

I can’t figure out how to start telling you this story. I could start at getting my ass kicked, which is where I keep trying to start, because it seems like the most interesting part. I could say, “once I got past the shock of being in such intense pain nearly everywhere in my body, the experience of getting my ass kicked was really just very awkward.” I keep trying to start there, and I keep failing. I could start with some dirty sex, because the story has lots of that, but without any context, that’s just porn is besides the point. Plus, the sex parts are the parts that make me the most uncomfortable. I should probably start with telling you that Steve is the most important person in my life I’ve never met. I should probably go on to tell you why that is the case.

Ok. Breath. Steve is the most important person in my life I’ve never met. He’s nearly exactly my same age, height, build, hair color, type, and, often, hair style. He tends to wear his beard in a goatee, which I only did to myself once and found repellent. Steve is my doppleganger, a nearly-perfect replica of myself in appearance, but in appearance only. This is to say that over the past four years of being mis-identified as Steve and hearing many stories relayed to me about him, I have learned that Steve is a complete asshole in ways that often get me dirty looks from complete strangers. Steve is not a fun doppleganger.

If you drew our lives as a Venn diagram, it would look like a doodle of big boobs in the notebook margins of a fifth grader, or in the margins of the notebook I am writing currently. There is a thin sliver of overlap that includes places like the post office, DMV, and about thirty-odd women that Steve has slept with, lied to, and screwed over. Those women belong in my life too, but only because they found me, thinking I was Steve, and inserted themselves in what was almost always an inopportune moment to be yelled at about sex I never had, lies I never told, or promises I never made.

Steve is an important person in my life because purely by the way he is living his, he is upsetting mine. I’ve never met Steve, but I have to imagine he hears about me about as often as I hear about him. I wonder what he hears about me.

See, I don’t have all that much going on. I have a job in an open office where most people have action figures on their desks and spreadsheets on their screens. If anyone ever asked me, “what happened at work today?,” I wouldn’t know how to answer them. No one ever asks me what happened at work today though, because I live alone and spend a lot of my time eating cereal out of giant mixing bowls, playing video games, and consuming porn like it was a food group at the bottom of the pyramid. In other words, I live close to the life I dearly hoped for when I was 12 years old, though I sometimes wonder just how proud that 12 year old would be.

Of course, when I was 12, I had a whole troop of friends I would hang out with. We watched the movie “Demolition Man” almost every weekend, ate Pixie Stix until our throats bled and talked about which girls in our grade had grown boobs over the summer. As late as a few years ago I still had something like that, a group of friends that made the only questions on weekend nights “where” and “what.” Those friends have moved or married or have continued character traits that made them wild or interesting in their twenties, but a little sad or crazy as thirty-somethings. If I have a best friend these days, it’s my ex Lauren, who has been my ex about 10 times longer than we were dating. I see Lauren about once every other month.

On second though, maybe Steve doesn’t hear about me all that often. Maybe Steve doesn’t know he has a doppleganger. I seem to end up thinking about it a lot.

By now, perhaps, you’re wishing I would get on with getting my ass kicked, but that’s going to come a little bit later. First, I have to admit to some really terrible things I’ve done, and maybe you won’t mind as much that I got my ass kicked. All I can say in my defense is that, even though he wasn’t actually involved, everything was Steve’s fault.

Big breath. Ok.

There are nights when a few drinks becomes a few more, and one of your friends isn’t going to finish their whiskey, and you decide you shouldn’t finish yours either, so you sit to sober up and talk for a half hour, only somehow after the half hour is up, you’ve personally finished both drinks and ordered another because, fuck it, why not? In other words, there are nights when you go out for a drink, and nights you end up with a drunk. So, somehow, without remembering it getting really dark out, and forgetting to watch most of the game you went out to the bar to watch, you know you aren’t driving yourself home that night because finding your car by yourself seems more than dicey.

So maybe I have those nights sometimes. So maybe you have a number in your head of how many nights like those are acceptable over a given time period. So maybe I have those nights at least double the number that’s in your head. Steve and I have this in common. We both drink more than you think we should.

So it was that I was feeling drunk and the kind of dizzy that doesn’t effect balance, but makes you feel you could stumble and fall out of time or self or sanity. I was in a bar with big tv’s and lots of dark boards and by far the least attractive clientele of any bar that doesn’t have the word “country” in its name. I was playing darts with my friends, somehow better when stumbly than when sober, and struck up a conversation with the group of girls playing next to us. I introduced myself as Steve.

So, you see where this is going.

I hit on one of the girls in a way I would never hit on girls at a bar. In fact, there is no way I would normally hit on girls at a bar. I hate how no matter what you say, you’re essentially saying, “I think you’re attractive enough that I’m going to risk embarrassment for the chance to have sex with you.” Steve picks up girls from bars all the time though, and on a slow, concentrated walk from dart board to table, sizing up the group of three girls next to us and deciding that I very much wanted fucking that night, and wondered how Steve did it. I said hello, and they said hey, and the girl in the pink or orange shirty thing pretty much took it from there.

She talked about herself and I laughed very loudly at things. I said things like, “man, that just seems like such an important thing to study,” and “my night was boring until you showed up,” and “I just feel such a connection with you.” I felt like she knew I was lying, and figured she was lying when she said, “you’re just so funny,” and “can you show me how to throw a dart right?” and “I think skinny men are gross.” Our friends retreated to their tables and left us standing by the dart board around a tiny tall table. We talked until they started to leave, waving at us from far away down a fuzzy tunnel and leaving us to each other.

Here, we cut to candles burning down, the camera pans of a living room full with empties, a floor full of the wreckage of two drunks undressing one another.

We did not have sex worthy of flowery language and long description. We kissed until I grabbed a breast, did that until I slid a hand down her pants, we fucked before the drunk wore off or our brains clicked black. We finished when we were done, not particularly satisfied or pleasured, but done with the ritual of the thing that started when I said hello. It was obvious to us both that we were lying when we said, “that was amazing.”

She fell asleep before I did, and I decided I’d be more comfortable at home. I found my pants and one of my socks. On my way out, I found a marker but no paper, so I wrote on the door of her refrigerator “Call me. - Steve.” I left no number, one sock, and a mess on her stomach she fell asleep before cleaning.

If you’ve never had a whiskey-and-being-an-asshole hangover, I do not recommend it. I spent most of the next day with a pit in my stomach that felt somehow spikey and gooey at the same time. I threw up after breakfast, almost immediately after realized I had fulfilled the role of cliche asshole super-villain that I didn’t remember the girl’s name, or where she lived, or really what she looked like.

I swore never again’s all that week, and again the next weekend, after walking home at three in morning from the house of some other (or maybe even the same?) girl. She had sucked my dick on the couch while her roomates were asleep in their rooms. When she asked me to return the favor, I said, “I’d better not,” and acted worried about waking someone up.

I hated being Steve. Steve is a complete asshole, and I am not. I decided the next morning, after sneaking back to my car, that I was going to let Steve be the only Steve around. I decided to let it be known to friends that I was looking for a girlfriend a “for real” girlfriend this time.

A week later, I met Mona through an ex girlfriend. The universe does seem to provide for things when you ask for them. Mona and my ex worked together at a hospital, they were the two “fun” ones working night shifts until they get enough seniority to live lives that approach normal. My ex from forever ago, Lauren, thought we’d be a good match, “she’d be good for you,” she told me, while setting up a lunch date. I met Mona in the middle of a weekday in a nearly empty restaurant far enough on the edge of downtown that parking was free, near enough that the menu had words I didn’t know.

Mona and I started seeing each other a few times a week for a few weeks without ever really giving each other a reason not to, so I guess we were dating. I hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since college, and she her last boyfriend had a breakup that made her cut her hair short and stop going out to bars. Our friends were happy. Our friends were holding us together from each side, telling us over and over again how great it was and how much fun we were having. Our friends mostly are married and have kids and have moved to the suburbs. I tried to adjust my definition of “fun” to meet theirs. After two months, the best (and maybe worst) thing that could be said about us is that we were very comfortable with one another. Well, comfortable with each other as long as we were at least a mile away from anything that may accidentally result in orgasm.

The first time Mona and I failed at sex, we had strayed towards it the way that when you’re not paying attention, you’ll sometimes drive to an old apartment or job. Our hands wandered on autopilot to undo each other’s pants and remove each other’s shirts, and much like when you find yourself pulling into your old driveway, we found ourselves staring blankly for a moment before turning around and driving away. We were watching a sitcom with a laugh track while sitting on her couch and made out during commercial breaks until we stopped stopping when the show came back on. When we stopped for too long, Mona decided it would be a fun time to make cookies. It was the first time since I was in high school that I was hard, the girl was wet, we were in states of undress, and nothing, really nothing, happened.

Things moved slowly and backwards from there. An evening of flirty touches and long kisses finally netted me three solid minutes of nipple play. One time, while making out on her couch again, she touched me over my pants, though she withdrew her hand quickly when she felt how hard I was. When I touched her, my hand was allowed to linger slightly longer, but then hips were shifted for more kissing.

This isn’t to say that I was upset or unhappy with Mona. We had a good enough time when we were together, and sex with Mona became a quest, something I would spend hours each day fantasizing about and strategizing for. I imagined that when given just a teeny bit more space to showcase my skills, the whole wall blocking intercourse would come tumbling down in a flurry of panicked pleasure. Two more months later, the wall was still up, and I started to sit on her couch and wish that I was home playing video games or jacking off.

I convinced myself I just needed a little fun, that since I wasn’t having sex with Mona, I should be allowed to go have some sex with some someone. I started going out to bars again. I invented a “big project” at work that had me working nights and being “so super super tired,” that I couldn’t hang out. The first two nights I went out, I went out as me, and struck out completely. So, I went out and bought a two hundred dollar button up shirt that seemed like the sort of thing Steve would wear. I wore it to places it seemed like Steve would go.

On the third night, a Thursday night, I went out as Steve and talked to a very drunk girl that had strayed from a bachelorette party the way an elk strays from the herd just before being eaten. I told her she looked amazing, and that I never go out to bars but I was just feeling so stuck in the total rut of my life, you know, and thought maybe I’d go somewhere new and hope something amazing happened, something that totally took me out of my life, proved to me that life still had magic and spontaneity to it. She said, “what?” because she couldn’t really hear because the bar was so loud. I said, “it’s loud, can we talk somewhere?” “Like where?” “Let’s take a walk up and down the street.” It was the sort of ridiculous suggestion that makes sense when you’re out trying to force something special to happen.

We made it halfway down one street, having shared first names (Steve and Something with an L in it) and what we do’s before we were sucking face against the brick wall of a closed art supply store. There were people around, but everyone else was anonymously drunk and the night seemed darker when we were out in it. I slipped my hand between her legs, up her bar-night skirt. She bit my shoulder while she rubbed against me, jacking off on my hand and getting off in a rather unrealistic minute and change. She stopped biting my shoulder, started biting her bottom lip.

She pulled me into the shallow doorway of the store, giving us about a tenth more cover than we had while we were in plain sight, squatted in front of me and sucked my cock with proficiency, enthusiasm, and with a robot-like lack of emotion. When it was obvious I was about to cum, she pulled away and jacked me off onto the concrete step in front of the door.

She asked me to come back to her place “for some more,” and I said “absolutely, just let me go get my card from the bartender.” She waited for me at the front door while I walked through the bar and out the back. I called Mona on the way home, saying I was done with work, asking if she wanted some company. I shed Steve at her front door and slept soundly in the pajamas she bought for me to keep at her place. She said, “I love it when we just cuddle.” I said, “me too.”

So I can tell you now about getting the shit kicked out of me, because now you can see the sort of spiral I was heading down.

It was a Tuesday night, and I was in the sort of bar that’s full on Tuesday nights, and has a line outside on weekend nights, and is lousy with guys wearing that one shirt they own for going out and trying to get laid and with the girls willing to settle for those guys. I had been there every Tuesday for a month, and on Wednesday mornings would drive by it on my way to work and wonder what kind of assholes went to that bar.

It was a Tuesday night, and I was in that bar, and I was pounding vodka-tonics and patting people on the back as we walked by each other. I finger-gunned the bartender when he gave me a good pour. I nodded at girls across the room who were sitting with other guys. I was a complete spectacle, nearly unnoticed in a sea of people acting even more douchey than me.

As the noise got louder in the bar and in my head, I was approached, finally, by a girl in clothes that seemed to imply sex in multiple different positions. She said, “Steve?” I said, “you know it,” which she apparently did. She said, “remember me?” I said, “you think I dont?” though I obviously didn’t. She said, “fuck this place,” and I said, “yeah, fuck this place,” and we left.

I drove, slowly and poorly, following her directions. She spent the drive talking little, but typing away on the keyboard of her phone. She was arranging my ass-kicking. I was staring at her legs and wondering if she’d let me cum on her face.

We got to her place and she said, “you sure you remember me?” I said, “this is going to be fun,” which wasn’t an answer to her question, but maybe could have been. She said, “this is going to be super fun,” and I reached for her and she moved away. She said, “upstairs,” like she was a Bond girl and I was fucking idiot who would fall for her trap. I was a fucking idiot, fully falling for her trap, not reading the billboard of intention obvious in her tone and body language. Not once questioning how this girl had been with Steve and wanted to be again, since Steve was such an asshole (and I am not).

We walked into her place and I collapsed on the couch, feet on the armrest, arms behind my head. In my head, I looked pretty cool and confident, and really felt so. I was about to have some good, self-serving sex, which is always great while in the anticipatory stage, though goes downhill slowly and then sharply from there. She walked into one of the back rooms and came out with a guy. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. He asked, “this him?” and I wondered who else I would be. I said, cheerfully, before she could, “I’m him!”

He walked over and decked me across the temple right as I sat up. I fell back down to the couch instantly and he continued to punch me. I felt my lip split open and tried to roll myself over to protect myself, to get away, but there was nowhere to roll. My legs hit the ground but my torso rolled into his legs. He hit me hard in the back of the head before he let me fall to the ground, then he kicked me hard in the ribs repeatedly.

The first thought in my head, and I was only vaguely aware at the time of its odd phrasing, was “Ow! Violence!” The second thought was, “I wish there was music.”

This is where we get to the part about how getting your ass kicked is an incredibly awkward thing. See, we were in this random fucking apartment, and I was in intense pain, which was being caused by the actions of a guy that I never really even got a good look at. I was grunting in a way that sounded a bit like I was having an orgasm and a bit like I was having a baby. It was a very intimate, very vulnerable experience to share with two strangers. It was also very quiet except for the sound of my being hit (which were duller, more quiet, than the sounds of movie violence) and the sounds of my continued expressed pain (which, I have to say, I did a very good job of describing already). So, it was quiet, oddly so, while this guy essentially broke me apart piece by piece.

The actual beating was only the beginning of the oddness. An anonymous asskicking, much like an anonymous fuck, can last only as long as the actor’s impulse for the action. There is no personal attachment, no social repercussions for a lack of longevity. An asskicking is also a little bit like mayonnaise, as a little bit goes a long way. So it was really only minutes since I was laying comfortably on the couch, and now I was on the ground and the dude was standing over me, and the girl was standing in the doorway of the room, and no one knew what to do next.

This is the part where we would have cut to the next scene, if we could have, but we couldn’t.

They let me lay there for awhile, crying into the carpet of their living room floor. I did not want to cry, but had no choice. It felt like my face had fallen off, and like my ribs were sticking into my heart and liver and spleen. When I was in grade school, an older boy kicked the door of the bathroom stall I was in. The door swung and hit me in the head and knocked me back, pants around my ankles, into the toilet. For a few minutes on the floor, I was that boy sitting in the toilet, crying while the older boys laughed at the sight of my penis while a bump grew on my forehead.

I tried to memorize and forget the colors and patterns of the carpet inches from my eye. They stood and watched me for awhile, and I thought about what it must be like sometimes after they yell “cut” while filming fucked up porn. They walked into the kitchen for a few minutes, shouting whispers at each other for a few minutes before coming back in. “Dude,” the dude said, “get out.”

I thought about telling them that I wasn’t Steve, but it seemed a little late for that. I got myself up and down the stairs. I crumpled into the front seat of my car and broke down crying. I fell almost completely into myself and sat with my head against the steering wheel, sobbing and snotting down it, threatening to become a broken black hole of humanity. Ow. Violence. I sat like that, crying with pain and violation and shock and embarrassment for some time. I was startled back into the world by voices behind me. Dude and Girl were walked down the street, holding hands, coming towards my car. I reached up and locked the door, tried to disappear into my seat. The walked by and pretended not to see me, looking hard to their right in the long moments they too to pass my window. I felt like I had been caught masturbating and almost apologized.

I drove Steve home, forced some advil and some more whiskey into him, and put him to bed.

I woke up in the sort of angry darkness and sourceless noise that makes me feel insane, makes me feel like screaming or running or falling down and covering my head. It took almost a minute before I shook myself from the mostly-sleep into half-sleep and could makes sense of things. My phone was buzzing and must have been for at least an hour. When I picked it up, it said I had missed 14 phone calls.

Someone banged on the door to my apartment. Somewhere in my brain, I registered that someone had been banging on the door to my apartment for a long time. I dragged myself to the door and opened it to Mona.

We were going to the orchard that day with some of her friends. Oh yeah.

She looked angry when she opened the door, but only for the half of a half a second it took for her to register what was left of my face. Mona screamed. I pulled her into my apartment so she wouldn’t scream in the hallway. Halfway to the couch I realized that her screaming was actually words coming so quickly and loudly they were nearly impossible to process. I gathered that she wanted to call the police, take me to a hospital, find out what happened, and call her friends to say she wasn’t going to make it, and wanted to do all of those things at once. She was pulled in too many directions at once, and so did nothing. She sat on the couch and kept screaming until I said, “it’s fine,” and she believed me enough to sit quietly.

I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. I stared at her, but she couldn’t look at me. I got bored just staring at her, so I told her she had to go. She stood and left without saying anything, without looking me in the eye. I went and looked at my swollen face in the mirror, but it was hard to see anything at all, so I went back to bed. I knew I should probably go to the hospital, have someone look me over to tell me what was wrong, but it seemed embarrassing, intrusive to do so. Besides, all of my bruises and cracks and splits belonged to Steve, and I didn’t want to think about Steve anymore.

Over the next few days, I spent most of my time in my bed, feeling each heartbeat stab blood through my face and around my ribs. I wrapped myself in blankets, attached myself to a comforting routine of eating, sleeping, and concentrating hard on not thinking about anything. Mona never called back. I didn’t called her. I wasn’t Mona’s boyfriend, and never should have been.

When I emerged from my comforter and denial cocoon, I stood in front of the mirror again. New skin, bright pink and angry looking, was stretched across most of my injuries. It took a moment, standing there, to recognize myself under the damage, under Steve’s damage. I stared for a long time at the face emerging in the mirror. I stared at my own eyes, surrounded by that sickly yellow skin of healing bruises. I understood. I dressed quickly, grabbed my keys and my wallet on my way out of my apartment. I understood that it was time to find Steve.

It was dark when I left the house, which was lucky. I have no idea where Steve may be during the day, but I get the feeling he’s almost always out drinking at night. I started at the inner ring of hell, deciding to move outwards from there until I found him. The inner ring of hell, I should say, is my single least favorite bar in the city. There are peanut shells on the floor everywhere, but is full of people too skinny to look as if they’ve eaten them. I’ve stayed away from this bar, even on my nights as Steve, because it’s plainly just over my head when it comes to asshole skills. I’ve been forced there on numerous social obligations and it has always, always ended poorly.

I made it into the bar with no trouble, but felt instantly afraid. This really, really, isn’t my kind of place. They sell more Red Bull than beer, charge more for cigarettes than a prison, and facilitate more obligation sex than prom night. I once almost got in a fight just walking past it. I was walking home from a late movie and there was a whole string of guys filling the sidewalk. “Excuse me,” I said, “I’ve gotta go somewhere here,” meaning, like, hey, one of you should fucking move. One of the guys looked at me and said, “yeah, you fucking better.” I walked around on the street and he stared at me the whole way. This is completely normal behavior in a bar that is more survival than societal. I didn’t even really stand out while I was there. Most of the guys looked like they had been fighting recently.

Steve was there, in the corner, and unmistakable. He looked almost exactly sort of like me, or like how I looked a month ago. He was at a table with three or four other guys, all with those sorts of shirts on, all with creative facial hair and silver necklaces. They were actively and obviously comparing each girl there to every other girl there, and describing to each other in detail what they would do with each or all of them. They radiated the exact sort of broken and aggressive male sexuality I had jumped head first into when I started introducing myself as Steve.

I stood against a wall and watched him. No one watched me. The guys were only interested in guys as potential competitors, and my filth and face excluded me there. The girls were only interested in the guys that were looking interested, and I was not. I was there for Steve, and I stood there, leaning against the same “vintage” Guiness posters that hang in every bar for boys in America, and waited. When Steve got up and went to the bathroom, his friends didn't even look up. I followed.

While I wove through the crowd of hormones and bad intentions, focused on the back of Steve’s head, I thought of what I could say to him. I thought of telling him about getting my ass kicked. He would say something like, “yeah, that was probably Anna, she was fucking pissed,” and I would say, “I got my ass kicked because of you,” and he would laugh and say, “that’s fucking awesome.” Or maybe I would just tell him about how he was my doppleganger, maybe start by telling him how he was the most important person in my life I had never met, but it seemed setting myself up for a bad reaction to follow Steve into a bathroom and tell him how important he was to me.

Instead of all that, I walked into the bathroom just behind him, followed him to the urinals, waited for him to undo his pants, and then hit him hard in the back of the head. He made a grunting noise as he fell, just after his head hit the porcelain top of the urinal with a dull thud. He started to raise his hands as he fell to his knees, but I was quick enough to get around them, to punch him again just to the side of his eye, and again with a punch that was meant for his nose but hit his jaw as his head jerked away.

The sudden violence sucked the noise from the room. The three or four guys who were in the bathroom with us all moved away. They looked scared, but none ran for help or to help. The stood back and watched as I flailed away at Steve as he desperately worked to stay steady long enough to scream, to cry, to fight back, or to flee. I kept the punches coming quickly, not giving him the opportunity to do anything but get hit. I kept the punches coming as his head fell against the tile of the bathroom, as my knuckles crunched against the bones of his face, as his blood covered my hands and the floor around him. I was screaming loudly words that I did not understand.

This wasn’t the ass kicking he deserved. This was the exorcism I needed.

I left the bathroom and then the bar without being noticed, without being followed. I drove home with blood on my hands and down the front of my shirt. I cleaned myself up, showered for the first time in a week or more, letting the water sting the tender skin of new wounds on my face, the broken skin on my hands, until I felt completely clean. I laid naked on my bed, waiting for sleep. I thought about the next day and the next day, wondered where I might go out that I could meet someone nice.

Me and Jay-Z

2010-11-27T16:10:00.001-08:00

Fire falls around me, little tennis-ball sized angry things, exploding along the fence, across the yard. They explode on the faceless bodies of those following me, my fellow survivors in some post-apocalyptic world. We shrug off the burning dead, we are ashen-faced and the randomness of death and horrible things is no longer worth comment. The fire streaks through the sky as far as can be seen, and is more beautiful than the end of world I had always imagined.

The ground beneath my boots is melting rock, rivers of sizzling earth. As I walk, it hardens, cools, and by the time I reach the street, I am sloshing my way through snow and slush along the back of my car.

As I drive down the street, I listen to Jay-Z and think about the time that he and I did a concert together in Minneapolis. It was at First Avenue, and was packed wall to wall the moment he made the surprise introduction of his favorite writing partner. No, actually, it was at the Varsity near the U, with a smaller crowd of people in the know. Actually, yes, for real this time, it was at the Dakota downtown, was highly secret and invite only. All of my friends and, inexplicably, two of my enemies, were there when he announced that I had been writing for him all these years and we performed all of his songs together, switching verse-for-verse, and sometimes line-for-line (so that I didn’t have to say the N-word), and sounding a bit like the Beastie Boys used to (with not a small amount of influence from me, I’m sure they’d admit).

In the audience was that girl from work, that one with the tits that make her t-shirt do that thing, and that has been secretly sure that I was capable of more beauty and more power than she had seen me achieve in my day to day stuff, and now she was sure, was so sure. She’s in the car with me too, but not talking about that day downtown. Instead, she is performing for me, some balance we have struck without speaking that we do not touch, can never touch, but when we carpool in my car with the dark windows, she unbuttons shirts and slides up skirts. She touches herself slowly, deliberately, keeping conversation going until she can’t talk without moaning. She always orgasms as we pull into the parking lot at work, sits there shuddering and groaning with pleasure as too-tired coworkers walk by unaware with their coffee in hand.

On the night of the concert we threw the no-touching rule out the window along with a large bag of the anxiety I would feel while having sex in a public place. She met me backstage in the sort of non-descript black room with three years of long-played show-posters covering each other on the wall that one finds in backstages. Her fingers tore those posters down, ripping them in half as she pulled herself against me against the wall as we finally kissed after years and years of so dearly wanting to. She wore a dark gray wool skirt that slid easily up her leg and she came with my fingers inside of her, my teeth on her neck, my hand pulling her head back against the wall by her hair.

Jay-Z had gone home by then, I guess.

Of course, life isn’t all concerts with Jay-Z and adventurous non-touchy sex with co-workers. I also need to juggle my profound talents for magic and Jedi-style mind powers with my sense of decency, especially while dealing with women. Once I was sitting at that brewpub in Uptown with crappy beer and worse food, and though my waitress may have been that one that wears the hats and plays with the bouncy balls and is conscious and exacting about looking and acting like that girl that guys dream about, and though it would have been too easy for me to get inside her mind and make her do whatever I want (and most likely in the hallway with the bathroom doors where there’s this other door that I’m sure is just there for hooking up). I could have also gently nudged her towards me in her mind, make her feel turned on whenever I’m talking or something like that. My own personal jury is out on whether that would be really ok. It’d be better if she just smiled at me all by herself, which she has done many times, before pulling me into the secret make-out room in the back, which she has done just as often, or to her apartment nearby, or to the backseat of my car, where she straddles me and bounces up and down on my cock with windows cracked open to let in the summer night.

By the time I’m home, my coworker has disappeared, so I’m heading in alone, which of course means terrorists. They are always around the house when I’m home alone, so I walk stealthily from room to room, my pistol pointed down, but ready. Jack Bauer-style, I eliminate them from the house, room by room, as they die spectacular deaths through windows, crashing over tables, and a constant look of “we should have known better to attack him” stamped coldly on their faces. As I pass through the kitchen, I see my neighbor outside raking leaves. The terrorists are gone then, and I don’t need to be holding my gun out in front of me, so I act like I wasn’t. No need to cause undue alarm. My neighbor is in her thirties and has lines on the corner of her mouth that tell all about how she was a girl that stopped every party, turned every head, had all the fun before the house and the kids and the jobs. Her eyes always answer that they love life now, but wouldn't mind a weekend vacation to crazier times.

As I sit to enjoy an after-work drink of Jameson and three ice cubes, and just as I’m about to divide my recent lottery winnings in my head between family members, creative projects, and neat red-brick buildings around town I plan to buy, there’s a knock at the door. It’s my neighbor, with bits of dirt on her forehead and cheek, and with a smile I’ve never seen before, a little quiet one full of embarrassing intentions. Before we have time to imagine what we’d say to each other, we’re undressing in my bathroom, giggling like we’re both a decade younger and we’re doing this on a dare. She gets into the shower first and extends a hand for me to take and follow. As water runs through her hair and down her back we begin to kiss, and in seconds her wet fingertips have trailed down my chest and stomach and wrapped around my erection. She brings along a friend, to the shower, that cute friend with the baby she sometimes brings over for the neighbor to watch. In the shower, the neighbor-friend stands above the her while the she reaches up to neighbor-friend’s nipples and covers her chest, her face, her hair in what my mind loosely and incorrectly interprets to be nipple-cum.

The girl from work does this too sometimes, she brings along a friend of mine she only met once who is ditto with the t-shirt and boobs things, and is a girl-hipster-Fonzie who could kick Henry Winkler’s ass. Girl Fonzie builds bicycles. They both get in my shower sometimes, and are sometimes wearing tight white t-shirts in there, but then laugh at how lame that is, and then are wearing nothing (like what people should wear when they’re in showers), and they drop to their knees one at a time and go down on each other, and on their knees on the bathroom floor they go down on me together, and they look most of the time like they’re having even more fun than me (which is a lot of fun indeed). Sometimes the girl from work is busy, and then it’s just me and the Fonz. She’s so cool it scares me, but she takes over and tells me what she wants, which is what I want, and so we do all those things. We both end up messy and exhausted and rather pleased. I haven’t told her yet about Jay-Z, because I want her to like her for me, and not my millions and millions of dollars and famous friends.

I’ve only shown off the extent of my famous friends to one person, which is the person in the world I most want to impress at any moment, which is my boss sometimes, or assorted coworkers, or that one friend that sings gorgeous songs, or that other friend with the hair and the constant artiness that makes me sigh when I think of her at all. I’ve taken them to New York for some lame conference and then surprised them with a weekend of high-end clubbing and going to places no one knows about. On Saturday, we were invited to go to a basketball game in a giant secret indoor gym that is secret even to a lot of people that know secret things. Jay-Z is there, of course, and was my in. Over years of sometimes going to play, I’ve also become friends with Barack Obama (who has asked me to write speeches for him now and again) and Kevin Garnett (just as nice as he seems, and no he doesn’t go easy on non-NBA players in a pick up game), Kevin Durant (the joker of the bunch, if you can imagine it) as well as a bunch of hot model-type-girls who don’t show any interest in me since I’m not any of those guys, except every once and awhile when my charm and intellect show through.

I don’t tell people about these basketball games though, and no pictures are allowed. It’s just one of those things that Jay-Z and I do together, you know? Some things are just for us.