S

You reach a point where when you think about a woman you’ve met you think about it all. Her dresses in your closet, your name beside hers on a door. As if she could be the endpoint. You’ve had enough bodies to fill all of your tastes so you don’t lust after a woman bodily alone. It is not about the kill, but the capture, and your own surrender.

That’s what I tell myself.

And if I fantasy about the woman scanning my groceries at the store, it’s not just my hand sliding down her pants or up her bare leg. If I dream about the sister of a friend it is that she can be mine.

Most of the women I think about at this stage, it’s about a love life together. I want to put her into a magic house and me beside her and lead a magic life.

This is what I tell myself.

S I meet on an airplane when I’m going to visit my son. One of her eyes has a quarter of brown inside all the green. She lives on the other side of the country. I think that she is of Irish heritage but she tells me Scottish and the way she smiles must make everybody think about kissing.

We exchange email addresses.

She comes for a visit for a week and that is a week of fucking and when you coax her into photographs it isn’t because you collect trophies. These aren’t pictures to masturbate over later, even though you might masturbate over them.

I’m 33 years old and I see the apocalypse in the genesis and the goodbye when I say hello and though I think about a girl in terms of forever I know there is no such thing.
If you can’t reconcile or ignore your paradoxes, it is hard to function, hard to live.

And I take photographs of everything. You watch your son grow up, day by day. And those are lines on your face. And you are the cliché of that pre-midlife-crisis when you realize not so much that you’ll die, but that you are in decay, and that in fact everything is, that growth itself is a form of decay, everything moves away from innocence.

The way I look back on who I was five years ago and see a more innocent me and feel warm toward him. And that a decade from now I’ll do that with the me I am now.

You want every moment captured. This human desire to control what cannot be controlled.

She sits on the edge of the bed with her skirt hiked up and her panties off and in this picture is just a hint of her x, the kind of image that all alone would make a man crane his neck to see what cannot be seen. The kind of image that if you kept for a long time and looked at often enough would convince you of your love for a stranger.

At first, you position her. Later she positions herself. She sits like this and that. This shot is meant to highlight her ass, a dancer’s ass, her flat dancer’s belly. She was flying back from a show and she and the woman beside her were critiquing their performance on a laptop. How could I not want to try to capture her?

This shot is about the breasts. The one about the lips and the teeth behind them.

Really, all the shots are about the same thing, but you focus them differently. As if it possible to take a woman from every angle.

And then you’re bodily involved. Her panties back on but she is otherwise bare and your hand is beneath them. A freeze frame of the first sort of penetration.

Then it is your x in her mouth and her eyes rising up to you, the camera; your tongue against her x, her hand on the side of your face, the thumb over your eyelid; and your x disappearing inside of her from the front, from the back, all these ways there are to fuck.

These are the pictures that will make sad.
This is just another passing girl. This is just another lost wife.
The way every connection is just temporary.
The reason for the Sistine Chapel.

These are just pictures of how you connected and if you lie to yourself you will say these are pictures of what may be instead of what has been out.

If you don’t think I get into your head through your x, then you’ll never know me. The addiction for a woman starts in the bedroom but these are drugs I know I can’t afford to continue to buy and every day is a cold turkey day and every day you start something new and tomorrow’s poison is just an anecdote for yesterday’s.

And really, these are just pictures of me, the person who took them. When I look at S's x some time in the future, what I'll really see is some lost version of me behind the camera.

I take pictures of S not so that I may gloat over them later but so I’ll know for certain what was; I take these pictures because these moments between us will never exist again, even if we always know each other, even if we decided to keep on fucking, even if we bind ourselves one against the other for as long as two lives allow—which we have not done and will not do.
(If you really mean all those things you tell yourself why pick a girl on an airplane, a girl who lives 2000 miles away?)

But still, that time she kneeled on the bed with her dual colored eye looking back at me, in the billions and billions of seconds in the history of the world, it existed once.
Each of those shots, the close ups of her mouth, the close ups of her x.

If you can’t get nostalgic over a picture of an x, what kind of lover are you?

A

She comes to you when you are tired, or maybe it is the opposite: that when you are tired you look for a girl like her. One who will try to make you still.

All stripped down, white t-shirt and jeans, both of you, driving in the night with nowhere to go, on some freeway you’ll eventually have to circle back against, and she’s leaning into you. Her breasts are big, her legs and ass are all muscle, and yet when she puts herself against you in the cab of your truck, she feels very small.

And you’re driving with nowhere to go, and when you say in that near dark that you ought to seriously shoot for Mexico as some fantastical getaway where you can really sink into each other, you mean it, and when she says ok, the scary thing is that she does too.

You’ll be Kit and Holly or Terence and Alabama. How many miles can you think like this?

This is A and she and others like her—not that there is anyone like her—have joined a group the bonding element of which is that they’ve all sworn to refuse sex before marriage. She’s all grown up but a virgin, and a Christian God means a lot to her.

So I try to avoid the fucking because to do so would mean that I have to take possession of her, the way in some cultures you do with someone whose life you’ve saved.

Anyway, it’s me that’s drowning and it’s both of us trying not to fuck.

Imagine the gray day when I try to do anything but take her to my apartment but eventually we go there. And card tricks and television shows won’t keep us from pressing together and at this stage in my life pressing is that one thing that must lead to another. And so there are her grown up breasts bared to male hands for the first time and she’s kissing with a hunger and I’m wondering: don’t you know that soon all the lines become invisible?

And there is thunder and there is lightning and I am nauseous with the effort to keep from pushing my hands below her beltline and move us then toward the fucking.

Imagine her weeks later at the apartment complex swimming pool where all my neighbors must think I’m a sex addict who hires women to visit me in the night: there is always some disheveled girl I’m standing with shirtless in the late morning by her car, a hug, a slight kiss, goodbye; and the security guard mixes up names and then stops trying.

And then, and now, I’m tried.

Here comes A, swimming, a smart girl who tries too hard and will outgrow that effort and then become almost pure grace, here she is very beautiful in her bathing suit and see the beauty around the scar a peacock gave her when she was a little girl from the middle of her cheek to her jawline.

Look at her in the sunlight and try then in the too cool apartment to keep yourself from untying her bikini bottoms.

Inside, she feels different, but every girl feels different. She’s is standing against the wall and her mouth is open and there is no “no” in her and my fingers are sliding in and out and her shoulder blades go all the way against the wall and her back flattens and she’s pushing her pelvis outoutout, as if to separate it from the rest of her, send it into the fires fully, but it is not separate and her face is contorted with an overload of sensation.

And this is easily one of the hungriest moments I’ve shared.

I wish almost out loud she wouldn’t make the denial all my work because I don’t know that I can do it.

I have to send her away. I have to dress her first. I have to push her off. Like a guard with a prisoner, I have to walk her to her car.

We have not fucked. After she is gone, I spend the evening on the floor in front of the television looking and feeling much like an invalid.

We meet anywhere where I can’t touch her like that because each time it gets a little worse and one time it will be all the way and I tell myself I want to save her from that because I would take her places the innocent never need to see and so it is better to leave her in that state which to some degree or another she might stretch out across a lifetime.

But what this is really about, my draining effort not to fuck, it is that I want to save myself from being possessed, tired like this and ready for some aggressive girl to pull my head onto her breast and keep it there as if I belong.

The last time we get together, she sleeps in my bed and in order that I might feel as frustrated as possible, before she drifts off, I peel down her gym pants. Her back is too me and her legs are pulled up and her ass is beautiful and there are the lips, moist and thin. I kiss them, just gently, not for very long, the way if you were trying to be chaste and half failing you might kiss a mouth. I resist the urge to put in my tongue or to peel apart her legs or to respond in any way to the way her body starts to move and her mouth starts to groan.

It is a false construct to link the moment, to say now that then I thought of us on one of our early meetings, when we’d go to the farmers’ market and eat bread and fruit in the bed of my truck and I’d talk about animal rights according to the Bible and she’d listen like a girl who meant to learn. And this is twilight and they had out all the flowers and plants and there was a week or two in the spring when there were hundreds and hundreds of ladybugs and we laid back against the bedliner and watched dusk and then its afterwards, the pale stars, and the ladybugs crawled on our faces, in our hair.

And it comes to me, maybe then, or maybe when I'm pulling my lips away from her opening x, or maybe neither of those times, maybe just now, that I'm always looking for somebody not to save me.

xx

We met at bar and I couldn’t tell you the color of her eyes but she wore a red sweater to which I was drawn. We went out and fucked around in her car for some time and it was cramped and through repetition became boring. She was with two friends and the three of them drove me home. I told her to come back but I knew she wouldn’t. This was an apartment I shared with a girl with whom I sometimes grew uncertain of myself. Where she was I can’t remember but there was some brief break in which I wondered if I could make it with one girl ever.

The red sweatered girl’s knock surprised me awake. She’d changed her clothes and seemed plainer to me but that didn’t stop me, and the evidence of my girlfriend which must have been all over the apartment didn’t stop her.

We fuck around again.

It is completely unlike the awkwardness in the car, trying to know how much you can have and trying not to make it seem like you want it all and that that’s all you want. I’ve answered the door nude save the sheet in which I’m sleeping and she has really shown up in the light of day, so there is no question as to the carnality of the encounter.

In fact, there is little need for an exchange of words at all.

She lying on the couch, and with my sheet encasing us both I’m perched over her like some bird of prey of vampire thing, and though she really doesn’t play the part of prey, neither does she play the part of an active participant.

She’s come here to let me do what I want with her.

Eventually I lead her to the bedroom and what I remember best from there is that the line of her ass seemed overly red and that when I put my fingers to her mouth she sucked them.
There was laundry to do—a trip to the Laundromat—and it was on mind through some portion of the fucking. I imagine this near obsession was something akin to guilt. I don’t think either of us enjoyed it much and she left without trying to cling in any way.

Several moths later, I gave a public performance of whatever it is I perform as part of a New Year’s Eve celebration; it had been advertised with my picture and I suppose she recognized it because when I had finished she came up from the audience and shook my hand. She was in a party dress and she told me she had enjoyed what I'd done and I believed her; there was a sort of longing in her eyes I didn’t remember from before. Though recognizable she seemed a new person entirely and my context too was so different that I must have seen more recognizable as the picture than I did as an animate thing.

Still, it is her handshake that cements that night for me; it’s the only moment that stands out. This wasn’t so many years ago but I couldn’t tell you where I performed or exactly what. I just remember a face emerging from a crowd and then the recognition that I’d fucked this girl and she me and there we were in a room full of people who nodded their head a lot and presumably didn’t imagine that real people did things like fuck strangers at dawn.

Outside it was snowing.

That town for the holidays was covered in lights and there had been a winter carnival during which ice-sculptures were made.

It was cold and in my memory everything is pretty.

I don’t remember her name but I don’t remember half of my 33 New Year’s Eves well and a quarter of them distinctly at all, and at least she has given me this one.

M

Everything comes back to you now, almost today, when she leaves you a message about the death of her ex- husband, a man you’ve never met. This you is me and the girl is not so far in the past and the ex husband always seemed to be on the verge of not getting his life together. He was the father of her son and her son is the friend of your son. How that father/ex husband died you don’t know but you talk to her the morning of the funeral and you picture the little boy, four years old, dressed in a dark suit and on this day everything seems to demand caution.

We get together when my son visits so that the boys can play. Beyond that, M and I get together when she wants to fuck. She calls me knowing I’ll come only so close and I suppose therein lies the attraction because she is the kind of girl who is spoiled with attention.

I love her smile and her ass but there is too much party in her and a decade between us and so though it is always my habit to try to think past the moment, mostly with her I can’t. Perhaps there was a time of potential and not even that long ago but of this I'm not sure.

Between us there is a pregnancy scare that I once believed was mostly manufactured and what I think of when I hear the message about the death of her ex husband is how on Christmas Day I was laid up in hotel with a serious sickness of my own and over the phone she was telling me she’d lost the instructions to her three pack pregnancy test she'd gotten some time ago for a frightened friend but she still had a stick left and after she peed on it two pink lines appeared.

What does it mean? she’s asking me.

And in the city where I’ve come to visit my son but fhave allen sick, this city that is mostly his home and once upon a time was my own, this city where I have chosen the hotel over the hospital, I find myself driving from closed grocery store to closed grocery store, from pharmacy to pharmacy, finally to find something open, and the last test on the shelf, and the directions on the back of the box, and quite clearly the idea that two pink lines means the girl is pregnant.

I don’t know how high my fever. I don’t know how clouded my lungs.

The ex-husband or some other boy called all night the first time I stayed with her and she insisted she was alone each time. I listened to her lie and I thought she did it well and maybe right then all the potential for something between us died, but in truth it was wrecked before that; in truth, I'm pretty sure there was never any real potential. Why not is something intangible. I find her smart and she’s got her charm. Physically, she’s a type I like, and I’ve got enough hubris to imagine that she couldn’t really lie like that with me and would never want to anyway.

In any case the phone calls kept us from fucking and kept me from calling again and it took eight months and Halloween coincidence at a bar when she was dressed as a GI Hoe and I watched her dance like that to bring us to our fucking.

There was a vase with condoms and a vibrator and everything felt purely sexual enough that when she knelt hands and knees on the bed I put it in her before I myself had been. As if we didn’t need sentiment between us but would not be satisfied with mere mechanics either. And true to that kind of form that first night of fucking many of the kinks you save for later worked themselves out between us.

She told me she was not the kind of girl that liked boys to stay but would I stay?

I’m not the kind of boy that always knows how to go and so I did stay, on a little bed in a pretty room with a ceiling fan that never stopped. I try to know now if there was a time during that night when maybe I could have imagined holding hands for awhile. She’s got dark eyes and the way she smiles makes you wonder what you don’t know and all of this I like; perhaps it was her moments of vulnerability that frightened me into distance.

She woke me in the latelate night with her ass against me moving and I understand from this that she wanted to fuck again and so I entered. She went afterwards into the bathroom and said in a cold voice that there must be something wrong with her because I did not come.

A man can always come, I told her. Any time he wants., I said. Or practically, anyway.

When she came out of the bathroom I told her lie to down and she did and I fucked her for five minutes face to face—the only time we had fucked in that position or ever would—and then I came.

She said, Were you wearing a condom?

I asked her if she thought I was sleeping in one when she woke me.

A month and half later, I’m wheezing and fevering and under prescription in a hotel room several states away and she tells me in essence that she’s pregnant. In a week she would leave an email that said she saw a doctor and he detemined she wasn't pregnant. There was hardly an option that didn’t cross my mind in that week, chief amongst them was asking for the baby and then proposing to and marrying a k not yet blogged who at that time would have done it. Such is our thinking at times of great sickness and panic.

And I still don’t know if M really peed on a stick and if it really showed two pinks and if she’d really lost the directions for reading the stick, or if none or even some of that is not true, what her motivation could have been. They say mystery is what keeps relationships alive but that was never it for me, and anyway, this was not a relationship.

That week I remember the way you remember nightmares, and I think about it first when I hear he ex-husband has died. I think about her little boy. I think of my own and all the little ones of the world. It makes me tread lightly.

I talk to her on her way to the funeral and her voice is solid, is brave, and I wonder if she is, and I think that even if she has all that courage, there is something she hides and I wonder what it is and for how long she can and I know that I’ll never get to it or try.

I think about all the times we’ve fucked, probably six in all, and how the last time I knew it was the last even though she did not know. She’d call me from a bar with the background loud and I’d pick her up. She’d come running out, once in the rain in a red shirt with her black hair flying and the faces of boys who wanted badly to touch her pressed against the windows. The energy she brought was always good.

She most liked to kneel on the bed with her back arched low. I would spread her black hair out over her shoulders and shoulder blades and drag my fingers through it until it became so smooth they met no resistance. We fucked like that for long periods and I’d look at her pornographer’s dream of an ass and I would wonder why we were not more closely bound.

This is M, a not so distant lover, and what she becomes in that instant I comprehend that a man she loved and married and made a child with has died is an emotional link to all the clichés you can think of about birth and death and orgasm.

M

There are some people you want to find again but won’t, at least not specifically, and for me one of those is an Irish girl whose stint as a nanny was ending. I’d given her my number based mostly on her eyes which almost seemed to be colorless they were so pale. Sometimes, when you fuck a girl, it is only that thing that attracted you that you are really fucking: her pale eyes, or her red slacks, the way her hair fell across her face; you're fucking the way the sun looked on her body or the way her collarbone snapped forward when she turned her head.

Perhaps with M it started like that, but by the end it was more; by the end I was fucking not only her eyes but her accent and the stories she told with it and I was fucking the first charming thing she did, which was leave me a voice message with her number in which she spelled several of the numerals because she knew that Americans misunderstood her.

Her ass in jeans was misshapen and because of it I had my reservations. We agreed to meet at the Hard Rock Café and there she told me she was “Limavady woman”, which was the second very charming thing she did and the sound of it was something I would fuck when the fucking begin. We had one drink and she said simply we should return to my apartment and so we did.

She called oral sex taboo but she held my head in her hands as I moved my mouth against her x which at that time in my life was the hairiest I’d known and another reason for pause.

After awhile she worked at my stomach with a focus for what seemed an unwarranted amount of time during which I stayed perfectly still, afraid to even shudder. The tip of my x was beside her face. All she had to do was tilt her head to take me in and she seemed so intent on the work she was doing with her lips and her tongue it felt inevitable that she would turn to my x but she never did.

It was one of those nights where you fuck for an hour and then feel finished with fucking forever and lie back side by side and tell each other the stories that are supposed to give off your character. Then after you’ve talked awhile one of you or the other starts it all up again.

She told me that when she was a little girl her father instructed her to go into the cemetery when with a bucket of black paint and a brush to touch up the grave markers there. The way I saw it taking place was on some a stereotype of rolling green Irish hill. There was some little version of her in a little sundress and bonnet walking through all that beauty and decay with her bucket and brush and innocence and sincerity, solemn and beautiful, the kind of thing I always want to hold as a picture in my mind or something more firm in my hands.

What a clear night it was, the one fucking out of ten that really works, your doubts about the shape of her ass and the hairiness of her x smothered in some kind of lovely longing, so that when you remember it some other night caught up in some fucking you know even as you perform it you will regret, you think: I do this so that from time to time I’ll have an experience like that other one.

The way you never know with certainty how an apple will taste until you bite it. The way sometimes one of them is so sweet it keeps you digging through the bag.

I drove her home at dawn, through the streets of a city that for the most part hadn’t awaken, and when we stopped for gas I bought her lollipop. She was leaving the country in two weeks, maybe three, but her host family was taking her and the kids she watched to Hawaii for most of the rest of that time, and this was pretty much it.

If I wanted to fuck her again, which I did, and sometimes even these ten years later still do, it was for how she looked with the lollipop: not the overused film cliché of overly demonstrated and falsified hunger or the real world cliché of an attention whore working on a straw or a cherry or beer bottle in a bar, but this woman who I’d been inside of exposed in her innocence, enjoying her lollipop simply for the flavor: there wasn’t even a shadow of regret in either of us, and there was no shame in her.

If I longed for her which is silly thing to do for a one night lover, especially one with an x more hairy than I’d like and ass by my taste misshapen, perhaps despite it all, my longing was for something genuine, some not tangible connection.

Or perhaps it is only that her mouth had been so close to my x for so long and never taken it in.

C

This one doesn’t count. There was no surrender here; no x was touched; nobody came; there was no seduction. And this blog is about all of those things: seduction; touching; sometimes coming. Still, this moment, somehow it fits.

The year my mother was drinking, the summer that drew her near the end of that, this summer I’d turned five, she came hungover out of the house when my friend S and I were playing in the yard. She was in her nightshirt though it was midday, and the sun shown through it and I saw S looking at what you could see, which was everything. My mother told us what she had to tell us, to keep it down or whatever, and she turned to go back in and S sat there looking at her, and before I’d even thought about it, I’d started to hit him.

We had other fights over other things. He moved about two years later and I went to visit him from time to time and then my family moved even farther away and so I didn’t see him again until we were both supposed to be adults and he’d turned into a bad ass. Maybe I thought I had too. We met up by accident in a bar his mother then owned and he was drunk and I was drunk and our reunion came closer to being another fight than anything else.

Who knows how she felt, my mother, this woman misplaced in a tiny town, this young woman hungover and just up in the middle of a hot day, watching her son beat his friend, a little crew cut boy smaller than me and famous in our town for having already had his father hit him over the head with a beer bottle so hard it required stitches. Maybe looking at us roll around like that in the dirt she felt a little guilty. These woman with husbands who were miners or cowboys, these women who’d young gotten in way over their heads, far from city homes and confused about love. Husbands who worked graveyard, children who seemed to sleep, what else was there to do but drink with each other across kitchen tables in the night?

In a couple of months, they’d take my mother away as if she were mad and not just alcoholic, and after she came back, she never drank again.

After she split us up, my mother called S’s mother and told her we’d fought and why. You could hear in her voice that it was more amusing than anything and that maybe she even took a measure of pride in it.

I don’t suppose it was fully out of my mind but I was at his house almost all the time and so was there the next morning or the one after.

His mother was dressing in the bathroom and putting on makeup. We were standing on either side of the open door, waiting to go do something I can’t remember with her.

She asked me if I still felt badly about what S had seen and I told her yes. I suppose then I knew where it was going. Maybe S did too.

A couple of years later, on a visit to their new house in their new town, I’d swing open a bathroom door and see her sitting nude with knees splayed and toilet paper in her hand on the toilet. She looked at me and I looked at that dark patch of hair which was really more than a patch. By then, I’d see that stuff in magazines, older kids leaning over weathered Hustlers and putting kisses on exposed nipples, open legs, but that was nothing like a real woman that much in the flesh and the startle of all that hair.

Still, what counted, what’s really stuck with me, it was the morning a day or two after my mother had been standing there before him in the sun.

His mother asked me if it still bothered me that S had seen my mother like that, and I said it did. She asked me if I would feel better if I saw her and I said I would.

S started to shake his head. He was standing in the shadowed hallway looking small and scared and some new feeling of power moved into me as his mother asked me again if I’d like to look at her.

They were all kids, his parents, mine, having babies at eighteen, nineteen, trying to figure out how to raise them, the early seventies, coming out of the love and war era, confused about much, but certain that the norms of their parents were even more invalid than any other previous generation had found the norms of the one that birthed it.

She told me to come stand in front of the bathroom door and look at her.

S had leaned against the wall. He was crying and chanting, “No, Mamma, no Mamma…”

I went and stood before the doorway. She was inside, in her bra and panties, and I looked at her. Even now I remember the semi-awkwardness of it, like the semi-awkwardness you feel at a strip club when you haven’t earned the thing with a woman it feels like you ought to earn if you mean to value it. I think I can remember what she looked like, the color of her bra, the color of her panties, but I’m not sure. What I remember with certainty is S, the pitch of his voice, and I remember especially his eyes, which shone, even in the dark of the hallway.

They were wet and there was hatred in them and what I like to think now is that the gulf that has almost always been between me and another man—that end of the day feeling that it’s still an alpha male world and you’re still looking to eat first—it wasn’t born, but it was recognized in that moment.

K

She is the opposite of her friend, V, and what takes me in the end is the quality of her heart. Mostly, I know a good person when I meet her. Is there really a choice to be made in a situation like this?

In this story, the good girl will always win, depending on what you mean by winning—taking into account as we must that in victory some people are most lost.

So then the fucking starts in earnest and sometimes it bleeds into something transcendent.

She’s tall and her breasts and ass are almost overwhelming the way it almost always feels a little obscene to fuck a woman with the kind of body you associate with pornographic movies. What counts though are her eyes and not just the way she looks at you through them but just the eyes themselves as object of beauty, darkly sheened, Indian.

Each time you fuck everything gets a little deeper. She is always climbing to the top of the mountain and walking to the edge of the cliff but she rarely lets herself fall and this in and of itself breeds an opposite kind of hunger to what I felt with V.

Her period marks the one month anniversary of the second time we fuck, and all these things happen between menstruations—the drama has almost worked itself out and the choice has most certainly been made.

I’m exhausted in her bed from too much fucking the night before and no sleep and the long day of exercise and etc and then the two hours at a bar with K and other friends. She works early in the morning and our sleep deficit is high. It feels as if we should just collapse together. Just genuinely sleep together.

I watch her undress and put on her negligee and as see I her nude in the soft light and then sort of covered I go painfully hard. I'm drifing and she is leaning toward the mirror and her negligee lifts and there is her ass as fresh to me as if I've never touched it and half asleep I want her.

And then she is beside me and it is my face in her hand and my hand on her face and then we are kissing in the dizzy buzz of a little vodka and a lot of fatigue. She tells me she wants me inside and I want it to.

She gets a towel and puts it beneath us and the inside of her x is swollen the way they feel during menstruation. After all these years this is the x I’ve met that gets the wettest which gives it a sense of mystery and leaves me snake-fascinated.

On this night in this dark with the towel beneath her ass I’m not conscious enough for awhile to think of anything but the way she feels and I don’t even really think of that; this is just me moving slightly and her against me and honestly these are the moments people are closest to melting into a One.

We go on and on, slowly, and we build toward something and then let it slide away, a cycle that we repeat and repeat, until almost everything becomes good, until somehow we’ve reached and extended period of near coming, and she says in that quiet excitement, “You can do anything with me you want.”

What makes me go down eventually I don’t know. I’m sure I did this before with my first exwife, and I remember the first time L and I were together she had in her tampon and I licked her x far above the place the string fell...but burying my tongue like I do now with K is something that feels new to me, though I’m not doing it for the newness. And am I not indulging or trying to invent a kink.

It’s just, in this moment, what my body wants.

And the taste of it is not much of a taste at all, more aftertaste than anything, and anyway what I want from her in this moment has nothing to do with blood. I just want my mouth against her x in act that feels the inversin of birth.

I want to breathe into her. I want her to hold the back of my head. I want my tongue to go on and on and in an in.

Later, in her bathroom mirror, above the neatly stacked beauty products, in the filtered light where her jewelry hangs, I see my bloody x, my bloody hands, and around my mouth, in the stubble that she says she loves, there are the smears of blood. I look for a moment like a pet dog who has stumbled into doing godknowswhat primitive thing in the forest and comes uncertainly back to its civilized home and canned food to confuse its master with a vision of unnecessarily violence.

But I have no master and I feel no shame.

And there has been no violence here, and what I feel is warm. And when I lay down beside her again I feel closer than our bodies touching.

k

This is one of those fucks that starts on the internet. It comes a few months after a girl I thought I wanted to go but probably really didn’t has finally gone, and I’ve spent the time I should be healing and taking stock of myself instead serial dating and serial fucking.

Then I reach a point where I’m weary but restless, and I’m looking for something more, anything different. I tell myself sometimes we do things not so much for the doing but for the memory of having done them. I tell myself that everybody is looking for rock bottom and I ask myself where I can find it.

K writes that she wants to be “fucked, spanked, and choked (lightly).”

This isn’t my scene but I’m not sure of that and so I write back that I’m up for that kind of thing. She wants to see pictures. I want to see pictures. A Black woman with unexceptional looks. She has written that she is 38 D and 5’6 and 135 pounds. She looked about all of that. She writes that she doesn’t play games. How big is my dick? I write back an exact measurement. She asks if I want to fuck.

Now?

It’s Saturday afternoon, the sun is coming through the windows, and all of a sudden, I don’t think I’m capable of purely anonymous and mechanical sex, of realreal fucking.
So I back out and spend a bad night at a bar, not liking my face in the mirror, my eyes too much in the shadows of their sockets, my lips too thin. My shirt doesn’t seem to fit properly. I brood for awhile over vodka tonics and then I go home.

She’s online. She gives me her number. I call. Her voice is flat and she wants to know if I’m coming. I have the urge to back out again but there is no sun coming in through the window. Out there it is all dark and cool and I tell myself this is what I’m supposed to do. In the movie of my life, I tell myself, this is precisely what the character of me would do.

The directions she gives are bad so I get lost and relost. Each street along the way I find not because it is linked to the street she gave before it, but because I stop and ask directions from people returning from clubs to their cars.

“AA5 Glendale Terrace.”

I thought I was looking for a street called Glendale and on it a apartment complex called the Terrace and in it, the apartment AA5.

Eventually, I run across a street called Glendale Terrace and began to drive hopelessly down it.
Then I stop.
A bald man walking a dog wants to know if I’m drunk.
“I’m tired.”
“THIS is Glendale Terrace,” he says.

I nod without understanding. He stares at me. I read out loud again what the girl told me, and in so doing, I see my mistake. It is not ‘AA5’ as I heard and wrote it. It is “885”. And I am standing in front of it, 885 Glendale Terrace. These are the kind of coincidences that trouble one.

“Very tired,” I say to the man.

I have no apartment number but somehow I know on which door to knock.

“Who is it?”
I say that it's me.

She opens the door. She looks something like her picture, but her face is more severe and seems less capable of animation than the one in the photo. She’s got bulgy eyes and her hair is in cornrows. She wears a tube top and a jean skirt with a tie for a belt. Her hips are large, her waist narrow. There is something almost pissed off about her and I wonder if she’s mad I’ve taken so long. I think we shake hands but I know with certainty that nothing warm passes between us.

This is a small apartment—one room connected to a kitchen and a corridor that leads into the dark—and a musty odor hangs over everything, but the odor is that of the building and not the apartment alone. I take several steps inside and see a sixty inch television turned on but muted. Across from it, two small couches, side by side. In the corner, a desk and a computer. On the screen are rows and rows of messages, all these other men she’s communicating with, I guess. She sees me looking at the screen but she shows no shame.

She tells me to sit and she gets me a Corona which seems an odd choice for the apartment, for the girl, for everything.

I know something is wrong. I’m ready for anything to happen. Mostly what I expect is for a man to step out of the dark corridor that must have lead to her bathroom and bedroom. I can imagine being robbed or killed or both. The only thing I can’t imagine happening is that we will actually fuck.

She sits on the other couch and presses some remote control buttons. We’ve hardly said anything. I drink. The channel changes. The DVD player starts. I read the writing on the screen that says all the performers are, in accordance with certain California state laws, over 18.
“This is a porno,” she says.
“I figured.” When I try to laugh what came out is humorless and abrupt.
I am not afraid but it is only the kind of lack of fear we feel in emergencies.

Her face has not changed since I’ve come through the door.
She gets up and goes into the dark corridor and a light comes on. Then it goes off. She comes back with a thin, checkered blanket that she spreads on the floor. She drops a condom on the couch beside me.

“What’s up?” she says.
I stand and unbutton my shirt.
“Let’s see it,” she says.

I open my pants and let them fall. She looks at my x, seeming neither impressed nor disappointed. She takes off her shirt, large breasts that hang, and over each of them a tattoo. She takes my x in her mouth and sucks half-heartedly at it and it gets half hard.

“What’s up?” she says again.
“Take you skirt off,” I say.
It seems obvious from even before I offer this order that she doesn’t like to be ordered, but she does as I ask. On the tv, a Black woman sucks a Black’s man’s dick, small and shiny. The woman on the tv is quite pretty. I look at the girl I am supposed to fuck. I look back at the woman on the television. The real life girl lays back on the blanket and I kneel between her legs and begin to kiss her there.
“How does it taste?” Her voice like her face never changes.
“Like soap,” I say, telling the truth. “Like you just got out of the shower.”
“Put on the rubber.”

I look at the tv while I unwrap it. The pretty Black woman fucked by the Black man with the shiny dick. They are in bed with a white comforter in a well lit room. It is dark were I am and I suppose I’m lucky for that. I put the condom on and get between her legs and push in.

“Do you kiss?”

“Yes,” she says, but she seems like she doesn’t want to. Her mouth tastes no good. We don’t kiss long.

“Nine inches?” Whether it is skepticism in her voice or not, I can’t be sure.
“Yes.”

If I’d any energy, I’d take something in all this dead she is offering and consider it a challenge. I’d tell myself that I had to fuck inflection into her voice. Expression onto her face.
I fuck, feeling glad and a bit surprised to remain hard. She seems to barely notice, her eyes half closed and her body rocking slightly with my movement. It is hot and I focus on a bead of sweat working from my forehead down my nose and hovering over her. I turn my head when it falls so that it doesn’t hit her.

“Do you want to fuck me from the back?” she says after awhile. Again, there is no enthusiasm in her voice, as if she is resigned to the idea that she’ll not get any more out of the experience if we fuck doggy style or not but thinks she ought to suggest it anyway.

“Ok.”

I pull out and she rolls over. I get behind her and begin fucking her. The sweat drops fall on her back and I don’t care to try to make them miss. Her ass is not bad. I remember that she likes to be spanked and choked. I put my hands on her throat. She shows a little life. I continue fucking and choking . She takes my hand and puts it on her ass and lifts it and brings it down, and I begin to slap her ass. It is hard for me to fuck and choke and slap at the same time, but I try. She makes some small moans as if maybe we might be getting somewhere.

“Harder,” she says. I fuck harder and slap harder and choke harder. I look at the tv. The Black couple is still fucking on that big bed. The woman on the screen has become more beautiful. Her x seems like the perfect x. I imagine that if I were the man fucking her or if she were the woman I was fucking then I would fall in love with her.
We go on like this for I don’t know how long.

Eventually, the girl I’m fucking asks, “Are you going to nut?”
“What?” I’ve never heard that expression before.
“Are you going to nut?”
I get it. “Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”

I don’t think she’s come, but it really means nothing to me either way. I fuck for half a minute more and then I sink my fingers into the flesh of her lower back. I tighten the muscles of my body and make a low sound in my throat and half collapsed forward. I stay still for a moment, mimicking exactly what I’d do if I’d really come. Then I pull up and out.

My x is naked.

“Where’s the rubber?”
“Inside of you,” I say.
My voice is flat too. I fear no reprisal. No hysterics. Whatever her negative reaction to this will be doesn’t bother me. I am in this moment completely nonplussed. She seems likewise nonplussed. I can see the ring of the condom hanging out of her and so I feel relatively safe. She gets up and goes to the bathroom. After a moment, I hear the toilet flush.

I put on my pants and shirt and look at my shoes sitting by the door. I consider putting them on and just going. But instead I go to the bathroom door. She is washing her vagina with a kitchen sponge.
“Did you come?”
I suppose she must by now know I did not but I say yes anyway.
She continues washing.
“I am going to fly,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Ok.”

In the living room I have trouble opening the door and her arm appears out of the dark to unbolt one of the locks. Startled, I leap backward. She opens the door.

“Later,” she says
“Bye.”

I walk out into the hallway with my shirt open. I walk down the staircase and out into the cool night and off to my vehicle. My shirt tails lift up behind me. This is how a man would look in a movie after he fucked a girl and then left. His face would be tired and his shirt would hang off of him revealing sweat on his chest. This is what I think. Maybe, anyway, from far enough away, I would look like that man in the movie. His expression would be less troubled than mine, but maybe from the right angle, from a graver distance, this would seem like that movie moment.

For more than half the ride home, I hold like a talisman the controller that opens the gate to my apartment complex.

K

This is one of those times when it doesn’t work.

You find yourself not that far past the loss of virginity, a sophomore in college, on a mattress pulled from beneath a bed on which a woman you’ve never seen nor ever will sleeps, in a dingy apartment with a girl whose eyes are so vacant you know that though perhaps she once was once capable of intimacy she never will be again.

Beyond that vacancy, she is stunning, and even the eyes from any sort of distance or when they cut across toward you are movie star eyes.

And even the vacancy, in the proper context, can be attractive.

Deeply blond. Her skin a perfect tan, the kind that will never turn to freckle or cancer. Her body all accidental muscle and curve. She is shaped like a wasp.

If you went by photographs, perhaps J, the good wife, is the most classically beautiful; M the prettiest; another M the most cute; but K, this girl, she was what people would call the hottest, even more than R, the stripper wife.

The way K looked, if this blog were a movie she’d be cast to play herself.

She’d gone away from the small city to a big one and come back and what I heard about her was that bad things happened there and so I figured maybe that’s where her eyes went dead.
I knew little of her beyond that.

Her habits were hard. She was drunk when I met her and drunk when we went back to the place she was sharing and tried to fuck on a mattress on the floor and she at least became drunk every time I saw her but one. After she moved into her own place and asked me to come see it, a smaller and even more dingy apartment than the first, and there I saw her drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine. We stumbled out into a blizzard, on our way to a bar, and she threw up in the snow. It seemed an act as natural and obtrusive to her as a hiccup, and the vomit wasn’t much different to look at than the wine had been and it seemed somehow pretty in the snow the way sometimes blood can be pretty.

That was the second or third time I saw her and I saw her only half a dozen times spread out over the course of two years, and that first time was the only time I tried to do anything more than kiss her.

And that first time didn’t go well.

It was a one bedroom apartment shared and her roommate was already asleep on the bed and K told me to be quiet so as not to wake that girl. We undressed as quietly as we could on the mattress in the dark on the floor.

We’d met in a bar. She came up to me. I thought this was what she wanted. I was amazed and frightened by the idea that things could happen so easily though it had stopped feeling easy even as it continued to happen.

Something mechanical had slipped into it and all I could read off of it then was a sort of sense of doubt on her end but I’ve come to recognize it was like resignation.

I couldn’t really appraise her but I wanted to. I wanted to see her body moving. I wanted to admire her breasts, her collarbones, her x.

“If [] wakes up and sees what we’re doing, she’ll kill me,” she said.

I went down on her for a little while and something stirred in me but as soon as I drew my head away I felt as if I hadn’t been there at all. I was half excited at best and just opening the condom killed that.

“Let me help you,” she said. She went down on me. I couldn’t see it and I wanted to and I couldn’t really feel it. I wanted badly to grasp what she was doing and who she was and, for that matter, who I was myself in that situation, but I couldn’t grasp anything.

I was kneeling there, feeling desperate and sort of alone.
I asked her to sit up beside me.
She came up and I put my hands on her shoulders.
She said, “Are we going to pray now?”
That was pretty much the end of that.

We went back through the tiny living room into the tiny kitchen. It was very late. She showed me a painting she had done. I remember there was a cowboy nude save his hat and boots and a sky of all these different colors, some kind of surreal southwestern scene. It looked like nothing she could have done.

Then she was kneeling on the floor, digging out a pan from beneath the stove. Without turning to me, she said, “You know, I didn’t bring you here because I wanted to fuck you.” I was watching her ass and thinking about the painting and knowing as you always should know that there are things you might have gotten that you didn't get and never will.

S

She had a boyfriend and a child. I was young myself and I can’t remember if the child had been born of that boyfriend.

This is the first lover after I lost my first real lover. I was twenty I met her at the university theatre box office where I worked. She was a student, and a class required her to see a play. Her little boy, I remember his name, he was with her and sick and he vomited on the carpet while she was buying her ticket. She was embarrassed but only slightly and I admired the vulnerability of her in that moment and also the strength. She asked me for paper towels and I brought them out of the booth.

This is a woman who looked like Joan Jett—the subject of my first masturbatory fantasies—with her black hair and dark eyes. I’d see her after the fucking, twice in fact, but only by accident, and she was more beautiful both times, the way a woman is most beautiful when you are saying goodbye.

She lived in student housing with this boyfriend whose name I also remember. He was gone for the weekend and she was one of those women who no matter how perfect—if there is such a thing—has moved into that phase with her man where he wants something different but thinks what he wants is just something more from her. So he tells her he wishes her breasts were larger or her middle less thick; he curses the length of her legs or construction of her nose.

And I was one of the men on the outside who couldn’t believe that he’d said anything like that about her because I found her breasts so perfectly fitted and her belly so taunt. Of course she was looking for a man who could see her like that.

And neither of us were probably far enough along in our understandings of the world or ourselves to realize that if we bound ourselves together we eventually would end up in the same boat as she was with her boyfriend, that we'd embrace that cycle just as they had.

There was a list on her refrigerator, the goals of her life and they were simple and earnest and she if accomplished them her life would be nondescript but good.

We tried fucking first in the bathtub but that didn’t work and then it was her bed. I was never unaware that a child slept in the next room but I was much calmer and more confidant with her than I had been with M in my previous and at that time only other genuine sexual relationship, one in which I was never sure of her or myself.

S and I, it was the first time that I fucked all night, with those pauses between coming and re-penetration when you lie side by side touching just the shoulder or the palm and telling things about yourself, stories from your childhood, fears about your future. Where you close your eyes when she speaks so you can picture what she is talking about. That kind of intimacy.

Once, the boy woke startled and she brought him in and held him for awhile and she was so natural with him and so suddenly adult again that I worried and began to feel I didn’t belong there.

Outside, it had started to snow. This was the night I somehow learned to keep myself from coming, and often I would stare out the window and the falling clumps which were, in their way, hypnotic. I remember that best, and certain songs on the radio, and how we went on and on and how since it was all still so fresh to me we seemed to be trying everything, every position, every combination of limb and torso and x. There is nothing specific I can say I remember learning that night but when it was over I felt I’d learned a lot.

At dawn, I walked beneath her window through the drifted snow, these heavy short steps in that cold, and perhaps an addiction is born or realized there. I wanted to see in but could not and I imagined that she was beneath the blankets, warm and at ease, smiling faintly, beginning to slip into sleep.

I don’t know what kind of vanity it is but I’ve never liked a lover to walk me to the door. I don’t know what kind of problem in my emotion and psychological makeup it is, but I like sometimes best that moment of parting, when I’m alone, but not far from her, when I’m moving off into the world but my life rewound by only a few instants would put me against her again.

n

I thought when it came to N I’d write about the consummation, but what I want to write about is where it sort of begin, two years before, when she was still married and maybe even meant to keep it that way. Then we always met in bars because are actions were limited there and we were trying to limit what we did.

Sometimes we ended up sitting in her car, and what I remember best is the first time, when she was wearing a wide belt that I can still picture. What I remember is how it seemed to me, separating her shirt from her flesh and flattening my hand on her tiny belly, how it felt pushing beneath the waistband of her jeans and the thin line of her panty and that not undone belt, like some magic trick our bodies had contrived, the burying of some part of me in some part of her without even unfastening a button.

People were wandering by, just torsos from my vantage, their shirts and swinging arms, jewelry standing out along neck lines, their mumbled voices, and in our bubble, we couldn’t care and we didn’t stop.

What I remember then aside from that generalized and focused hunger is that I was asking myself why she was doing this, what she wanted from me. What I doubted was that it could be so simple as just my finger. As just my lips. Any part of me like that.

What does she do this for?

It’s a good question always, one I am habituated to by now, one that is like a mantra, a chant, but that’s the first time I remember asking it. In those days before her marriage unwound, before I returned to the city and we wrote words on the beach and fucked on her couch, in those days of the genesis of our intimacy, I tried to know why she’d let me do this. Or anything like it.

Why any woman would.

It took years for me to invert the question and begin to wonder why I want to.

We’re finger fucking in her car and I’m fairly young and her divorce is in front of her and so too are both of mine. People are wandering, all of them carnal to some degree or another, all them capable of finger fucking in a car and full on fucking on a couch and every kind of fucking you can imagine, in every kind of context you can imagine, these people that at the time were unreal, ghostlike, all of them having come from and going toward moments of penetration and orgasm and un-intertwining.

And when I think about it now, all of this desire, I realize that all of us, by instinct, were connection addicts, that almost all of us, we’re almost always fixated on trying to know and be known, as if something in that will save us.

And maybe it will.

r

So try to write about love when you write about sex.
Try to write about loss when you write about penetration.
Try to make one of your anecdotes go all the way. Backstory. Beginning. Middle. End. Epilogue. Try to suggest not just plot but theme; not just incident but the emotional complexity of even a single moment.

Beginning: Why don’t you talk about the firs time you fucked, if you can remember that, and you can. Was there any prophecy in it? If you could see that future, would you accept it?

End: Or why don't you write about the last time you fucked, if fucking was what it was then. Was there any peace in it?

Middle: Or why don't you write about one of those middle times after she left and came back or you did. That particular way of re-bonding.

(You thought you’d save this vagina for lasts because it hurts the most.)

It can be said with certainty that I’ve been in few girls deeper and it can be truly said as well that few girls have gotten that far into me. The vacuum of her absence, the one I begged for, the one I demanded.

Write about a time when you literally weren’t in her at all.

Write about the time when things still seemed innocuous. When nobody was going to get pleased terribly much. When nobody was going to get hurt very badly. Write about a time before addiction.

We climbed to the top of a half renovated ancient building. This was in a Mediterranean town that had know war but now the neighborhood was fashionable and had become a club district. A Friday or a Saturday night. All along the street below the boys and girls walked from neon lit doorman to neon lit doorman, the lines of slowly moving cars, the sounds of laughter. This is a place where everyone wants to be pretty and pretty much everyone is. This is the spoiled generation that comes after the generation of those that suffered too much and wanted their children not to suffer at all. She was part of it and I was more a long term tourist and when it was all said and done we merged for awhile those two worlds.

We climbed the old building, stuck in the middle of all this progress, this building trying to reemerge, pockmarked with bullets from rifles that have been broken, this building of crumbling and new walls, of half completed staircases and haphazard ladders. Getting to the top was like solving a puzzle. Was like wandering away from the Minotaur.

We did it because at that point in our relationship we did dangerous things that didn’t seem that dangerous. Then there we were looking down on those people we had been amongst and would be amongst again.

We stood on the ledge but I don’t know why. I suppose because one always looks for the next step. It was cooler up there and she was afraid at first. Eventually--my idea or hers, I can’t remember--she unzipped my pants and took out my x and kissed my mouth hard as she stroked me. When I came, it was off the side, into the air, into that nothingness.

(Try to make something of that, in this blog about vaginas, this moment that seems to have nothing to do with hers).

Things happened from there. All of them are worth writing about, or none of them are and every word of any of those stories bothers me.

Epilogue: and nobody I know like that lived happily ever after, or happily even for long, but we all know that's ok.

v

She was older, a tall girl, Japanese and Polynesian. We were in the same graduate program. This was in Southern California and during a class break I sat beside her on a bench beneath a palm and she said to me, I want you stop it.

And I said, What?

And she said, Relating to me in that way.

And I said, In what way.

(And God’s truth, I didn’t know.)

She took off her sunglasses and said, Sexually. Stop relating to me sexually.

(And God’s truth, it didn’t seem to me that I ever had.)

Perhaps it was two weeks later that we fucked. She took a shower first. She was a tall girl, from money, and the money showed in the way she dressed, in the style of her hair, her sunglasses, in how she walked, even. My apartment was very small: just a bed, a desk, half a refrigerator, a dresser, and a tiny bathroom, which was dirty. She showered because her period had just gotten over and she wanted to feel clean.

I was in over my head, in this girl, in this city, this kid from the country going to a private university on student loans, showing up in his cowboy boots and sport jacket with the pockets still sewn shut. It was ten years ago. I was twenty two. This was a time when you might still be able to call me innoccent.

I knew nothing about what I knew about seduction. Everything was accident then.

There was a moment while we were fucking when I knew I had to begin to stop but for reasons I can’t remember or fathom or at least can’t capture, I chose to go forward. And then I was coming and she was pressing my torso against her torso. It was the middle of the afternoon, but dark in my room, the single window, the heavy curtain.

Later, she asked me why. She wanted me to tell her that I came in her x because of some irresistible pull within her. In fact, I wanted to tell her something like that. It was probably the truth. But I gave no answer.

She’d brought me things, a basket of food. She’d let me drive her BMW. Her teeth were faded, the only part of her that seemed out of synch. Everything with her happened beneath the surface; I never knew where anything was going. It would get heavy between us and eventually break. She’d move out of her boyfriend’s apartment and I’d try to re-bond with my long distance girlfriend at the same time. We were at cross purposes.

Perhaps a year later, we forced a dinner together, then a fucking in the hot tub on the roof of her building, but everything was behind us and we were just going through the motions and there wasn’t even anything left to be sad about.

That first time, we lie there on the bed in the shadow of the curtain in the middle of the day and she said again, I’m not mad, I just want to know why you came inside me.

b

She'd called me angel, once. I suppose that was what it was all about for me.

This was in California and my apartment was on the seventh floor. We gone on a drink date and now were moving with unexpected speed through the undressing. She seemed the type of girl that it would take more time with. I removed her panties and she was still and she told me something I couldn’t hear and I felt around and found the string of her tampon. It came out easily, and there was something satisfying about that, the way you feel when you remove a splinter or an ingrown hair. I threw it out the window into the dark.

She said she was a virgin and I said that to fuck, then, would be overly heavy.

A Pepperdine student with a lot of hair framing her face, a girl who knew how to wear her makeup and how to talk to boys, or at least to boys like me.

She kneeled on my thighs and sucked my x with persistence and consistency, in the manner of those girls who think it is ok to give head but not fuck and so have sucked a lot.

I hardly ever come in a woman’s mouth but there seemed nothing else to do. This was what passed for restraint on a night like that.

It was close to Thanksgiving. She was lonely, having just come out of a serious relationship breakup, I think. Me, I was an angel, and we were going to spend the holiday together. We weren’t supposed to be in this position so soon but we were in it just the same and even as I watched her work against me I knew that we weren’t going to make it past this night.

You never know how you feel about a girl until the first time you come with her and even before I came I saw all the ways I’d tricked myself into thinking even halfway seriously about her.

She wanted to stay the night, and on my bargain store double bed, I slept as far away from her as I could, aware of the weight of her and aware of her innocence to all the things that had changed.

I was in a period of blue during which nothing was quite working.

I was defunct and that bed was all I had—all through the day and night, the television played on a cardboard box at its foot. Some girl with me sometimes. It was a haunted place of reruns and talk shows and succubus and flesh, the sheets growing stale, my life growing stale, the bed itself becoming taunt like a springboard that will not for much longer bend.

I knew better, that this wasn’t the girl for me, but she’d called me angel and there we were.