T

Her husband was fucking H, an ex lover turned half friend who was for this scenario supposed to be my girlfriend. I was fucking her, a Latina woman named T. This was in their basement on a sheet she had laid out on the floor. This was all the result of a curiosity about a phone personals swinger site. After a few calls, we’d met in a bar, H and me and the husband and T. I think H thought she was going to get to fuck the girl, which is something she always enjoyed, but it wasn’t about that for me. To work, this had to be a straight across swap—I had long since finished with H sexually.

T had a beautiful body, all pliable muscle, one of those asses, two of those breasts. Her husband and H were panting away in the dark but it didn’t matter to me. I’d lifted T’s dress off over her head. I’d touched her belly. She’d unzipped my pants and appraised and touched my x.

Now I was inside of her and I realized that as much as anything, people do what this couple was doing because they want to connect with other people. She was beneath me and we were fucking but it was more than that.

Perhaps it was half an hour, forty five minutes. Sometimes, almost no matter what, when you are with a girl, you feel like you love her; you are fucking her and looking into her eyes and you think, I love you, and you might even accidentally say it. It was as an especially strong urge with her and I wanted her to have it with me. We begin whispering things, about each other’s bodies, about beauty, about the quality of the sex. I asked her her middle name and she told me it and I told her mine.

Something had gone wrong between H and the husband. She wasn’t attracted. She was jealous on my behalf. She was just going through the motions. He had come and wanted to start again and she said they ought not. He called his wife away, whispering her name sharply in the dark. We were lost in each other. It took us a minute to un-intertwine.

The parting was soon after and awkward. In the mirror at home I found her blue eye-liner had stained my cheek and I knew I’d never see her again or have her completely and what I felt was hungry and sad.

v

The first time you fuck, it’s drunk, and even then you know there’s something about her. This petite woman, Vietnamese, with her marble eye staring, a girl who can come and come and come again, wound so jackinthebox tight that it takes only a dozen or so strokes, the breathes you push into a balloon when it is almost full already.

She is content with you on top, a vision of near submission, doing all the real work of the fuck, all the work that is meant more for the brain than the body, the movement of her eyes, the way they fix, the opening of her mouth, the turn of her head, the raising of cords along her throat.

You are divided between her and her friend, two girls exactly opposite in frame and bearing and conversation. You want to think that you don’t have to choose. You want to think that you can bounce back and forth so often and so well that one day the three of you will walk the streets hand in hand.

You look down at her, V, beneath you, your x going into her x, coming out, her mouth opening wider, the rolling of her eyes. This fucking suggests a certain kind of addiction you mean to mostly ignore. On the second night, between sessions, you roll over on your back and she rolls her little frame atop of you.

You’re quiet, she tells you.
There’s nothing left to say, you answer.
And you feel like you can hear her mind searching in the dark.

In the morning, her little hand on your chest, she says, After all this, how it was, you’re not going to sleep with anybody else are you?

And she means K. They keep no secrets.

And you’re looking at the ceiling, you’re feeling her bed beneath you, you’re thinking how at this moment, how all through the night, this feels just right, feels just fine, feels like a choice, and you think about how later in the day, that will be gone, like the angles of her face in the morning sun.

Y

I told her I’d watch her purse “like a hawk” while we danced but somebody stole it. She had a baby doll face, and that’s what I liked about her.

I was on a numbed and noisy journey away from a girl that I loved, a sort of panic run across the country, resting, if you can call that rest, at a dance club in a city where I had friends.

We met the next day for lunch, and in the sunlight, her face was not as impressive, her body slack. I’d stayed an extra day for this. When we fucked, she was the girl from the night before, the one whose hips and ass were tightly wound in her party dress, with her eyes and lips perfectly painted, the girl whose purse I’d let get snatched. That’s what I imagined as the sun fell and we undressed on her living room floor.

There was a hunger to her, when she sucked my x, the way she bit and scratched and even tore at me, as if there was something she wanted to get more of, or get at all. She was sitting on the couch with her abdomen thrust off of it so that I could fuck her.

I remember her panting and the darkness of her eyes and the way she peered at me.

I remember that she bit her own lips when I leaned away from her and that often she leaned toward me, doubled up

Her breasts were fake; hard, round, not so large, but unexpected. I’m pretty sure I’ve never touched breasts like that before. It didn’t bother me, or overly please me. I liked them best in that dress the night before, beneath her baby face, her baby teeth smile.

a.

A barmaid.
Men always want women in the service industry.
You like to watch them at their craft. You see her bend in her black slacks. You see the eyes of the other patrons following her. This nearly eternal atmosphere of desire.

She said early on that her breasts were perfect, and, in fact, they were.

You watch her in her red shirt and think: I’ll never have that.
And then you have it.
And after it is gone, long gone, you want it again.

A girl with a boyfriend she half pretended not to have.

The first time was in my office, past dark, the afterfiveabadonned feel. There was a blizzard, the snow coming down so hard it made me think in the back of my mind that we might not be able to leave.

Florescent lights. Nobody likes to be looked at like that. Not the first time. I turned them off. It felt like we were doing something bad in our snow cave in the dark. The computer screen, in glowed the screensaver glow. Both of us are cheaters.

The chair was as low as it would go and she sat back in it with her pelvis to the front and she looked very small and pretty. She sat there bare from the waist down, her knees open, her shirt on, her face open and expectant. In some way or another, a picture of it would have passed for innocence.

I kneeled.

She told me her period was nearly over. Her eyes are blue and she is a vegetarian. There would be other times. The last time I saw her, it was by accident in a bar. She was with her boyfriend and a girl I’d only met once but who had to pretend to be my lover so that the boyfriend wouldn’t grow suspicious. All of them smelled of garlic and we had to drink together. .

In my office, my x coming in and out of her looked to be covered with blood. It was too early between us for something like that. I began to want to get it over with. All through the fucking, I was thinking of the blizzard. I was thinking of the blood.

I began to hurry. I forgot to memorize her body. I forgot to create moments I could revisit later, sitting at her bar, watching her when she seemed impossible to touch. Later, on different occasions, I’d create those pictures.

When were finished, in the bathroom, my x was clean, depending on what you mean by clean, and I realized the blood I thought I’d seen wasn’t blood at all, only shadow.