We lost a guy.
After a couple minutes with the weirdest fucking syllabus of all time, which had a reading list long enough to seriously disappoint me — isn’t that always the way with these low-credit art classes? — Mags broke up the share circle.
Which got me down, because in Winnie’s attempt to avoid sitting next to me again, she got stuck right across the circle from me, which was even better. Planted across from her, I could enjoy her vigilant attempt to avoid eye contact.
In fact, she didn’t look at me so hard that I couldn’t stop grinning. I watched her copy Maggie, who was showing us how to sit in lotus position — watched her stretch her black skirt over her black legging-clad knees so I couldn’t see up her skirt, watched her inch her body away from facing front into the circle, watched her profile with its sharp little jaw lock so tight the tips of her ears were red with the effort where they poked through her elf-hair.
If I licked her ears, they would feel hot.
Now we were all sitting on different X’s Maggie had taped to the floor, all over the stage. It turns out our energy is too unformed and selfish for the share circle, except in small doses. When she told us that, Hyong looked right at me, and my answering What, me? smile did not accomplish what it normally does.
My X was way out by the footlights. I couldn’t help but notice my X was the farthest away from anyone. Maggie made me sit facing out into the dark and empty seats so that I would discharge.
Except, instead of discharging my energy like a snap from a doorknob in winter, my staring into the dark, folded into lotus, just sent my energy right up into my spine, where it found — I know it did — its other pole. Because I felt, right where Maggie had left Winnie, a tug.
So I let myself drift on that tug. Let it center me like I was a boat swinging on anchor.
I believe in this energy stuff, is the thing. I feel it all the time from people, from groups of people. I pick up on it, and I send it back with an extra push from inside of myself. Nothing better than the give and take; it’s why fucking or anything related to fucking stops time. Fucking becomes the battery that powers the world, and no other force matters. You’re each inside the other — tongues, fingers, dicks, heat. You’re powered up, and it’s power for the sake of burning itself out for a momentary shove into oblivion.
I drifted and I thought of that, of hot ears in my mouth and what would happen if all of Winnie’s focus were on me like it was outside the tunnel, when I watched a blotch of pink make a mess of her paper-white skin. I eased into that, the yank of it, and sank right into the pumping throb these thoughts made of my dick. Right at the base of my skull where I was connected to her, I was charged with wet skin and open mouths and rubbing hands and filthy, defiling, sucking thrusts. I was spreading her ass and tonguing her asshole, I was dragging my balls over her sweaty thigh, I was fucking her mouth while she looked into my eyes and slid a middle finger in deep.
Which is why I jumped out of my goddamned skin when there was an echoing crash from the middle of the stage and Darren Wellborn shouted, This is fucking bullshit.
When I turned, he was kicking his way through shit in the wings to get to an exit, and Maggie was walking calmly after him.
As I thought about what could have happened to him, all by himself on his X, our eyes met. Mine and Winnie’s, from clear across the stage. It was like rare earth magnets, snapping together from where you’d tried to keep them separate in your palms — precise violence.
Her cheeks were so hot with blood, the color in them made her eyes look bright.
I looked away first.
I looked away first. I looked away to see my hand fisted in my shirt over my belly, my dick so hard I was afraid of coming lest I break something.
This is fucking bullshit.
I turned back around. Faked my way through the rest of it.
That day, in the four minutes before we left the theater, Maggie told us about “dark space.” About how we would be able to do exercises, a month from now, six weeks, completely in the dark, to push our energy out, to receive energy from others, to know each other and be known, act in a way that we could locate the part of us that wanted to do what we’d been asked to do, that wanted nothing more than that.
I couldn’t tell afterward if the dark space meant the theater or the part of us that craved all these forbidden things. The part of us that never said a lukewarm, Yeah, sure, okay, because it was too busy saying Fuck yes now more do it do it YES YES YES.
I didn’t want to find that space.
I didn’t want to skip lunch and bail on my next class so I could fast-walk back to my room, fling off my backpack, lock the door and drop to my knees, my hand already sinking past the doubled elastic waistbands of my skirt and leggings, wrist locked in place, starting to ache as I pushed my fingers past my clit and in, in.
My neck heated, my face, my nipples stiffened, and I didn’t want to be doing it, but the dark space said yeah. Yeah to my slick moist wet fingers in my cunt, on my clit. Yeah to the words, dirty thoughts a virgin shouldn’t have, a girl who looks like me isn’t authorized to think about. Friction, pressure, contact, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I came, it was with my eyes closed, the dark space behind my lids pulsing blue, orange, yellow, green as I remembered the way his thoughts had invaded me on that stage.
It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Like sorcery. Like magic.
It was just a class. A stupid class for theater majors, a make-out class, a joke.
I bit my lip and felt his fingers inside me, his tongue on me.
Every single dirty thought he’d had, flashing through my mind like fireworks.
I’m a smart guy.
Both my parents are smart. My mom’s a writer for public radio, and my dad had no choice but to be a professor or be eaten by wolves for lack of street smarts due to all the other smarts packed in his brain. I grew up without television in a house full of books, with gender-neutral playthings and periodic infusions of cultural programming.
Professor’s kid. It’s like a whole thing.
So when the end of the day found me jack-knifed in my beanbag, my head roaring with questions I had no answer to, my poor dick raw from jerking in a hot shower, I turned to a book.
A book, I had been raised to believe, would have answers.
I flipped to the reading list in the syllabus and started downloading stuff as fast as I could on my tablet.
A few hours later, I just had more fucking questions.
I’d learned, first, that contact improvisation was more typically understood as a kind of partner dancing where partners share a constant point of contact and move together, lift each other, fall and roll together, breathe together, and it is all effortless, because you have learned that your constant point of contact is everything in the entire world, as I understood it.
Hyong means to get us to control the energy that can exist between people until it is a tool no less necessary than pointe shoes to a lead ballerina.
The contact improvisational dance book had pictures and a link to a video. I watched it over and over. It made my nuts ache. My stomach drop. My eyes tear. It made my hands hurt with longing to shape around another body’s energy like that, to look into someone’s eyes and know exactly which direction to follow—
her.
Because, let’s face it. I didn’t watch that video and think about shaping Mark Esparanza’s body with my hands.
It got worse, though, because this class — this class at my unassuming, safe, and respectably ranked liberal arts college — diverged from contact improvisation contemporary dance by way of intersections between method acting theory by gurus like Meisner, Adler, and Strasberg and something else that our own Hyong brought to the table, which was accessing positive sources of energy, like sexual yearning and love, to broadcast this energy to an audience.
We were to touch each other with love and purpose, to lead and follow, to radiate our sexual selves and demonstrate, like this Meisner guy said, how to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
What I couldn’t work out in all that reading was why I couldn’t stop thinking about dragging Winnie Frederickson backstage and getting every part of her body against every part of my body in every possible configuration until we both fucking died of it.
I am no stranger to being horny. I understand wanting nothing more than to fuck yourself against something, to have the taste of someone else’s skin and sweat in your mouth, to get off on getting off, on the way someone’s throat grunts and their eyes cross.
And I was fucking horny, as a baseline, understand.
Particular horniness, however — horniness orbiting around some person — had always been a manageable and pleasant sort of anticipation that fueled my mouth and my brain into patterns of affection, wit, and persistence until I had, at the very least, made a friend and, at the most, a friend with benefits.
The point is, by the time the object of my affection and I were panting into each other’s necks, I knew her. My healthy appreciation of the way her thighs squeezed around my hand while I fingered her was part of a larger picture of intellect or specific charm. Part of this was making the best of living as the frigatebird with the smallest throat balloon, but also, I got off on the deeper connection.
I knew Winnie Frederickson not at all, and I would have gone to her then. I would have gone to her and held her knees to her bright pink ears, and I would have licked her and sucked her and scraped my teeth against her until she had me by the hair and wasn’t letting go.
This was not theoretical. These were not imaginary circumstances. This was the truth.
The books had failed me, and so I did the only thing I could do without losing my mind.
I called her.
“It’s Cal,” he said, as though I hadn’t known before I even glanced at the phone. As though the phone hadn’t been glowing in my hand, faintly pink. “Cal Darling.”
“What do you want?”
The question seemed to stump him for a moment. The phone cooled against my palm.
So it was going to be that way, even outside the classroom. Glowing pink phones and mysterious knowledge.
I still wanted to punch him. Even more, I wanted to get my teeth into him, test them against the round bulb of his shoulder. Leave a mark on his chin.
“I thought you might need a study partner.”
I rolled my eyes, though there was no one to see, and I wasn’t capable of fooling myself. Not about this. It was too big already.
“What do you think we’ll do, tape X marks on the floor of my room and sit on them quietly for an hour?”
He was silent. Breathing.
Then, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds pretty fuckin’ great, actually. Did you have dinner yet?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t. Where do you live? I’ll bring some of those nachos from Nick’s — the ones with cheese and olives and salsa and sour cream and every possible disgusting thing on them. You eat meat?”
It was his image in my head. His hands on my ears, my pinkened cheeks, red lips rough from kissing wrapped around his cock.
Worse, I felt his awe and satisfaction, his possessive pleasure, the hot humming depth of his elation.
You eat meat.
I didn’t look like a rat to him. I looked like a fairy, sucking his dick.
“Not usually,” I said, and the phone warmed.
There was a small pink spot deep inside my head where I felt it when he smiled.
I didn’t know how this was going to go down, and that made me jumpy as a coked-up ferret when I knocked on her door.
She was in the basement of Dahmer, which is about the worst floor of the worst dorm on campus. The building’s old, the carpet smells like bong water and stale puke, and something’s hinky with the lighting. The bulbs are always shorting out. The custodians get sick of replacing them all the time, so they figure two out of three in every overhead light fixture is acceptable.
Even if one of the two is always flickering, or buzzing, or flipping on, heating up, then going dark.
The pagan girls like Dahmer, and the peckerhead guys who show up for orientation in crewcuts and polo shirts but a week later they have ill-considered full-sleeve tattoos, swollen red and weeping.
I wondered why she didn’t have a place off campus like everybody else.
I would have, if I hadn’t been saving my money for LA. But the way I worked it out, it didn’t fucking matter if I was living with Ma and Pa, because there were six hundred places to crash when I didn’t want to see their faces.
Plus, they’ve seen everything, and they don’t give a shit. Rebellion is pointless when your dad caught you smoking a bowl in your room for the first time at age twelve and said, “Open a window, Cal, for fuck’s sake.”
I was sweating when I knocked, I remember that. I felt greasy with it, and too obvious, like my nachos were a naked ploy — which they were, I mean, both of us knew that, right? — but there was another layer of ploying going on that was beyond my ken.
Like, maybe she really was a fucking witch. It would explain why I’d never seen her around. Winnie Frederickson had cast some kind of spell on me, tied an invisible rope around my cock and dragged me over here.
Though you’d think if that was the case, she’d have looked happy to see me.
“Did you sign in?”
I don’t know what I expected, maybe not that she’d drop to her knees in the doorway and unzip me with her teeth, but she could’ve been answering the door for a roommate she was so distracted. She didn’t even look at me, more over my shoulder, into the hallway.
“’Course. I know the drill.”
“Because you have to. For the fire department.”
“Right. I know. Lived here my whole life?”
She looked at me then, and her expression, her eyes, something emanating from her — it made me want to fucking cry. I wished I hadn’t brought greasy nachos in a Styrofoam box, I wished I’d packed up the other half of the loaf of banana bread my mom made and butter to spread on it. Her face made me want to feed her love.
Or something.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” I took a step forward, and she turned her body to the side, as if to let me pass, but now she was looking at her feet.
“Come in,” she said and walked into her room.
I followed her, and something deep inside, in my middle, it felt like, was frantically searching for — her — for that thing between us. But some line had been cut, or the air in the room was wrong and diffused everything. Made me think I was just some random asshole from her class harassing her.
“I don’t really have a place you can sit.”
“I can sit on the floor, no problem.” Because the follow-up to her sentence was very obviously, You are not sitting on the bed, bucko.
She perched on the edge of the bed. Like, on the edge. Her feet were flat on the floor, encased in those suede slippers that look more like shoes, and her knees were latched together.
Her floor had the same thin felt carpet tile that was in the hallway. It peeled up at the seams. Most people got one of those room-sized rugs to cover this kind of shit up, but not Winnie.
Although — she’d done some stuff that was interesting. There was a table by the bed, a genuine bedside table with a genuine tiny lamp on top of it, and its own tiny lampshade.
There were tchotchkes lying around like a grandma would have, but cooler. A brass kaleidoscope on a wooden stand. A plant that was actually alive, dark green leaves spidered over with white tracery and stems covered with hair as fine and white as the hair on her head.
The table, the plant, the little knick-knacks — they kind of glowed.
I gingerly sat down, my bony ass instantly cold from the concrete subfloor’s seeping chill, and looked up at her.
Her index finger traced the plaid on her flannel pajama pants.
I was at sea.
“Hey, Winnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Should I . . . go? Was this a bad time?”
“You can stay, if you want.”
If I hadn’t been watching her so closely, desperate to figure out what I’d missed, I would have left then. I would have apologized for bothering her, tried to make her laugh so there were no hard feelings, picked up my five-buck nachos and probably had a few slightly awkward but not unpleasant encounters with her in class for the rest of the term.
But when she said if you want in that rasp of a voice she had, her index finger, the one which had been so diligently tracing lines and squares, slid into the valley between her knees and rubbed.
Limited appeals, remember? So while some triangle-shaped frat guy might need a body-language lexicon just sensitive enough to pick up on a hair toss, I had been collecting the alphabet of potential willingness like I needed the language to survive a suicide mission from the time I started sprouting hairs on my dick.
I looked her all over, and she was still — perfectly still — waiting for my answer.
She was breathing through her mouth but trying to cover that up by barely parting her lips.
I got so hot, so fast, that my thoughts became intrusive. I was crawling to her on my knees, jerking down those pants, pressing my thumb over the wet spot on her panties, sucking the wet spot on her panties, raking my fingers over her thighs, dragging her by her waist to lie back so I could hump her, grind against her, moan and lick into her mouth.
I didn’t even want anything that fancy. If she would just let me rub myself off while we made out, hands over clothes, I could get on with my fucking life.
“I’ll stay.”
Then our eyes met, and it was like I relaxed and got all jacked up at the same time. Like I was warm and heavy, like I had twice as much blood in my body as I was supposed to.
Her eyes were such a pale blue that the only way you could distinguish them from the white part was the dark ring around the iris.
Her eyelashes translucent, rimmed with the softest coral pink, like the inside of a conch shell.
“I’ve never kissed like that.”
She said kissed, and my brain buzzed and flipped out like one of the lights in the hallway. “Like what?”
“Like you want to kiss me.”
“How do I want to kiss you?”
“Like it hurts. The kind that looks and sounds like it hurts.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I’ve never been kissed, that’s what I’m telling you, and how you want to kiss me plus how I feel right now—” She sank to the floor so she was facing me, and I had to make fists to keep from grabbing her. “—means there is no way it won’t hurt.”
What I remember most is the clarity of the voice inside of me telling me I couldn’t kiss her. Not yet. And on the heels of that voice was the pain she was talking about, squeezing my body, and then the sudden blossoming of creativity about what we could do unfurling.
The books were right.
Between us was everything.
“Okay,” he said.
And then again, but more like he meant it. “Okay. Here’s how it’s going to be.”
It was hard to concentrate on his voice, the meaning of the sounds his mouth made, but I found when I let my eyes blur and concentrated on the pulse inside me that I didn’t have to hear him.
I knew what he was saying without hearing him.
I’m not going to be your first kiss. That’s what he was saying. We have to follow the syllabus — respect the class. We have to walk through those steps, and that’s fucking weird, I don’t know how I know that, but I know. One step at a time, in the proper space, on the proper fucking schedule.
“But you’re here,” I said.
And I guess he heard my end of it, too.
You’re here, and we have to do something with this. We can’t sit eating nachos and not do something.
What neither of us thought, or said, neither of us, was, I don’t know you. I’m not sure I like you.
It wasn’t that we’d set that aside. It was more that we’d tapped into something that made it irrelevant.
Dark space, I thought, and his eyes widened.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said. “And also I’m pretty sure you didn’t say it out loud. Which is fucking freaky, actually. Should be freaky. I should be running out of the room screaming right about now.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what it meant, either. Or why I wasn’t scared.
I just wasn’t.
This just was.
“Take off your shirt,” he told me.
I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn’t want him to see me smile, but it was so funny. Cal Darling. In my room, saying, Take off your shirt.
“I’ll take mine off, too,” he said, and then he did. Just like that. Whipped it over his head, so I got a whiff of the smell of him, his skin and his mom’s laundry detergent and his overripe armpits, at the same time the sight of him smacked into me.
He looked like exactly what he was: a skinny college dude with a small patch of dark hair between his pecs. Skin draped over muscle draped over bone, light draped over shadow, heat gathered together and held somehow, energy that emanated from a fist-sized muscle that beat out the seconds of his life.
Awesome in the original sense of the word — Cal Darling’s bare chest, the shadow stripes of his ribs and the prow of each clavicle, the plucked turkey skin of his throat and the deep well at its hollow where energy pooled and swirled and piled up, waiting to come out his mouth.
All of that at once. It’s a wonder I didn’t pass out.
“Please,” he said, and the word was a yank, pulling my eyes to his face. “You have to.”
So I did. I crossed my arms, found a grip, lifted them over my head and let my T-shirt fall away. Unhooked my bra and dropped it, too, without his asking, because I knew what this was, and it wasn’t courtship or foreplay.
It was a vision in his head of two people swirling over a stage, connected by a single point of light.
We were going to do that, too.
Only we weren’t going to dance.
“Touch yourself,” he said, but I’d already heard him, and I was moving in sync with him before the words left his lips.
Fingertips. Only my fingertips against my mouth.
His words were my fingertips.
“I like your mouth,” he said. Fairy mouth. Fairy girl.
Witch.
I traced along my bottom lip, corner to corner, perplexed by the drag of my own flesh against my skin and the tickle of my upper lip when my finger accidentally brushed it. Had I done this before? Was this really my mouth?
I think it was. But it was Cal’s finger.
My heart beat so loud. The lamp on the table by my bed glowed bright with syrupy light that coated my face, and it was so warm that I licked it. Licked away the light, which tasted bright as a lemon, and Cal closed his eyes.
I traced over the shapes of my face — her cheekbones the sockets beneath her eyes the ridge of her nose the span of her forehead, her hairline, her ears — around and around the soft curve of my ear as he talked and talked at me, naming each part, telling me nonsense, saying my name.
Winnie. Winnie, I don’t know where you came from.
Winnie, I’m not sure if you’re real.
I can feel you on my hands. I can smell you in my stomach.
You taste like clouds. Like ink. You taste like lemongrass, fuck, Winnie, I want you.
Touch me. Touch me.
I touched my stomach. He told me it was soft as a chinchilla’s belly, which made me smile. His eyes licked over my teeth. His mouth whispered against my nipples.
His hand was on his own stomach, two fingers rubbing restlessly up and down the arrow of hair beneath his navel. Twisting those hairs into soft spikes, tugging at them until his fingers bumped against the snap of his jeans and I felt his surprise.
That we would do this, too.
Yes, I thought, and his zipper yawned open. His hand rustled around in his shorts, emerging triumphant with his bare, bold cock.
“You too,” he said. “I have to see.”
It’s difficult to explain what it was, that first time. Not a fog or a fever dream. Not a spell or a hypnotic state. I knew exactly what I was doing every second, and I didn’t feel as if he’d drugged me. I’d never done any of this before. I wasn’t doing it then. It didn’t count on the scales of my lifetime, this thing with Cal — it was an exercise. An assignment.
It was a compulsion that came from the dark space inside us both, that part of us that was more us, each imprinted on the other for reasons that didn’t need reasons.
I sat up on the bed to push off my pants and underwear, hooked my socks off nonchalantly, spread my knees wide, closed my eyes and listened to him tell me what to do.
My finger his tongue. The heel of my palm, the press of his nose. My moisture his saliva, my vacant cunt his breath, my excitement his own. His hand that was my hand stroking him, amazed because I’d wondered about this, wondered what it would be like to have a penis hard and warm and pressing into my palm, and here he was telling me, showing me, letting me feel it over two empty feet of space between us that had filled with that syrupy, lemon-tasting light.
Cal talked and talked me through it, his voice quiet and frantic and joyful, so joyful, and that pink spot in my brain turned orange, turned yellow, turned red, crimson, purple-blue. I breathed in short pants and bucked my hips into every frantic rub of my-fingers-his-fingers.
The hot splash of his semen on my hand in my head was the benediction I never knew I wanted.
When I came, the light bulb shattered, but the room didn’t go dark.
It couldn’t. We were drenched in light.
We were ambient sources of light.
I wasn’t nothing, I was never nothing, I was always light.
Between Cal and me, darkness wasn’t possible.