Best of Best Women's Erotica (8 page)

“Sorry.”

Readjustments.

Teeth.

Chests pressed against each other in heat, his mouth chewing up my neck like a summer corncob, and I clenched my eyes against the infliction, then opened them to behold the refreshed beauty of my ceiling as viewed from the perspective of ravishment: the cracks, the light fixtures, a single thread of cobweb catching the sun in pinks.

“Let it down for me, girl,” he whispered—the great melting, the great expansion inside a woman like another mind taking over—and when I started to come he made a face of
Oh, no you don't
mixed with
I told you so,
and just like that he stopped, and pushed himself inside, and then it hit me that I would never feel this beautiful giant hard warm smooth intuitive penis ever again, the way he filled me, the way his hair smelled when it dragged over my mouth, the way he bored his eyes into mine—almost never let me close my eyes. “Hey, you,” he'd say, “don't you fall away from me.” My fingers to his chest, the white scar.

Afterward, his full weight on me, his sweaty collarbone against my nose, he spoke my name three times, and murmured disbelief at how good it could be, about the greatness of my “pussy,” as was his preferred nomenclature (I'm a “cunt” girl, myself), and I thought about how this would never happen again, which was fine, but I'd become accustomed to thrice-daily scenes like this on Sundays and Wednesdays (as our schedules worked out) and it seemed a pity, it seemed unfair, it seemed a loss not only to ourselves but to the United States of America that this should stop.

 

I'd met Trevor during a weird chapter in my life when I went almost three years without sex. When I was twenty-seven, I decided to wait. I wanted
Eros,
not noncommittal fixer-uppers
insulting me with lines like, “I tried to call you….” (How do you
try
to call? You aim for the keypad and miss? You can't, in this telecommunicative country, find a fucking phone?) No more wasting time on boring guys who kissed nicely, or interesting men with whom sex was a hopeless fumble. No more flings that ultimately left me feeling more alienated from my body than the emptiness of unwanted celibacy.

When I dropped to some friends that I was waiting for someone real, they looked at me like I was crazy—worse, like I was naïve. Before I knew it I was waist-deep in rants on sexual politics, on the “myth of gender difference,” on sexual openness—as if casual sex were a sign of maturity, on all kinds of topics that I didn't think belonged on the menu. Meanwhile I was left to defend what I thought was a time-honored notion: that sex is related to, like, super-special intimate feelings. “Of course,” Cate agreed, “but there's nothing wrong with a little sport-fucking. It's how I met my husband.”

“Great. But I can't do that anymore. I'm
different.
”

“What do you mean you can't do that? What's to do? Just go have fun!”

But random sex was the opposite of fun for me. Why have sex with someone only once if it's so fun?

“I'm
different
than you,” I repeated, emphasizing the word
different
to try and trip her P.C. valve. San Francisco is all about tolerating difference—unless of course your difference is that you want something vaguely normal. Then it's a tough town. I told Cate about a man I made out with on a second date but didn't sleep with. “Why not?” she asked in a tone bordering on reprimand. “Because I wasn't ready to,” I said.

“Huh. If I'm ready to kiss a guy, I'm ready to sleep with him. You're not sixteen.”

Truth was, I enjoyed not sleeping with Jeremy, my last boyfriend. It prolonged the good ache.

It can be a drag living in a place where your private life is so relentlessly politicized. We're full of revolutionaries fighting to smash the repressive normalcy of missionary sex—which is fine, until the fight becomes an alternative repression, until “normal” becomes the straw man people flagellate to prove how open-minded they are. Read the
Bay Guardian
sex polls: I bet far fewer people are masturbating their pets and having
ménages à trois
in the office restroom than the ads would indicate. I think people just don't want to be caught with their pants up. Fringe, shock, wild nights with weirdos—it's like truffle oil: one drop is good but you don't want to make the whole sauce with it. The new imperative here is either to fashionably distress your heart with jaded cynicism or to shatter your sexual boundaries until you're left with a vagina full of broken dishes. Well, suck my backlash: I am tired of the word
fuck.
After a while, the clamor for exotic-erotic, academically groundbreaking, retrospectively funny, it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time sex becomes a white noise distracting people from the most pioneering act of all: namely, erotic
intimacy,
in whatever freaky or romantic or counter-cultural way you want to define that.

So, I decided to wait until a man pinned me to my bed with two determined hands and a hard dick and said to my face, “You make me want to give up red meat and cigarettes, the more days on earth to be with you.”

 

Off I went on my waiting spree. And waited. The joy of looking is in the finding, and there was no finding to be found. Bars, parties, openings, the Internet—looking became a second
job. People should get paid for dating. It's hard work, sifting through the rubble.

Then I met Trevor, at a party. I quickly decided he was self-absorbed and arrogant, a garage-band purist whose tastes were beneath his talents. He was obsessed with money, with not having it, that is, and every conversation ended up a polemic against the “piggies,” i.e., those robber barons who drove, like,
used BMWs,
and whose jobs paid more than his—followed by a long defense of his minimalist financial habits. Seriously, I once brought up snowboarding and within two carriage returns he'd transitioned to the impact of recreation on the environment and the “piggies who can afford lift tickets.”

Once again, a dead-end guy.

Still, we clicked. He was smart, funny, and emotionally grown up in many ways. Above all, he had one quality that was clear and beautiful—acceptance—and I recognized it instantly because it was so lacking in myself. He accepted his flaws in ways I couldn't accept mine, and by the time he wrote down my phone number I sensed that Trevor was unconditionally unafraid of his own psyche. In calling him back, I wanted to get closer to that quality. I wanted to learn what it felt like not to care.

 

The first time we hung out, he brought me
The Catcher in the Rye
as a present, which I'd told him I'd never read. It was his high school copy. “Hope you like the pretentious notes in the margin,” he said.

We walked to Ocean Beach for a picnic he'd prepared, and then he took me for pints at Beach Chalet. He won major points for these niceties, and yet I soon tired of the lefty loop-groove of a conversation that decelerates many a Green date.

Then he kissed me. Trevor was a good kisser, or maybe
we were both bad in complementary ways, but whatever, we couldn't stop. I mean, the language in there was like some Farsi-Romansch hip-hop dialect—slang double-meanings—hours of it.

And Trevor smelled like—I don't know how else to describe it—a man. Like salt air and amber and a worn T-shirt. Like wool and unwashed hair and a winter day in Death Valley. Which is all to say very good.

Over the next week, we played pool at the Elbo Room, hiked in Marin, saw a movie about the miserable labor conditions of charcoal producers in Brazil (
The Charcoal People
—rent it). Still, I couldn't do more than kiss, even in marathon stretches, even in the yearning twilight of red wine and pot. Finally, he pressed.

I was in the kitchen making tea after our video ended. He was impossible to watch a movie with because of nonstop commentary on the “bourgeois pigs in Hollywood who make this crap.” It was better when he shut up and slipped his warm hands under my clothes. This was before we'd lain together naked in a dark room, and so it was a thrill when he dragged his finger along the edge of my thong, about which he asked “jokingly,” was it Victoria's Secret and was I promoting prison labor.

In the kitchen, Trevor came up behind me, scooped my hair away and licked my neck.

“Sooo…” He knew about my sort-of celibacy, said it didn't bother him. I pressed against him, swooning, by which overused word I mean that I stopped thinking
Is he sane?
and
Will my heart get trashed?
and instead allowed his animal presence to fill a fractured mind. I felt like dancing, like losing myself in a cheesy club and being felt up rudely.

“I want music,” I said, and bent at the waist over the Formica to grind my ass against him. He pulled himself close, pressed my
bones into the counter, yanked me up by the hair.

“I'm still kinda shy,” I said, and meant it.

He laughed. “This is shy? You're the one that's all bending over doggie-style. I'm as gallant as I can be, under the circumstances.”

He had a point.

He embraced me as if we'd been lovers a long time, even took my face in his hands. “I have really selfish reasons for saying this—but you're due to be violated by a man who has your every best interest at heart.”

I breathed in nervously. While everything I said about looking for Señor Right was true, there was another side to my withdrawal: throughout my twenties, my sex life had been complicated by one evil little factor. No matter how hard I tried to cover it up beneath a veneer of sexual confidence, I was crumbling. Every one of my fantasies focused on some kind of crime scene.

It had been the worst with Jeremy: I felt a gun to my throat, winced at the sound of it firing. With one guy after another I fell on my sword in female
hara-kiri
—the metal piercing my throat while ninjas raped me from behind. The tingle of orgasm was accompanied by the spattering of blood on the wall. I told myself it was harmless fantasy—even “Dear Abby” said fantasy was okay. For a while I was proud of it as avant-garde eroticism, like
The Story of O.
Or I reasoned that I hadn't found the right guy. But day in and day out, it isn't healthy to think of sex as a murder-suicide—killing myself while others killed me.

Though I resisted listening to F-Man, I nevertheless found it had something to do with Daddy; doesn't it always? There was guilt, there was revulsion, there were dreams. For years I lugged around my confusion like the purse that breaks your shoulder
with loose change and old lipstick. I wanted to abandon the whole thing, wanted my vagina to stop aching for it and be normal, like an elbow or a toe.

Not good.

I knew the source. Certain of my memories—my father's game of touching my tongue to his when I was little, the time he gave me a bath at ten years old “for old time's sake”—anointed themselves as significant. But you know how it is with this stuff: you can know something yet not know it. Through celibacy I thought I'd sort it out. It was cheaper than therapy.

“I'm not sure,” I said again, in the kitchen.

Trevor said, “I think it's time.”

 

I lit a candle. The room was cold, and outside the fog swirled low and thick. Trevor took stock of my room, my
Wings of Desire
poster above the desk, books arranged against the wall because I wouldn't spring for bookcases. His gaze settled on the ceiling corner, where a crosshatched shadow flickered like bad German Expressionism. It was my old lacrosse net. Suddenly, I was embarrassed to have kept it all this time, as if at thirty I still lived in a dorm room. Trevor said, “Your room's way less Pottery Barn than I thought it would be.”

“Gee, thanks.”

From his tone, I knew he was bummed that I didn't have the Normandy end tables. His contempt for money only belied how much he wanted it; I think Trevor would happily have become Catalog Boy, dialing 1-800 numbers all night and having UPS shovel it in.

Trevor decided the room wasn't clean enough for him, and tidied up, clearing shirts and magazines off my bed, gathering laundry tailings—a bandana, three socks, a kitchen towel. He
turned on the space heater, straightened the comforter with a few tugs. At first it irritated me, like the time he was carrying my groceries and gave
my
five-dollar pineapple to a homeless man—but then it was also sweet how he niced up the place.

He sat on my bed and removed his socks without taking his hazel eyes off me.

“I could give you the vacuum cleaner and wait outside,” I said.

“Messy room bad. You gotta have a clean bedroom. Where are your condoms.”

“They expired.”

He unbuckled his belt, pulled the leather free, tossed it on the floor.

“There's a man on my bed,” I said.

“Yes'm.”

Trevor, his dark eyes sparkling even brighter in the candlelight, a man, here, a man in bare feet, rumpled jeans, T-shirt and button-down, this man slid his hands around my thighs and pulled me to him. He grasped my ribs, my shoulder blades, my spine, and he kissed me in the candlelight of my room. How many nights had I stared at the walls—nine hundred and seventy, to be exact—and wondered and hoped? And now—
a man in my bed!
An arrogant man with a deep contempt for the upper-middle class I was raised in (he spent a few years of his childhood on welfare), a man who'd expressed a not-so-subtle scorn for my current economic deal: “for editorializing about dog food and bird toys for
Pets.com
you're paid money taken from strangers who'd invested in a VC company stupid enough to bankroll MBAs intent on eradicating the need to go shopping.” I was going to have sex with this man and I was not going to tell him about the thing having to do with Daddy.