M

She kept those gourmet jellybeans in a glass bowl because she knew I liked them and so I was sort of wrapped in her the way we get when we are very young and our feeling are based more on symbols and gestures and the stuff we hear in love songs than on the deeper understandings that really binds.

I’d never seen her as anything but sweet until just after the first time we fucked and the rubber I’d gotten an hour earlier—on a desperate and unexpected trip to the grocery store during which I wore my boots on the wrong feet because when I put on the first one that way in the dark I was too impatient to take it off and start again—was not on my x when I pulled it out of hers a minute after I came, and, as she told me with a groan, moments before she would have.

Her eyes had what I thought of as a sort of Mongol cut to them and though she was thin her belly was strangely swollen. Both of these things served to fascinate rather than repulse me, the same way her seeming lack of carnal hunger did. Our relationship was slow moving so that though we’d been out a few times and stayed in a few times we’d done little more than kiss.

This night she invited me to stay but said she didn't think we should do anything serious. This was the first time I was close to a woman in a bed without the certainty of fucking between us and that made me want her badly.

We kissed a bit and then stopped and I'd stare at the ceiling and start kissing her again.

I thought I ought not but almost as if I couldn’t help it my hand was up her nightshirt and down her panties and almost as if she couldn’t help it her hand was on top of mine to make sure it moved in just the right way.

This was her x for the first time, and so suddenly and completely it overwhelmed.

So I was off to the store with the toes of my boots pointing the wrong way and an idealized vision of the fucking that would follow, on this night and subsequently.

Then I came a moment too soon and then it turned out the condom wasn’t with me and after five or so minutes of me playing amateur gynecologist, we realized it wasn’t with her either.

Her expression soured at first, and I’d never seen this air about her, but I quickly learned to prefer it to the flatness that followed. In silence, we begin to search the futon and then the floor around it, and then the furniture around the futon.

She moved more and more quickly, with jerky motions, as if she was angry at everything she handled, and I felt a tremendous pressure to find the condom, as if once that mystery was solved a pressure would run out of the room and we’d be ok again.

I suggested to her perhaps it had disintegrated, and believe me when I say that then I was innocent enough, if you’re willing to call it innocence, to actually believe in the possibility of a fucking so extraordinary it could melt a condom, and I knew little enough about the world of fucking to believe that it was I, of all people, who was capable of that extraordinary friction

You have to sort of love of naïve like that, or I should say that at least I have to sort of love him; in retrospect, anyway, I do, the way we will almost always grow to love the people we’ve been, and the way we will even grow to love the people we are now, softened by time and forgivable in it.

It didn’t fucking disintegrate, she said. She was a drama major and you could hear her stage training in the way she enunciated each syllable separate from the others.

Immediately I knew that she was right.

I’ll find it, I said. What else was there to say?

I wondered if I did if she would stop being distant and angry and if there were other things about her I had failed to imagine. I’d enjoyed the fucking and there was something particularly seductive about the seduction, the way her x had opened and then opened more and how she’d began to breathe and how her Mongol cut eyes had turned to me and how she’d finally whispered, Ok, let’s—I wanted badly to repair the moment and have it all again: that basement apartment with squat windows close the ceiling and the bowl of jellybeans and all the little distinctions of her life into which she’d invited me.

What made me eventually flip over the futon mattress, I can’t say, and how it happened that the condom came to be there is likewise a mystery, and what real good either of us thought finding it would do, I don’t really know.

Anyway, I held it and it hung there unwrinkling itself between us and what became clear was that all of this was over.

N

They lived one floor below me, and her husband was a colleague I hardly knew. At a company party I stood with him on a balcony and told him honestly that we had in common beautiful wives. They’d come from Australia and my wife and I had come from somewhere. After she went back there without me, I sat in a hotel bar with the wife of this colleague and she told me that her husband had told her I’d said she was beautiful. Perhaps I knew when I'd done it what seed I was planting.

Or perhaps it just that sometimes things start before you even know they start.

I wasn’t even sure then we were starting. It was winter and so night had fallen but we were not out late. There was nothing overt in our decision to have a drink. We must have been talking about the idea of an affair because eventually she leaned toward and said to me, “So how game are you?”

Sometimes, we go forward for the smallest reasons. What I found sexy was her choice of words and the accent with which she spoke them.

They had a thirteen year old daughter and I heard N tell her once over the telephone to lie to her father about where she, N, was. Whatever the girl knew or sort of knew made her relate to me differently so that she began to smile sly at me in the elevator and look at me out of the corner of her eye, like a would be seductress.

By then, I knew it was all bad.

N’s breasts were heavy, her waist narrow, and on her ass I’d find a Gorbachev birthmark that gave a point of focus to my feeling that I didn’t really want to fuck her.

Her husband kept his head shaved, a very short and tan man, who one day knocked on my door during a downpour. He was standing in the hallway, holding a sock in his hand, wondering, he said, if it were mine.

His hands were shaking. The sock was dry.

His wife and I had been in my bed only once, and she’d noted that it was directly over her bed and we promised to masturbate about each other at the same time but in our separate beds that evening. It was afternoon and twice before we’d met in my apartment and gotten close to each other on the couch and she’d asked me to take out her breasts and I had. She was proud of them and for good reason. She liked fingertip circles run around her nipples and she liked them sucked in and out of a mouth.

Now she’d worn a matching bra and panties and I’d taken them off. The sun was coming in through the window and she lay nude on my comforter. Her x was neither shaven clean nor was it overgrown; rather, there was a look of five o’clock shadow wedging up from it.

In retrospect, she makes a pleasing picture, but I remember the feeling at the time that there was something obscene about her on the bed like that, the way you feel about pornography when you look but aren’t in the mood for it.

I’d kissed her x for a long while and she’d sucked mine briefly. I’d tried to place myself in the moment by watching her cheeks sink in and her lips part as she slid me and out of her mouth, but I felt awfully distant. Though I could focus on her x when I was touching or looking at it, I had trouble relating to her as a whole. Almost before it had started, I’d wished it were over.

She told me to lick her breasts and glad for a simple task I lay on my belly perpendicular to her and worked one nipple and then the other. With one hand she pressed against the back of my head and with the other she began to roll circles along her x. I could feel her moan and I watched her knees, half risen, push away from each other as her pelvis lifted. I was too solemn to feel like fucking, and so I waited until after she’d come before I asked her half heartedly if she’d like me to get a condom.

Sometimes things stop in near invisibility too, for reasons that we could probably know if we really want to but we don’t.

Now, a week or so later, there was her husband in the hallway, telling me that a dry sock had fallen onto his balcony in this pouring rain, and he wanted to know if it had come uncliped from the bare line on which I sometimes hung my clothes to dry.

Perhaps it was one of his own socks and he didn’t know where she was just then, or maybe she had another lover and he’d been to her apartment and left a sock.

In either case, the sock was a pretext.

I didn’t see her after that, but that was a decision I’d already made sometime before she’d even dressed that first time on my bed. In retrospect, and even at the time, my impulse would be to think of her as someone bad, but that isn't true. She was just another person out in the world with some hunger for some ill-defined thing that she'll keep hunting all her life without getting, and, of course, I'm no different.

She wasn’t with me and the sock wasn’t mine but everything was clear anyway. I like to tell myself that somewhere along the course of my adult life, I’d learned that I’d rather be the lion than the lamb, but the equation is never so easy as that. And I wasn’t playing an alpha male game, but if this is how it felt to win, then victory wasn’t that appealing.

b

This was on the rooftop of the highrise in which I lived. There was a party in my apartment and B and I had only a few moments to spare. We worked together and didn’t like each other much but it had recently become apparent that there ought to be a fuck between us. I hung out a lot with H—a girl who will appear in this blog—then, and that was B’s best friend, and so we all three ended up together often. One of my roommates, J—who will also appear in this blog—sent me a picture several years ago that I don’t remember her taking. In it there is a version of me and there is H and B. We’re lying on the floor; my head is on B’s stomach and H is lying face down with her chin resting on my shoulder. My shirt is open and I look young and, according to J, this is a picture of who I wanted to be and I guess she is probably right.

There were too many people at the party who would be bothered by us fucking and so B and I did one of those things in which we told each other where to go and why and when without saying anything.

We found each other in the elevator. This was a strange time, though strange is either not the right word for any specific period of my life or it is right for all of them. In any case, it was different. I was twenty three and a year and a half away from anything I’d called home and I was about to quit my job and stop attending classes and dedicate myself to staying up and sleeping late, to a bottle of cheap champagne a day, to late afternoon weight room workouts, to grocery store visits in the early evening for sugar snacks that would pass for dinner, to nightly errands with my other roommate, also J—a girl who will also appear in this blog—and then to doing it all over again.

In short, I was about to drop away from everything but the things that pleased me, and most of what I remember from that time reflects that sense of me closing in on some kind of necessary period of transition.

In any case, there was a little glass window in the elevator and often when I got on it I would punch the window; perhaps one out of ten times that punch was magic and the window would break and the flesh would open on my fingers and I’d look at the cracked glass and the dripping blood and feel a little fulfilled.

I was fucking a lot then and you could say that nearly the same odds applied.

I didn’t punch the window with B. We stood on opposite sides, each of us afraid that if we spoke or even moved around a lot we’d blow it because as well as it seemed we got on when we hung out together with H, the two of us alone could easily argue and now was not a time for arguing.

I loved the roof and went there often alone. All around it was a three foot high wall with a ledge about a foot wide, and some nights I’d stand on it and catch my balance and begin walking along it, the palm tree tops and the green grass below, until I’d made the whole square of the building, and I don’t remember in all those times I walked that line feeling a real fear of falling.

Perhaps I wanted to have that fear or perhaps I wanted to know why I didn’t and that’s what took me to the wall. Or maybe I just wanted to do something like that so I could write about it eight years later.

I didn’t walk it with B there.

I took the condom out of my pocket and I put it on the top of the wall as B leaned against it. Maybe we had spoken by then. Maybe not. I kissed her and pushed my hand beneath her jeans and panties and worked a finger inside of her.

She has brown eyes and hair, and by most standards would be a plain girl. She acted more like a princess and I think that’s why the men at work were attracted to her. It was an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of thing. She pretended she was beautiful and so we all sort of assumed it was our perception that was off.

We kissed and I fingered her for a few minutes.

Then I suppose she spread her arms out, or just rearranged herself, but you could hear something scraping against the ledge and she lifted her hand away. We both looked. She’d pushed the condom and it was falling down now, twenty some floors, past the window of my apartment party, out of our sight into the darkness, to the ground.

Do you have another one?

Downstairs, I said.

She wrested her x away from my finger. Her face away from my face. My hand out of her pants.

We can do other things, I said.

I meant it. I imagined her sitting on the ledge with legs spread, me kneeling there to tongue her x. It was a pretty a night. It was always a pretty night, or so I remember it. This was where I went to commune with the moon and the stars and the idea that it doesn’t really seem possible for something, especially not me, to fall and semi-flatten and be dead.

For her, though, it was over. She was walking across the roof, and I was following her.

The party, as I remember it, was nothing extraordinary.

x

Her husband was fucking my wife and almost as a matter of etiquette, I started fucking her.

This was a big girl, maybe pretty, and I’d stood up for awhile to better watch and she rose to her knees and began to suck me.

My wife and I weren’t swingers but this was at a swingers party and there were mattresses on the floor of a room and all around us people were fucking and sucking in pairs or small groups. My wife and I figured we’d pretty much do everything at least once and this was the second time but the first had been pretty mild.

Now it was full blown and she’d started with the woman but the man had worked his way in, fingering her while she continued to lick his wife’s inner thighs. They were big thighs, the kind you have to push apart with your hands if you mean to really fit your face in there, and her belly hung down, and why my wife had started things up with them, I wasn’t sure.

The woman was sad and I felt as she sucked my x this wasn’t really her scene but I knew also that they did this kind of thing all the time. I guessed that they hardly ever fucked except for in this context.

Now my wife was on her back and the man was fucking her and it was all vaguely exciting but I really didn’t know what to do with the large woman kneeling in front of me, my x in her mouth, her sad eyes all closed, her face and her movement dispassionate.

I pusher her slowly backward and her breasts fell off to the sides and she looked at me.

It’s ok, I told her.

There were a pile of condoms and I fumbled one open and I put it on. My wife’s arms were over her head and you could see how beautiful she is, but it didn’t seem such an odd thing to mount this other woman.

When I think about it now, it makes me realize that despite how large the differences between one human being and another, they are little too. These woman, from a great enough distance, you couldn’t tell them apart. These women just born would be not so unalike, and dead, just bones, they will be hard to tell one from the other. Peel them back to essence, to soul, peel any of us back, and are we so distinct as the bone and muscle structure of our faces and bodies?

My thin wife with her Italian cinema star looks.
This fat woman who never smiled.

I was in this woman for only a moment when my wife glanced over at me and then one of her hands rose slowly and she put it on my chest and pushed to tell me to stop fucking the other woman.

I did.

The woman was nonplussed.

I don’t remember if I’d kissed her mouth. Probably, I didn’t. I remember her x, that it was shaven, that there was a small mole just above and to the side of it, that going inside of her and being there was maybe the least remarkable of all my sexual experiences.

And I remember driving home, my wife dressed and pressed against my side with my arm over her shoulder, and perhaps she’d gone asleep, and I was thinking about the woman again, wondering what her life was like, what she did in the morning when she woke, what she liked to watch on television, if she believed in a god, if her parents lived, if she were kind to animals, what she cried about last and would cry about next, if she were Republican or Democrat, the details of her childhood and of her death, all the things you ought to want to know and can but won’t.

J

If you were to judge by photos, you’d put her in the top three and maybe at the very top. That’s the way she looks. Nine siblings, I’ve seen pictures, and they are all beautiful like that. Scattered around the world, the way they grew up, the stories she tells, it is a family dreamed up by Salinger or Fitzgerald.

I expect nothing because I imagine she needs nothing.

We meet on a day I’ve gotten a haircut I don’t like. Everything feels off so I expect even less than the nothing expected before.

We eat at a vegetarian restaurant and she is quick about it and she has more of the shared platter than I have. She talks the entire time, and if I was tight before I sat down the simple drone she’s become and the way it humanizes her calms me.

Vodka tonics in the next door bar and by now I sort of know that she’s open.

Her legs are well shaped and pale, her dress high cut with a slit cut higher, and she sits with one thigh folded over the other.

She tells me to touch her and I do it even though I haven’t figured her out yet.

She hardly stops talking, over complimenting me, and I assume that she is using words with me that she wants me to use with her, but now I can’t say them because she already has.

I tell her she is nervous and she says she’s jittery and I don’t ask what the difference is.

We kiss in the hallway outside the bathrooms. She’s got my back against the wall and her hands up my shirt and I can’t quit feeling like I’m watching this in a film and trying to figure out the female character’s motivation.

Against my vehicle and in it, we press on each other, her fingers in my beltline, my beltline pushing down on my hips, my palms on the back of her thighs. I’m fairly subdued and probably this is something she likes about me but I’m not doing it because I think she’ll like it. There’s something here I still don’t get and it bothers me.

She’s got her hand on my x and when I move my fingers toward hers, she folds up.

I tell her for the first time that she should just tell me what her limits are and I won’t cross them.

We should just go get a hotel, she says. Then she laughs so that I know the spirit of this thing she hasn’t really meant as a joke was only a joke.

Driving to my apartment, she continues to talk. I realize she is eager to be known and why she thinks I will know her I’m not sure but everything must be based on that. We’ve had one other date, in the afternoon, for drinks, and it was cut short by a babysitter issue. Beyond that, we’ve talked on the phone a half dozen times.

I’m ill-prepared for company, have arranged my apartment nor my head properly for company in the dark.

Inside, she quickly takes off her dress, proud of her body and wanting me to look at it. Her build defies my logic and all the lessons I’ve learned about what becomes of a thirty year old woman who has children and whose only exercise is an occasional run. She’s thin, petite, even, though tall—but that always seems a possibility. What is surprising is that her skin is tight, her breasts upheld, her belly undimpled, her ass well shaped. Whatever you touch and press against doesn’t give far and comes back immediately and I openly marvel at this.

Then, for a moment, I stop. For a moment, I wonder if it’s been all lies. If she has no children. If she is not a sibling to nine. But then I remember her talking to her children on her cell in the bar, and the pictures she’s shown me of the family whole.

On the couch, she says the word’s “no” and “don’t” the way a woman usually says words like “more” and “yes”, almost secretly, into her arm, as if she means to seem like she is ashamed and doesn’t want me to hear.

I tell her for the second time that I don’t want to push anything. I tell her that we can sit on the couch and talk. That we can make out without touching anything but each others’ faces. That we can do whatever.

She says, I want you to do what you want.
She says, I want you to do everything.

And so she does want to fuck; she does want my tongue in her x; my x in her mouth; it’s just that for her there is a secret and certain way it must go, and I’ll have to stumble through it, like a man in a maze, stopping when I hit a wall and trying a different route until finally I’m accidentally right.

I’m getting a headache. What I’m thinking here with this woman—exceptionally beautiful and nude, mostly opened and definitely patient—is about a different lover and how easy and smooth things can be with her.
.

It’s one of those headaches where your scalp along the side of your head burns.

My only Tylenol are the PM kind. Fuck it, I take one. Then fuck it twice, another.

These pills can’t put me to sleep through my insomnia, but now I’m instantly tired.

The girl is moving from the couch to the bed and I’m standing in the dark in the kitchen with the bottle of water still in my hand and the aftertaste of the pills on my tongue, and what I feel for a moment is pure fatigue.

I still have to drive the girl back to her car. Before that, I’ve got to fuck her. Or maybe it is I get to fuck her. The distinction is fine and I’m too drowsy to try to make it.

I wander in.

The inner lips of her x are slightly pushed out and swollen, the way they are in some women after birthing. Small and resilient as she is, I feel that she is large inside, that where most women are mostly closed up all the time, I’ve discovered in her a little bubble of black that is never burst.

And I know this fucking is one I’ll enjoy writing about more than experiencing, that it will please me more to masturbate about later than it does during the actual occurrence, but then we get close to the end and I’m wrong about that too.

She’s face down on the bed, I’m behind her, her legs are together, his ass slightly risen, and she wants me to talk to her. She says, I’d do anything for you. Tell me what you want me to do.

And though it doesn’t it doesn’t seem to fit her, I know what she wants to hear.

I say: I want to fuck you in every way that I’ve ever fucked any woman, so that all the style of fucking can be collected in you.

I press my thumb against her xx, and her ass rises higher and she moans more loudly and I say, I want to fuck you here.

I want to fuck you while strangers watch and come just at the sight of you.

I go on and on about the ways I want to fuck her, and while I’m saying them, I mean it.

She starts to come and she yells for me to come and so I do.

When we’re both of us finished, she says: You’re a god. We’re leaning against the pillows, barely touching, and I know she doesn’t mean this, and I can’t imagine that she can have spent the entire night with me and not know better than to say it. If she’d only kept her mouth shut we might be in a good place but for a little while I grit my teeth against the absurdity of grown up lovers talking like that.

The pills keep pushing down my eyelids and I keep pulling them up. Somehow, a few minutes of this is cleansing.

She’s dressing and I tell her that it pleases me to watch a woman dress. She says she likes the way I talk about women. I say that most women wish I wouldn’t talk about other women at all.

She smiles because I’ve just told her that she’s different and that’s what she wants to be.

Driving her back to her car in the early morning, she continues to talk. She tells me that she likes to see her partner with another woman. She asks me if I’ve ever known a woman like that before, and I tell her honestly that I’ve known only a few.

I think of the way that throughout the night every time I decided she must be on a husband quest, she’d do something to suggest we were going to fuck to fuck, and how every time I thought she was playing hot/cold games because she really wanted only attention, she’d push it to the next level.

I’m your anomaly, she says.

Yes.

A

She spends half her days rescuing cats and their litters in a Mediterranean city that is overrun with cats and kittens in need of rescue. Her clothes are from Paris and she wears a nose job bandage. It’s late at night and I’m somewhat drunk when she rustles out of the bushes close to my building as I’m walking toward it.

She’s small, apparition like in that darkness, completely unexpected, and before I see that it is just a nicely dressed girl cupping something in her hand, I feel a shot of fight or flight adrenalin.

This is one of those places where being an American can buy and cost you a lot.

We don’t fuck for the first time until after the bandages are off and the blackness beneath her eyes is mostly gone.

I’ve seen you leaving food for the cats, she says. You have to take these. I have no more room.

The kittens she makes me keep in boxes on my balcony, the kittens I feed with eye droppers for three days and nights, they all die.

The first time we fuck, she wears a camouflage mini-skirt. We meet for drinks to discuss a spade and neuter program we’re setting up for the strays. Her shirt is sewn over with sparkly scales and for days after, I’m finding glitter on my skin.

It is hard and sometimes necessary to keep a secret in this city.

This is the apartment of a friend. He’s gone for the summer and would not approve; the air conditioning is off and all we have is a fan. Her x is completely shaved, a petite girl with dark eyes, dark features. Sometime later, she’ll fuck around with me and another girl, the three of us on an Egyptian rug on a stone floor of a million dollar apartment, the two girls refusing to touch, but I’ll save those details for that girl’s entry.

This first night is unbearably hot and she never takes off her mini-skirt. Her breasts are small and very firm. Everything about her is smooth, so that you feel when you knead her flesh you could accidentally leave your fingerprints.

Perhaps we’re moving too quickly, she tells me. I’m sitting on the couch with my shirt open and she is standing over me with her legs slightly apart while my fingers slide in and out of her, small and wet and gripping.

I know and perhaps she does that neither of us can let this night pass without a deeper penetration.

She’s completely given over to the fucking and when I surrender to it, the heat no longer bothers me. Rather, I fuse with it, so that if anything, the fan, when it sweeps directly over us, is unwelcome. We’ve moved into the bedroom to fuck on the bare mattress.

There are unbroken moments from that night in my memory, but mostly there are images:

Her tiny panties. Her pink fingernails. The way she sinks her little belly toward the bed from all fours when we fuck in that way.

I have only a few months left before I return to the States, and she knows it. During this time, we’ll try most everything a man and a woman try. In my world, this is intimacy. I take your hand and we step over some boundary you never really wanted to exist. There are places we will go together that you have never been before, and what else does that produce but closeness?

I’ll let it burn out before I go, maybe because I don’t want some ragged break, or maybe I’m just naturally moving on. In any case, it fades for me. She’s small, and her ass is perfectly rounded, and even now in my mind’s eye I want to reach for her.

Everything you really hold is hard to let go but you learn to let things go just the same.

Close your eyes and pretend you are holding in your fist the girl like the string of a balloon, and now just smile and open your eyes and your fingers and let everything be free of you.

Let yourself be free of it.

And who knows if this addiction to release is born of necessity or habit; practicality or fear; instinct or reason?

She’s not ready for this breaking away.

Toward the end, we’re fucking in a way that is almost purely chemical, or maybe it’s spiritual, whichever of those things or whatever combination of them you believe in.

Just after she’ comes, she says: Oh God.

This is in the home of her parents when they are traveling. The things you do to keep your secrets. We’ve fucked in the bathtub and then in the bedroom of her childhood which her parents have kept in tact. She’s been to the States, studied in New York. She keeps cats here, too, in the garden of her parents' home, and you could hear them mewing all through the fucking, and you can see their outlines move across the window.

(Before A, I would carry boxes of cat food everywhere, leaving little mounds for the hungry cats. After A, after those first three kittens, I would never be so casual about my care again. There is a love born of that alone.)

Oh God, she says.

My hands are on either side of her face, the thumbs out across the cheeks, just below the eyes.
This is not exclamation of satisfied fatigue.

Oh God, she’s just said, and I know what she means.

She means: We’ve gotten in too deep and the end is in sight.
She means: Why did I let you this close, why did I let these feelings build?

And my heart is not quite in the same place. Already there are other shadows moving through it. Still, she’s beautiful. We’re bound by the lives and deaths of cats, and by the communion between my x and her x; she is small beneath me, her hands are small on my belly; everything feels more or less right.

Close your eyes. Close your hand. Imagine the woman inside of it. Imagine the string of a balloon. Just open everything so that everything may be free.

Oh God, she’s said, her voice near breaking.

And it’s such a fitting epitaph for this or nearly any affair.

k

Somewhere this all breaks down.
Let’s say it is with the girl of a friend.

(Let’s say the somewhere is not a permanent condition but something that happens from time to time.)

Let’s say that somewhere in that fucking when you are thinking of finding the way she likes to be touched, the expressions she likes you to offer, all that particular ways you should go about pleasing this particular girl, all the distinct paths toward connection you must forge with this distinct lover, let’s say that in this performance you become aware again that it is a performance.

And what you feel like is an old actor who is no longer in love with acting.
Somebody who onceuponatime turned life experience into emotional memory he cold bring to a performance and then got so far into the method that he forgot it was a craft.

So weary you want to quit mid-scene.

But you knead the back of her neck and the muscles tighten at first and then loosen and she offers a sharp intake of breath and you know to do it harder.

You’re deep in her.

Intellectualizing the fuck.

Turning your head then dropping it to kiss her suddenly because it suggests to her that her eyes moving against yours overwhelmed you. You do this because you have come to realize that feeling that kind of power stokes her.

This is a second fuck and you’re working on being her ideal lover.

And for a few moments, you pause. For a few moments, it all breaks down.

Your x is so far in her x that it would seem impossible to pry you apart, but you’re closer at this moment to being a monk than anybody’s lover.

What this is really about is your death.
Or finding something else to live for.
This is a glimpse of your future and it is an abyss.

Your child will save you. For how long, you don’t know. Seventeen, eighteen years, a long time, until he’s all grown up, this baby.

Or maybe you can just forget that you remembered that you’re only pretending your heart is in it. That you’re so good at pretending it you might sometimes lose the opportunity to really feel it. That onceuponatime, all of it was real. That to fake it like this you have to have known it.

The way an actor to really cry on stage must know that kind of sorrow (and so then what is it that separates one set of tears from the others?)

Anyway, it’s only a moment. A fuck. The kind of fuck you have from time to time that causes you at least for a little while to see a life after x's and to fear it because it has no recognizable shape. These impressions don’t define your sex life and it is possible and even probable that a week later you will fuck without breaking character just as you did a week before.

In fact, you may even do that later in this fuck.

You’re holding your palm flat against her hip bone and pressing down and this brings her close to coming and you forget that you may be faking it.

Kiss the girl. Press yourself hard. There’s something in here you need to get. You have to get. You want to get. Get get get.

This can be a sacred mission.

(If you’re lucky, you’ll never think you got).

Never mind the other complications. That this is the girl of a friend. Just fuck.

She’s decided on that with you, and you with her. That’s what you here for. Don’t look too hard for the virtue (or vice) in it. Just be there, like a Buddhist.

Just kiss her again.

Just notice that she is human and that she is letting you inside, whatever it means, whatever it is worth. This rare thing.

This is her x, the second most private part of her body, and she has given you access to it.

Those are her eyes, a color like a snowflake, absolutely distinct, and she is looking at you through them the way she will look at almost no one else.

In this moment, through this woman, you are bound to some kind of existence. Let yourself go. She has come and she wants you to.

Let’s call it an escape.

Let’s worry about the rest of it later.

This is all more and less reasonable than it sounds.

K

We worked for the same company but in different departments, and on three or four occasions, I left what I considered exotic fruit on her desk. Maybe this was an act of seduction or maybe I really just wanted her to feel what people feel when they receive secret gifts. Later, I’d see in her apartment a canvas on an easel, and over it, a painting of all the fruits gathered together. She didn’t say whether or not she knew I’d left them and I didn’t ask.

We’d gone casually for drinks though I didn’t think of it as casual. What I’d imagined after a semi-recent and first real heartbreak was that I found in her somebody who could reshape my world.

I was 23 or so and the pictures I painted in mind were of us blowing soap bubbles off a balcony and flying kites in the park. What I thought I saw in her smile and the expression of her eyes was a place where all my restlessness could end and where my pain would fade and never duplicate.

What I thought I was starting when I put three kiwi’s or a ice-cream peach on her desk was a love story, the kind people have in movies and songs.

This was a woman without edges. She was all grown up and pretty in the Irish way, with her clear eyes and pale skin. She looked good in clothes but there was something about her body that worried her, and that first night when we fell to fucking she kept a nightshirt on, letting me she roll the shoulder straps off her arms and all of it down her torso, but she wanted it bunched up on her middle always. Each of the three or four times we fucked, she kept some barrier like that.

I liked her breasts, the largest and hardest I’d then touched, and I was fascinated by the areola, which was smooth, and the nipples, which were soft and pretty and unobscene.

I think we kissed in the pub or maybe the car. There was a smell of sulfur from her mouth. I thought when that odor came off a woman it had something to do with her makeup, a particular brand or ingredient, and I’d learned by then that if you kiss it you don’t really smell or taste it. Later, I’d learn that odor has was a result of a lack of oxidization.

Over the next two weeks or so, we fucked a few times more and called it dating, and once I showed up with a rose at her door and put my finger to my lips when she answered it and handed her the rose and kissed her mouth and then went away without saying or hearing anything, but my image of what could be had been almost immediately fractured. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the penetration, and I can’t remember if either of us came, so I don’t know if I revaluated her in the sadness that follows all of my comings or if I reached some negative prognoses about us in the more general context of my life.

The first morning I awoke in her apartment before she did, and I was alone with her sleeping face, and there was the painting, which looked like a gateway into something magic, and there too were her panties, discarded, white, and very soft looking in the morning sun, and I held them, and they felt also like some kind of gateway, but for whatever reason I was certain by then that we were limited.

K came around during a time of growing pains, but what I felt was mostly shattered. Before her and after, I’d prowl bars with a false smile and an earnest desire for connection and you could find me mostly alone and half drunk and looking out my bedroom window at almost any five am.

Not long after the first time we fucked, a small group of people came to drink at my apartment and she was among them. I found her in the kitchen with several girls. I offered each a pastry and I remember how her eyes fell when I held them toward her. She shook her head and it seemed for a moment that everybody felt awkward, but maybe it was just her and me. I took two of the girls on a tour of the apartment. Coming back, we surprised K hastily eating one of the pastries and when she saw us she put a hand over her mouth. A look of shame came into her eyes and she turned immediately to the window to chew and swallow and put down the pastry in semi-private

The last time we were alone together wasn’t long after that, though I wouldn’t say our demise was related. Her shame both repelled and attracted me. Regardless, the clock was ticking on us. That last time, we didn’t fuck. We just sat on the couch and almost kissed.

She told me she felt it was over.

I said that she was right.

It was quiet as it always seemed to be between us, even when we fucked, when she’d lightly hold the lateral muscles of my back in her hand and guide or perhaps follow my motion. She felt big inside and comfortable and she always kept her eyes closed, a solid and solemn fucking, for which most certainly fucking is the wrong word.

She wanted to know if we would be friends and I told her we would. We sat for a long time. This was an apartment I shared with two girls, both of whom will show up in this blog, and the windows were large, the floor high. Palm trees stood out against the sinking sun and even the smog looked pretty.

K sat there on the couch and the sun fell down and I was aware of what I’d believed about me in the context of her and how it wasn’t true and I knew that I was headed back to what I’d recently been.

I took out her breast and she let me. I kissed the nipple and looked up at her. It was dusk and she was crying without any sound, and the sadness that seemed to descend on us was deep.

?

I've no idea why there is no place to comment on the last entry.
Maybe this one?
New entry, tomorrow, late.

i

She worked as a cocktail waitress at the club where R danced.

A petite Black woman with a British accent who had once been on a television program that reunited her with her father. This was the story she and her husband told us as we sat around on an afternoon waiting for darkness to fall. He was more interested in its telling and how we should understand her through it than she was. We were sober because I was fairly new back into the country and absolutely new to this part of it, and I hadn’t realized you couldn’t buy liquor in my county on a Sunday.

The husband, in essence, was a fool, and I don’t think that about every man. He couldn’t see the situation for what it was and this blindness gave him a sort of desperation that caused him to try to manipulate the girls into doing what they were there to do without manipulation.

There were no surprises but everything came to him as a surprise. Just as he’d realize he’d done or said another stupid thing and possibly blown the gig, the girls would take it another step and confused relief would move across his face. The evening unfolded despite him.

R took off her clothes and he undressed i except for her panties. Then R lay down and i kneeled on the carpet between her legs and peered at R’s x for a little while. The husband watched breathless, the way you’d watch a butterfly finally descend to the tip of your finger. Then i closed her eyes and lowered her head. There was absolute silence for a moment, just the motion of her head moving slightly in a short and repeating nod.

She was a bitch really, i, or that was what the dancers thought of her, but R has a way with everybody. It was clear that despite the rings, i was mixed up with this boy just barely: he was in love and she didn’t even like him.

I assumed their marriage had something to do with a green card.

In the conversations before the undressing, they’d referenced problems in the marriage, something they were trying to work past, and the way they talked around the problem made it seem as if she’d recently had an affair and he was one of those husbands who thought he could accept it and they could purge it in counseling, and she was one of those wives who always going to be thinking about that and other lovers.

He thought as boys tend to think that somehow two girls being together would be about him and not about them enjoying each other and using him as a witness excuse, but it was even worse than that because they had me and he was really unnecessary.

She was a thin girl with heavy but not false breasts and a nicely rounded if not overly supple ass. The time she was the prettiest, it was when before she knelt, before she bowed her head; it was when she was standing there with her panties on and her belly was sunken and her breasts hung heavily and her face was slightly turned. I have that moment and other in photographs.

She didn’t take off her g-string as she knelt there between R’s legs. R was mostly still, with her shoulder folded slightly in and her legs pressed slightly open and her head slightly risen so that she could look down her torso. Her belly was taut and the apparent difference in the girls’ bodies was exercise, though i was in a certain shape and had her own way of looking appealing. You could hear R breathing more heavily but it was still a fairly silent room.

I got behind i and kneaded her ass and then pushed the panty aside and fingered her for five or so minutes. I looked at the boy and I could see that he was worried not that I was touching his woman but that what I was doing might cause everything to stop, and yet he’d say nothing to get me off because this change too could cause a halting. He sat there staring, paralyzed like that, the way you look the first time you see pornography or real violence.

I knew her better than he did, and I knew that she wanted to get into some kind of deep water and that at this moment anything could happen and she wouldn’t mind.

I knew she was here for a full on baptism.

I kissed her x and she lifted her ass to better meet my mouth. After a little while, the boy came down to try his hand at being involved. There was something about him that disgusted me, his pathos, the way he wore his hair, his idiocy, and I couldn’t bear to see him touch my girl so I nodded him away.

I sat back myself.

We watched and I took a few more pictures.

I couldn’t tell you now how she tasted or felt inside. I remember that her flesh was overly soft. It was another x and around it another woman, one I’d known for a very short time but understood because she is a type and because I’ve known that type, and touching her really wasn’t important.

I’d seen it all before and been a deeper part of it, and though it didn’t bore me it didn’t do much for me either.

I knew that he’d sit shell shocked if I got behind her again and that he’d likewise remain motionless if I began fucking her. I knew that she would thrust herself back against the fuck as she continued to try to devour something which cannot be eaten.

Nothing in any of it really inspired me.

R and I, we were still ok then, though who is to say what will become of a restless heart?

This was the girl’s first time and you could see that she felt safe and you could see that she felt famished and she licked away and away and away, clinging to R like she’d never stop, like a tic who once attached seems to never find the occasion to unattach.

When it was all over you could see that i felt there should be more; you could see that the magic door she keeps on expecting to swing open was not open. She sat against the couch with her lips moist, her face perplexed. The boy, he kept trying to hold and kiss her, but I could see a sort of vacancy move into her eyes, and the room itself had gone cold.

And I felt in ways we were kindred spirits, though I did not like or respect her.

C and xx

We drive country roads and she plays a game with me and three of my friends. The winner is supposed to fuck her. What she is really angling for is probably more than any of us but she can handle. I’ve kissed her before, more drunk than I am now, that first time in the back seat of another friend’s car and the liquor so high in my head that I can remember thinking as our tongues twirled around and around that I wished I could just calm for a moment and know I was really doing this with her. Or anybody.

That I was kissing a girl. That she was kissing me.

We’ve driven into the city and back and have been drunk and sobered and are drunk again, and now we take turns kissing her for a timed minute to see who she thinks deserves to fuck. Earlier, we rounded a bend and below us were giant people and for a fraction of a second my understanding of the world shattered and then I realized it was the drive-in.

Round after round and she's never really sure and then finally it’s finished.

I don’t win and take the losing not well, but at least it’s shared. By the time everything is settled, we’re all exhausted and the steam seems to have run out of her, as if she got all she really needed in all that kissing.

C and the winner and I get out at my car and without asking I drive him home first. We watch him scale the side of his house and go in the window and then we start off, into the mountains again.

Maybe I asked or maybe I assumed or maybe she told me to go back. I can’t remember.
By the time she and I pull off the road beneath a shelter of trees it is near dawn.

Her hair was tightly curled and I think I can see her face now and what I see I wouldn’t call pretty but she was known for her sex and I had never had any, the closest being a girl at a fair the year before who took me to the side of the church where she told me that I didn’t kiss properly. That girl, her skin tasted of salt and she was fleshy and when I put my hand down her jeans, I was surprised by the wetness. I believed it must be blood and told her to wait a second, that I thought I’d heard something. Than I went round the corner and examined my fingers in a streetlamp and smelled them before I returned to her.

This was experience but didn’t make me experienced.

C’s shirt disappeared into her pants and when I got them down a little ways I saw that what she wore was really a teddy. There were maybe three snaps and each of them was a little puzzle demystified with shaking fingers in a mess of hair that I felt would pull easily.

And beneath the hair the flesh.

It was bare then and the air around us was gray. Her x looked small and the hair looked too much. I think I touched it but I’m not sure. What I do remember is that I looked at it for some long time and it seemed to look at me. C was leaning back against the door with her eyes half closed and she didn’t move or speak. There were the barely open lips, the not yet hooded clitoris, pictures upon which I’d grown up, but I’d never seen something so ominously alive, and if you want to fill in a cliché about a hunter and prey, in this scenario I most certainty felt more the prey, looking at her soft thighs and hair-nestled x the way a young man looks at the bully he has been taught and encouraged to fight even though he’ll lose.

I was tired and I wished it weren’t light out and that I was drunk again or that I’d let the winner take his prize or that I’d never played or wanted to.

It was an awful car, my first, a Falcon Ford Future, all black, with a three on the tree, and this was 1987 or so, and I was a child, and the girl laid there against the far door with her eyes slit and on me, her breasts not bare, her teddy undone.

This is the second x and that’s as far as it went.

m

I was nineteen and a virgin and still of an age where I though if a woman let you fuck her, she’d let you love her.

She was a major in the graduate drama program and had been in a film. She’d just kicked a lover out of her apartment, a man with sad eyes and thinning hair who probably knew the things about how it does and doesn’t works between a man and a woman that I didn’t yet know and couldn’t imagine.

What she saw in me, a boy, I suppose was some opposite of whatever he was. Every time I slept in her bed, I kept my slacks on.

I knew fucking was supposed to last longer, but I was just happy to be doing it. I’d apologize after I finished, the way a person who beats a loved one can only weigh her feelings after the release.

I said to her, I love you.

She said to me, Does it bother you that I can’t say that?

My father was away and so I took her to his house in the country. The dog of my youth was dead and the electric fence was supposed to be off, but when I leaned against it to close the gate, a jolt shot through me. My arms were loaded down with her things and I threw them involuntarily as I shot forward and I landed on my knees at her feet.

She was wearing a jean skirt. Later, we’d light a fire and we’d fuck in front of it for a few minutes and even later we’d fuck on the glider on the front porch in the cold air. Fucking for us was always face to face and was always quick.

It was dusk, and I’d been shocked and was kneeling next to her and looking up at her and she was looking down at me. In somebody else’s story this is that memory you laugh about over the years, but her face was stern and I don’t think I ever did anything that visibly amused her. What I see of that moment in my mind’s eye is a woman with a boy she didn’t want to take care of.

We lasted about three months. I don’t know how many times I came in her. Her apartment had a particular smell. Maybe some day I’ll come across it again and I’ll more fully remember what it was like to be with her, my first real lover.

Blond hair, sharp nose, blue eyes. I remember her head shot and the pictures her agent had her take in a bathing suit.

I remember walking home one morning after a night rain, from her apartment to mine, that university town, the bridge, the puddles here and there, my slacks rolled up, my shoes tied and thrown over my shoulder, my naivety on display. I didn’t know anything about fucking and I didn’t know how to read the troubled expression she often wore, not sadness but genuine perplexity, as if she were always asking herself: why did I let this person in? How do I get him out?

Toward the end, I was restless myself, but I didn’t know what it meant or that it would become so salient in me later. She would sleep and I would not and I would rise up quietly and get in my car, a sports car, all I had to show for the death of my grandmother, and drive the country roads outside the city, very fast, my stomach going hard on turns I might not make.

And she’d still be asleep. And if she knew I’d been gone she never asked me where or why.

I thought I was in love and when it was finished, I’d drawn lines with a razor on my forearms. Wounds like x’s of their own, the blood a different kind of coming, and the general sense of being unfulfilled, that whatever you’ve done, it hasn’t been enough.

l

It would have been better if she at least acknowledged it. Or maybe if I were older and had at least experienced it before.

But as that point, even though I believed an x could do that, I didn’t know it actually would.
I hadn’t had enough lovers or loved any of those I’d had long enough to hear one of those sounds.

If she had said something about it, perhaps we could have laughed together, or perhaps we could have pretended to laugh, anyway.

As it was, her x was talking before we’d even started fucking. This was in a small room with a futon where we were supposed to be watching Tombstone on a little tv/vcr combo. She told me when she closed the door on her roommates that there was no way we were going to have sex.
And then, after just a little finger fucking, her x began to babble. I try to imgine what she saw on my face in those first moments of stunned non-silence.

It started before I went in and never shut up, not during the fucking or even afterwards.

She was a beautiful a girl and still might be. I’d known her briefly years before, a cheerleader for another school’s wrestling team. But now I was in college and she was a barmaid at a place I’d gone into and we were older and her face and body were sharper and I wanted her.

Now it was hard as I was having her to keep wanting her.

She put her hands on my face and held it close to hers and I was trying not to wince during each moment of silence that seemed like the mericful end but was followed by a sudden burst.

We fucked and I tried to go easy as if to calm her x, and we talked in semi-high pitched whispers about how this must be a certain kind of destiny, us bumping into each other these few years later, as if we could talk enough romance around this ragged fucking it would be transcendent.
As if if we talked continually neither of us would hear what was happening below, her x going on and on, like Donald Duck in a rage.

I’d see her a month or two after, riding in a grocery cart on the street between bars. She was drunk and two or three drunk boys were pushing her along. It was a late night and odd already, and I was alone and headed home and I stood still and watched. They had the look of some corrupt medieval morality dramatists purposefully lost between cycles. She stood up shakily, a mock goddess you could believe in after midnight, and the boys went hush and for a moment she held a pose. There was her ass in this atmosphere of mirth and lust and there was her hair and that wide smile and those half shut eyes, the streetlamp making her something more than she or probably anybody else ever was.

There are some things we can’t afford to know about a lover too early on, but at that moment, I could almost forget that I had touched and heard her. At that moment, it was, in fact, hard to remember that if I could actually sweep her away from those boys and undress her again the results wouldn’t really be magic.