-9-

After high school, I continued to drink alcohol from time to time, but my system was a virgin one with this drug. I also had an ulcerous stomach as a teen with constant heartburn, a physical manifestation of my inner turmoil. Alcohol coupled with dipping tobacco created even more acid in my stomach that bubbled up into my esophagus. For this reason, I preferred marijuana as not only did it provide more of an escape from reality while genuinely easing anxiety, there was no heartburn or the nausea-inducing side effects like the ones I got from alcohol and nicotine. Cannabis is a legitimate, medical cure for nausea. The actual THC high itself is different as well from alcohol; it’s a better high with pot. That said, I still drank.

I had yet to build up a tolerance to alcohol and so became intoxicated fairly easily. I once bought a bottle of red wine at nineteen years old and wandered around the UT campus in Austin one night taking slugs from it. I met up with a friend and fellow student who was working on one of her big paintings in the art department building. I had only drunk barely half of the bottle of wine but was very drunk. She and I finished the rest and ended up back on the other side of campus at the student union bar, drinking kamikazes until two a.m. By the time I got back to my dorm room in Jester, I was stumbling and nauseous and threw up in the communal showers for the rest of the night.

If too much alcohol enters my system, I begin to feel nauseous and this is usually enough to make me stop drinking. It’s a fine line though, not to have already put too much alcohol in your bloodstream to use respiration to get it out of your body in time to counteract the nausea. When nausea sets in, it is usually too late and your body will vomit up this poison to get it out of your system. Even then, lying on my bed or on a couch after throwing up, too much alcohol remains in my blood and the room spins, or I feel like I am on a tossing boat at sea and continue to be nauseous and vomit for hours though I have nothing left in my stomach. I’ve always ended up just lying by the toilet then to vomit, curling up on the cold white tiles of the bathroom floor between violent regurgitations, the hard slick surface helping as anything that can take your mind off the spinning constant nausea is a relief.

Most times when I am vomiting after drinking too much I think to myself: I will never do this again. . . . Why did I do this? Or I’ll make some big promise to never drink again as long as I can just stop being sick right now. Immediately. “Stop this vomiting and I will never drink again.” And for a few days, this works. I don’t drink or have any desire to drink. After a day or two, I begin to feel good again. My health and color come back. My appetite returns. And one night, I am alone and bored or out with others, and I begin to drink again.

Alcohol is the cheapest and easiest drug to get in America. If you’re young, under the drinking age, alcohol is harder to get than marijuana because the former is regulated by the state. But if you’re of legal drinking age, then for the majority of Americans who are continually seeking some sort of escape, a brief daily respite from their mundane reality, often enough nothing is available and alcohol has to suffice. Off and on, I drank alcohol throughout my twenties and did eventually begin to develop a tolerance. I never enjoyed getting completely drunk to the point of losing control and, usually, I’m able to avoid this.

My second wife Karen was an attractive and intelligent woman who drank alcohol every day when I met her. Her father was a severe alcoholic who drank half a quart of Wild Turkey or more every day until he died in his late sixties. Her siblings also drank regularly though only one brother did so to a debilitating degree. He had been arrested for driving while intoxicated so many times that he had a special breathalyzer alcohol tester attached to the ignition of his truck. If you were intoxicated, the car wouldn’t start. He found others to blow into it and still drove without a license the last time I saw him, wrecking his truck often. The other younger brother, Tommy, the one I was friends with, was a former heroin addict who’d served time for robbing pharmacies in Austin to get opiates.

I’d met Tommy when Karen and I were first dating. I’d brought him a chocolate shake and cheeseburger at the Austin rehab facility where he was locked up. It was his third and last chance to get clean or go back to the joint. They’d flashed Tommy’s mug shot all over the local ten o’clock Austin news one night as a parole violator and everybody was after him. We hid him out at the farm for one night in a trailer in the back pasture but he fled the next morning. I had given him the heads up that some of his family friends had stopped by the house asking for him, encouraging him to turn himself in. His old redneck father still loved his oldest son deeply and he was the one who had driven all over town for weeks, then finally found Tommy holed up in some shitty motel on South Congress, surrounded by garbage, his six foot three frame emaciated down to maybe 140 pounds. Tommy was getting his health back now in rehab. He didn’t want to go back to prison but told me he did get better heroin in Huntsville than on the outside in Austin. Stuck in this high dollar facility for months, whenever Karen and I visited, he talked to me longingly of his days as an outlaw in Austin in the early seventies.

“Man, Jake, I was a pimp,” Tommy said. “I walked around with a fucking three-inch-thick roll of bills in my pocket and a .38 on my hip. I was selling heroin, Tuenols, Nembutals and Dilaudid all over town to everybody man, rich people, working people. I had all these bitches. There was this doctor who used to have me over to his house in Westlake, this old rich pervert and he’d pay me to bring over two hookers and we’d shoot speedballs all night while he watched me fucking both of those girls. I can still see him, wearing this silk robe, jacking off his old wrinkled white dick, walking up next to me on the bed an’ sayin’ ‘Yeah Tommy, that’s it man, fuck her in the ass, stick that cock up her ass.’ I’m tellin’ ya, I was a pimp.”

Now he was a skilled heavy machine operator, addicted to alcohol and nicotine, two drugs that would kill him less quickly than heroin and coke might have as he had no willpower with the latter. “I couldn’t stop,” he told me. “I keep shootin’ til I run out of money, and then keep stealing shit and pawnin’ it until I got caught. What can I say, man? There is nothing better in the world than a speedball . . . you can either nod out or just get up an’ go. But . . .” He shook his head wistfully. Whenever he and I spoke, I could tell there always seemed to be something missing from his life now, this empty space left when he stopped using heroin and cocaine. It was like the loss of a loved one; an eternal dulling of the consciousness of daily experience, of life, a feeling I wouldn’t understand myself for years.

Tommy’s little sister, Karen, easily slipped into my recently divorced, solitary life in Austin mainly due to loneliness, vodka, and sex, in that order. Alcohol can also stimulate the libido, or loosen a person up more to a perception or reality of want. The first night I ever fucked Karen, before we were married, she came to my apartment, a tree-house loft in Clarksville, with a half a quart of Absolut. My apartment had a good view of downtown Austin and she burst in with the bottle while I sat typing at my desk. We opened the vodka and mixed it with a splash of cranberry juice. Karen had taste and was elegantly dressed, her thick blond hair up on her head, her full lips wet and pink. She downed her drink in three seconds.

“I’m sick of being a prostitute,” she said.

“How so?” I made her another big vodka cranberry.

“I just had to have dinner with that piece of shit spoiled brat husband of mine. I pretended that we could maybe have sex or get back together if he would write me a check for my credit card bills.”

“How’d it go?”

“I got the check but promised to go have dinner with him again soon. No sex though.”

“Too bad.”

“I can’t imagine that hairy monkey on me now. The things he used to make me do . . .”

“Oh yeah?” I had another vodka, poured some into her glass.

“Well,” she said and smiled, “he liked to tie me up and slap me. Or I tied him up and shoved a dildo up his ass, or he’d force me to suck on his balls or lick his asshole or something like that. I mean, I like being tied up but I don’t want some hairy assed man sitting on my face . . .”

“Who does?”

We were just drinking the vodka straight now and both getting drunk. She walked over to my bed with the bottle and sat down, hiking up her dress enough for me to see she had no underwear on from my desk chair. Karen and I had been dating for weeks, but I was afraid that if I had sex with her and enjoyed it, I would immediately get sucked into her chaotic and expensive life. Even her current lovelorn, well-heeled architect husband couldn’t support her. But the alcohol, her legs, and that tight light-blue knit dress she was pulling up made me stand up and walk over to her on the bed. She set down the bottle, scooted back on the bed, propped herself up with a pillow, and pulled her dress up the rest of the way. She had a small labia with barely a tuft of light blondish brown hair. I went down on her for only a few minutes, sticking my finger up her vagina and working her clitoris with my tongue. At one point she asked me to put a finger inside her ass also, and soon she was screaming so loud I thought it was an act. She also severely scratched my back and neck.

When she was done I asked: “Jesus, Karen, was that real? Do you always come like that?”

She shrugged. “Pretty much. I just have really strong multiple orgasms when someone goes down on me; I can’t come though from penetration.”

She jumped me then and yanked off my belt, tying my wrists up with it. She took a slug of vodka and then poured some of the bottle onto my erect cock. I jumped at the cold liquid.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, trying to get my hands free.

“I’m just disinfecting that thing,” she said, laughing, and took a long pull from the bottle, then poured some into my mouth and all over my face. “Goddammit, Karen—”

“Just relax,” she said. She began to perform fellatio on me but was so drunk she kept biting me.

“Untie me,” I said.

“I’m sorry this angle is difficult.”

“Untie me,” I said.

She did and I threw her on her back on the bed. I grabbed a belt from my robe and tied her wrists while she fought back quite well, a tall, strong, blond German farm girl. She kept her legs pressed together and was getting aroused. “Hit me,” she said.

I slapped her lightly in the face.

“Harder, you pussy.”

I slapped her pretty hard leaving a red mark on her face and when she turned and looked up at me, I could see how much she liked it. I forced her legs apart with difficulty until I could get her ankles in my hands. I then fucked her some, pulled out, and climbed up onto her chest and straddled her breasts. I grabbed her by the back of the head and slowly moved my cock down into her throat.

“There you go, baby. Suck on that cock. You like that cock?”

“Mmm-mmmph,” she groaned, her mouth full. I positioned myself to finger her clitoris and move my cock in and out of her mouth and when she came this time she almost bit my dick in half. When she was done, I worked it in her mouth again and finally pulled out and ejaculated on her face, big white dollops of cum falling over those full perfect lips, dripping down her chin and cheek.

I can’t remember much else that night except that we finished the whole bottle of vodka. As I was passing out, Karen was getting dressed to go work as a waitress at an expensive restaurant in downtown Austin, still drunk off her ass. I didn’t get sick but would be hung-over all the next day while she received one of her biggest nights of tips ever, the alcohol only enhancing her quick and cutting tongue.

For the next year or so, our nights followed a similar line. She managed to divorce her husband and get me to start helping her pay her many bills. We drank every night to excess either in my apartment or at her farmhouse in the country. When in Austin, we hit a few of the better restaurants in town regularly until we shut every last one of them down spending thousands of dollars of my savings or putting it all on credit cards at Mezzaluna, the Granite Café, or The Shoreline at the Four Seasons. More than once, we were cut off by the establishment, two obnoxious drunks. The last time I was thrown out of a restaurant in Austin was from one of our favorite hangouts, Katz’s Deli and Bar on 6th Street. We were up on the outdoor patio at 1:30 a.m. and Karen ordered a bowl of matzo ball soup. I ordered another vodka tonic. When the food came, Karen was so drunk she stuck her spoon into the bowl and dumped the entire contents of hot broth and one giant matzo ball into her lap. The waiter had yet to even leave the table. Karen held up the matzo ball to him.

“What is this crap? This is a tennis ball, not a matzo ball. Here”— she tossed it to him and it bounced off his chest—“give my insults to your chef. And tell him I used to be one also.”

As soon as I started to take a sip of my drink, another waiter suddenly appeared and took the glass deftly out of my hand. A young, tall, college student, a nice young man I’m sure, began to look frightened when I stood up.

I picked up Karen’s matzo ball and grabbed the waiter by the front of his shirt. I’d never drunk so much before. Alcohol in these large amounts made me more belligerent. “Listen, you little shit. You never should’ve SOLD me and then BROUGHT me that drink if I can’t have it.”

He was holding my glass behind his back. “My manager!” he yelled loudly. “He says you guys needed to be cut off—”

I put the dirty matzo ball in his face. “I’m gonna shove this ball down your fucking throat if you don’t give me my drink back.”

Just as he handed me the drink, the manager and two other waiters came out and basically told us they had called the police which was all we needed to hear to split just after Karen made a show of leaving the poor put upon waiter a quarter tip.

There were so many nights like that in our first year of dating that I can barely recall any of them. Alcohol, like marijuana, can also wipe out some of your memory. We were running out of money at the end of that first year. When we married it brought in at least a little more cash from gifts. Karen had asked me to marry her one afternoon in Mezzaluna, a restaurant on Fourth Street in Austin. Both of us were smashed on Bellinis and I foolishly said yes. We had many mutual friends then in Austin, and there were many alcohol-fueled parties at the farmhouse just south of town. Our home came to be known to many then as “The Farm,” and people often stayed with us for days, or weeks, most of them usually young men and women in college at UT whom Karen had befriended at work and to whom she sometimes rented a room for cheap. I was often at work late in the city or traveling on business and would arrive home with parties in full swing, “Aguas de Marco” at full volume on the stereo, Karen wearing a cowboy hat, drunk off her ass and surrounded by men. She’d run to greet and kiss me, more than once almost plowing through the plate glass door that separated our sun room from the back porch of the house.

Karen’s best friend came into town one night in the early nineties to come live with us in the farmhouse, just after we married. Her name was Heather and she was thin and tall with long blond hair, a pretty smile, green eyes. She was from England and had worked as a model there, barely making a living. She had hoped to do the same or better one day in the States, but was broke again and in the country illegally to boot. With no real set plan, she moved in with us and stayed for almost a year. Heather was just as much if not more of a drinker than Karen was. One night, after we left Heather alone in the farmhouse stranded with no car, she was so desperate for alcohol that she drank a load of dry, foul-tasting Vermouth, killing half a bottle.

It was nice to have the attention of these two beautiful women all the time. Heather was as acerbic, attractive, and wild as Karen, and she joined us now on most of our drunken Austin nightlife excursions. Back at the house, she flirted with me often, flashing me her small, taut breasts. Or she bent over in front of me in the pair of short grey gym shorts she always wore, laughing as I stared, transfixed by the cheeks of her tight little ass. Even better, after several months Karen started letting Heather sleep with us in our wide king-sized bed when Heather complained of being either too cold or too hot every night in her own room. Karen’s only comment on the arrangement was the very first night when she told me calmly before going to sleep: “And Jake, please don’t fuck my best friend.”

I was content to sleep with these two women and live out the rest of my days on The Farm and never leave. But we did leave, often, and though both women were trouble as individual drunks, they were even worse when intoxicated together and wandering any city in the night. The main problem was that neither of them had ever had to ever address the consequences of their actions; there was always some wealthy father, boyfriend, or husband to fix their messes. I was making decent money, so I suppose both of them felt safe in leaving a swath of destruction wherever we went.

I wasn’t rich though, and thus it fell on me to try to rein them in before we were sued for some real damage, or hurt someone while driving drunk—which we regularly did, along with millions of other Americans. If the State ever really wanted to crack down on drunk driving they would just have police give breathalyzer tests to people before leaving any bar or restaurant. But since that would be bad for business and easily a violation of privacy, it was better to either encourage or tacitly allow alcohol intoxication in our society and then make money on both ends by selling the people the drug and incarcerating the ones who were unlucky or poor enough to be targeted and caught. It was mostly just chance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that took drunk drivers off the road. I’ve driven legally drunk for years, and still do, along with almost everyone else in America every Friday and Saturday night.

Eventually, I began to grow a little tired of Karen’s now two-person troublemaker act. When Heather and Karen berated a driver next to us, or ridiculed and insulted some guy trying to pick one or the other of them up in a bar, it was me who had to step in and calm the man down to avoid a fist fight, or drive the getaway car, or always, always, pick up the tab

The last night the three of us went out in Austin together was at a restaurant called Z-Tejas on 6th street at the edge of South Lamar. Karen knew the owner, and he escorted us to a nice table outdoors in the middle of their mostly empty patio. We ordered some dinner and a pitcher of margaritas for the three of us. They made strong margaritas at Z-Tejas with good tequila, and we were soon drunk before the food had arrived. In an attempt to stay vaguely sober, I had asked the waitress to leave us her pitcher of ice water after she brought us the second pitcher of margaritas. Karen and Heather had started to argue with each other playfully about nothing. Karen used one of the three thick, Saguaro cactus-shaped martini glasses they’d served us to fill and drain her fourth margarita. Then, without even looking or hesitating, she tossed the heavy glass over her shoulder where it sailed over the wooden fence that surrounded the restaurant patio and crashed in the parking lot next door.

“Goddammit, Karen,” I tried to admonish her. “You could’ve hit someone with that.”

“Oh, they’re all right. Wait . . .” She looked down at the table and saw she’d thrown away her own drinking glass. “Oh, shit.” She grabbed at Heather’s glass, laughing, “Gimme that!”

“You . . . are quite insane,” Heather said, draining her own glass, then also throwing it over the fence into the same parking lot full of cars. I could hear the smash of glass upon glass, probably a windshield. Heather was more intoxicated than Karen and some of her margarita spilled on Karen as she threw the glass.

“You bitch,” Karen said. “You got that sticky stuff all over me.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Heather slurred. “Go wash it off.”

I poured both women some ice water from the other pitcher, filling their water glasses, urging them to have a drink.

Karen had a sip. “What is this? Someone put water in my margarita!”

Heather tried to drink from her water glass and spilled some of it down her chin and shirt. “My drinking problem,” she muttered.

Both women’s minds seemed to be on a seven second delay.

“You wash it off,” Karen said, and she flicked some of the water out of her glass at Heather.

Heather screamed lightly and tossed half of her ice water at Karen but most of it missed. The gesture alone was enough for Karen, a woman who never left any gesture unchallenged. She threw her entire glass of ice water on Heather, who genuinely screamed at the cold water drenching her yellow shirt. Her nickel-sized nipples grew hard and tightened under the cloth that now clung to her small breasts. Heather quickly picked up the half full ice water pitcher and Karen leaped to her feet, screaming and laughing as well, both women chasing each other from table to table with ice water.

We had run off the customers from the only other table that was occupied on the patio. The large glass wall that made up the back of the restaurant was lined with tables and I could see each person and every table watching these two drunken women chasing each other. Heather threw part of the contents of her pitcher at Karen, the water hitting her shirt and soaking it. Karen immediately grabbed another full glass of water off a table and soaked Heather’s white pants thoroughly. Heather trapped Karen between two tables that rested against the glass wall and threw the rest of the pitcher of ice and water at her. Karen ducked and the ice crashed against the glass of the restaurant with a loud clash that made the customers inside jump. This finally drew the attention of Karen’s friend Greg, the owner, who escorted all three of us out the back door within seconds not even asking for us to settle the check; he just wanted these obnoxious idiots gone and would take Karen to task for the display later (and send me to the bank for damages).

We were so drunk it took us several minutes to find our car, as we’d parked in front of the restaurant on 6th Street. Both women were hanging on to me to walk. Halfway down the alley, I remembered where we were parked and lead them to the new Land Cruiser that I couldn’t afford and that Karen had insisted I buy. They stopped before getting in.

“I’m soaking wet,” Heather said and she began to take off her pants.

“Me too,” Karen said. She took off her pants and then unbuttoned her shirt, grabbing at mine. “Gimme your shirt!”

I took off my shirt and Karen took off her top. She wore no bra, no panties, was completely bare-assed naked. I heard a small group cheer arise from behind me. Up the hill, a number of people were sitting out on patios in front of three restaurants, including the one we’d just left; they were watching and laughing at us, shaking their heads. One table of young men was cheering Karen on. She pulled on my large shirt, flashed them her breasts quickly to another cheer, and tried to button the shirt in vain as I pulled her around the front of the car and shoved her into the front seat. Heather had crawled into the back seat holding her wet white pants.

The thought of the police had yet to occur to me as I briefly drove the wrong way down 6th Street. Fortunately, the traffic was light. I only snapped to after three cars came swerving and honking around me. The near wrecks sent a quick shot of adrenaline down my spine. I turned right and sped down South Lamar over the Colorado River.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Heather said. She’d taken off her yellow shirt and I rolled down the window for her as she vomited out of the car. Karen always got horny when drunk and she was now grabbing at my crotch. “Could you please be quiet?!” she yelled to Heather. “I’m trying to suck my husband’s dick.”

Karen couldn’t get my zipper undone but I stopped her anyway, telling her to tend to Heather as it was coming to me now how bad this was going to look if we were to be pulled over. All of us were extremely intoxicated, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, Heather was naked except for her underwear and bra as she threw up out the window, and Karen wore only my large shirt over her naked body. When driving drunk, I always go into a rote route memory pattern of driving, a sort of autopilot. I didn’t wake up to where I was until I felt a wave of relief coming over me as I saw the tall corn stalks that lined the miles of pastureland around our old country farmhouse. We’d somehow made it down the interstate, i-35, out of the city, and we were safe.

Heather was feeling better and dropped in and out of sleep in the back seat. Karen had begun to kiss my ear and cheek. I had had a perpetual hard-on since both women had removed their pants and tops at Z-Tejas and Karen had now gotten past my zipper and was trying to suck my cock. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Heather watching Karen’s head bob up and down in my lap and we both smiled at each other. Karen stopped and tried to get out of her seat and straddle my lap, something we’d done before in my old truck a couple times, fucking while driving out in the country. The new car had bucket seats though, not a bench seat, so neither the blow job or sex were working well at all and I pushed Karen off of me.

“Come on, I’m gonna have a wreck.”

“I want to have sex, please” she said, imitating Heather’s English accent. She managed to climb back over the gear shift and was straddling me again. “Heather, go back to sleep. You shouldn’t be seeing these kinds of things.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not looking.”

She was though and I spent just as much time looking at her in the rearview mirror as I did looking at Karen or, at the very least, watching the road. Karen had slid down onto my dick and was humping away, pushing her clitoris down on the top of my cock and grinding against her pubic bone.

“Quit looking at me!” Heather said to Karen and laughed.

“You are such a slut!” Karen said and both women laughed again.

“I can’t come this way,” Karen said. “Hurry up and get me home.”

Having Heather watch us fuck gave me no end of excitement. Just as I came inside of Karen, I may have briefly blacked out and thus missed the last hairpin turn that led to the farmhouse. I remember the girls screaming and then laughter. Karen was talking to me. “Pull up your pants you idiot!”

I heard Heather’s voice as she leaned over my seat. “That’s nice . . .”

Karen was pulling up my pants and trying to close my zipper. “Stay away from it, you harlot!”

“Harlot!”

I was coming to my senses and saw that we were surrounded by tall brown stalks of corn in every direction. “Where the hell are we?”

“I believe you’ve driven into a cornfield, darling,” Karen said.

“I saw the whole thing,” Heather said. “That wretched woman, that beast was accosting you.”

I was sobering up some and began to back up quickly, following the downed corn stalks behind me. I could imagine some angry farmer coming out of his house to find three yuppie drunks in an expensive rice burner destroying his hard work, unloading on us with his twelve gauge shotgun. I sped down the road back to the farmhouse. Just as we pulled up to the closed cattle gate on our land, Karen muttered “I’m gonna take a little nap,” and closed her eyes.

“Get the gate, Karen.” I saw she’d completely passed out.

“I’ll get it,” Heather said. She sounded sober now; throwing up most of those margaritas had seemed to help. I knew a number of people who could drink heavily, vomit, and then feel just fine. Myself, once I reached that line of nausea and puked, I’d be sick all night. But for now I was still okay and I told Heather I’d open the gate to our long caliche drive.

Karen was dead weight and it was with difficulty that we got her out of the car and into the house, into bed. I was briefly excited again as she lay before me naked, my big white shirt open, revealing her tan skin and flat stomach. Heather went into the bathroom. I put on a clean shirt and lay with Karen; we kissed some when she awoke and then she fell into a deep sleep. I covered her up and went to the kitchen. I found a half empty bottle of a cheap chardonnay, Fetzer, and filled a wine glass to the top.

“Do you have anything to eat?”

Heather walked in from the bathroom. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck. Her hair was slightly wet from washing her face, her lips red from brushing her teeth. I walked outside with my wine as she rummaged in the bare kitchen for food. Heather soon joined me with a dark red apple in her hand and we walked into the back pasture. A bright three-quarter moon shone down on us both. The low mesquite trees stood out as isolated dark lumps sprinkled throughout the tall blue grassland. We stood close to one another and there wasn’t anything to say. She’d been sleeping in my bed for weeks and we’d held hands, or I had cuddled up behind her once or twice, pressing my hard-on against her back, whenever Karen had fallen asleep. Karen could out drink both of us and never get sick but when she went down, she went down hard, sleeping deep and long.

I could see Heather smiling at me in the blue light at the edge of the pasture. She took a bite from her apple and then offered it to me, both of us laughing.

“The forbidden fruit.”

“Just one bite . . .” she said.

I took a last drink from my wine glass and tossed it far out into the pasture.

“That’s how it starts . . .” I pulled her toward me. We began to kiss with a real and genuine intensity, built up from months of anticipation and thwarted desire. We were standing near a large, round concrete horse trough at the top of the pasture, pulling at each other’s clothes, moving our tongues in and out of each other’s mouths, sloppy and wet, slobbering all over each other. I was still drunk enough to have lost all thought of guilt or repercussion. It was, for me, a rare moment of complete and utter abandonment, a complete loss of control that was both fulfilling and exciting, the very opposite of the worry and enhanced anxiety that I had encountered in the past with too much cocaine. I simply didn’t care . . .

Before I knew it, I had pushed Heather to the ground and was humping on her savagely like some enraged silverback gorilla. Both of us still wore our clothes as she wrapped her legs around me tightly, grinding back against my erection, moaning in the night. I noticed the tall grass around us which brought me back to reality. I suddenly remembered other times I’d tried to have sex with women outdoors and how it rarely ever worked out well. For some women, it was exciting or even romantic, exotic, to have sex outdoors in some scenic setting. In the past, I’d obliged as best as possible but hay or grass sticking in your back or bugs biting your ass or water going up your nose as a beach wave crashed over the intertwined bodies, mosquitoes biting your neck, rain falling down—something was always distracting me. Now, I preferred a nice, warm, clean and preferably king-sized bed. I stopped and picked Heather up.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing, let’s try the house.”

“But Karen—”

“She’s out for the night.”

We began to kiss again and tried to walk, both of us still overcome with alcohol and want, unable to stop kissing or holding each other. Once inside the front door, Heather dropped to her knees, unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans, pulled out my erection and moved her mouth down eagerly over my cock. She began to truly suck my dick, so unlike Karen who, after we’d gotten married, usually only blew me reluctantly and poorly. Heather was sucking my dick like she wanted it, that long cock going deep down into her throat, her soft, wet mouth making a sucking, slurping sound.

I heard a distinct noise, a floorboard creaking, and yanked my dick out of Heather’s mouth with a plop, quickly pulling her to her feet.

Karen staggered into the dark room. “What’re y’all doing?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

“We were out in the pasture,” Heather said, standing in front of me.

“No,” Karen said, “y’all need to come to bed. Come on . . .”

She stumbled back into our big bed. I followed her and lay down while Heather ran to the bathroom. Karen turned away from me and was snoring by the time Heather came back into the bed and got under the covers. She’d taken off her clothes and wore one of my T-shirts and black underwear. We began to kiss again, her tongue deep in my mouth, as I turned her over and pulled down her panties. I reached under her, ran my hand down across her labia and up between the cheeks of her butt. I was surprised at how hairy and wet her ass and pussy were as she seemed so cool, trimmed and delicate on the outside, but I liked it. I pulled out my cock and started to slip inside of her but she stopped me and whispered over her shoulder in that accent “I’m still on my period . . .”

“So what?”

I began to fuck her slowly while manipulating her clitoris, lightly and quickly rubbing the tip of one finger over it until she began to moan lightly. The alcohol and having already come earlier in Karen had numbed me some and I was able to hold back. Heather grew louder though and I reached up with my other arm from beneath her neck and clamped my hand across her mouth.

“Heather, be quiet,” I said forcefully.

She bit at my fingers and I worked them in and out of her mouth to keep her quiet until she came. I sped up and soon came as well. Heather turned around and we kissed some more, leisurely on my part, but still eager on hers. To my surprise she went down on me again, and seemed as much or more energetic as before, burrowing under the covers, taking my bloody dick into her mouth. Even though I could feel my cock thickening, she was making a lot of noise and Karen was beginning to stir. We were pushing our luck, asking to get caught, and she didn’t seem to care. I pulled Heather up and whispered, “We need to stop.”

She tried to get up on top of me but I stopped her again, pushed her onto her back, and held her face with one hand so she was looking right at me.

“No,” I said. “Stop. It’s over.”

She put her arms around me and we kissed. I tasted something vague, the earthy semen and menstrual blood on her tongue.

“I love you, Jake.”

“Heather . . .” Her blond hair fell across her face . . . she was beautiful . . .

She held me tightly and put her head on my chest and said it again. “I love you so much. I always have . . .”

I didn’t say anything in reply because I didn’t really love anyone at the time except maybe one of my dogs, and, of course, that was different. When she finally fell asleep, I pushed her away and lay awake for what seemed like hours thinking about that wine glass I’d left out there in the pasture.