Best Sex Writing 2006

The first thing Eden does is take my clothes off and tie me up. She uses a long black rope, starts with my balls and my penis, continues to my ankles, then from my wrists to my ankles, all of it a series of complicated knots. She wraps a collar around my neck and ties the rope to the collar, so that almost any movement pulls on my genitals. I’m going to New York tomorrow. We’re not going to see each other for twelve days.

I once followed a woman into her apartment on the Upper West Side. There were piles of stuffed animals as high as our knees. The animals spilled onto the mattress, which was uncovered. The walls were smeared in red graffiti. There was a dog leashed to an open refrigerator. I realized when it was too late that I had followed a crazy person home. She tied my arms over my head, blindfolded me, burned me all over my body with her cigarette. That’s the kind of thing I used to do before Eden. I’d go home with anybody; I just wanted to be hurt. I have scars.

Eden cradles my head in her lap, her bag nearby. Yesterday her mother had a biopsy. There was a chance Eden wasn’t going to be able to come over today, depending on how things went. Eden has thick thighs, comfortable legs. I’m so far gone, so in love, I can barely think. I stare at her cheeks, her nose. I can see every pore, blood vessels below the surface of her skin, hairs that will turn gray one day.

She strokes my face. I keep thinking to myself how nice she is, wondering why she is so nice to me. It makes me want to cry. We have the whole day. Her husband said she could spend the night; her son is away at camp. My roommate is home, in the next room, with his music turned up. That’s the world around us. And then there is Eden and I and all the clips she’s decorated me with, her initials carved across my back, the bruises on my belly, the twenty-five stripes she cut into my shoulders.

She takes the clips off one at a time. We’ve been together over five weeks now. I see her four or five days a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. We don’t always do this. We go to movies. We go dancing. We shop for fabric and groceries and I keep her company while she sews. I go to her house and I make her breakfast and sit on the floor next to her chair, working on my articles, while she manages her affairs, her husband at work in the city. We do other things, but this is what we’re doing now.

I try to breathe deeply as she removes the clips. The clips on my penis hurt so much. I’ve made it much worse with small movements. It’s hard for me to stay still. “Oh, god,” I say when she pulls the clips from my penis in one motion, tugging the rope, like a zipper. Everything is white for a second. There’s this sound I’m making and I’m in the back of my head watching myself. “Come back to me,” I hear. It’s a voice so far away.

When my vision returns, Eden is there. “Hi,” she says. She’s smiling. “You took a lot.” I try to respond, say anything. I want to tell her that I once rode a bus late at night when I was thirteen. Everything was purple and yellow. The acid was so strong at four in the morning I thought the police officer was Napoleon. My friend’s father picked us up when the sun came out and he took my friend home and I walked down Devon Avenue into Little India and scaled a drainpipe onto a roof and slept the morning covered in cardboard boxes. I want to tell her that when I was in fifth grade I was so good at dodgeball I was the best in my class. I played soccer, chess. I want to brag, stand on my hands. I want to impress her.

I’m still lying on the hard floor when Eden suggests untying me. “No,” I say. “Please.” I’m worried that I’ll cry and she’ll stop. When I’ve been with women and cried before, they always stopped. I don’t want her to stop. I don’t want her to go. So she holds me for a while and then slides out from under me, rolling me onto my side, pressing her hand across my face.

She hits me first on my left cheek. She’s still smiling but my vision is going again. I’m crawling into my head, tucking into that little room. I have no right to be here. I have never done anything to deserve someone like Eden. The slaps get harder, and then the other side. I’m not in the same place anymore. I try to see Eden but she disappears and it’s just the hard slaps on my cheek, and soon she is replaced with an image of my father. He’s wearing a green bomber jacket. There’s snow all around us. He’s holding me by the neck, walking me back into the house. The social worker called from school. I’ve been sick from sleeping outside. The cold has gotten into my bones and I sit in my eighth-grade class shivering through the day. I’m always cold. The first slap comes over by the fireplace. My sister is upstairs sleeping. My mother is dead four months now. We’re right by the couch she spent the last years of her life on, virtually paralyzed and left alone most of the day with her small black-and-white TV. I miss her so much and I don’t even know it yet. I haven’t even begun to really think about her. She died and I left, but now the social worker has called and my father is angry so he tracked me down. I’ve been telling lies about the family. I’ve betrayed him. I’ve made him look bad, done him wrong. This is what is coming to me. This is what I have brought on myself.

Eden is hitting me so hard while cradling my head in her hand. The animal I sound like doesn’t exist yet. Like a strange beast dying in the forest. My father’s pulling me to the kitchen. There’s clippers there. He’s shaving my head. I’m paralyzed with fear. Her ropes are biting into me and I can’t move. I see only him now. Just my father, with no background, his green bomber jacket. Why didn’t I fight back? Because I’ve always been a coward.

And then he’s replaced with another image, a year later. The state has taken custody. I was found with my wrists cut open, sleeping in an entryway. They asked me where my parents were; I told them I didn’t know. They moved. I’m in a group home, just turned fifteen. There’s a house meeting in the living room. I’m standing, holding a butter knife. The biggest boy in the home hits me open-handed across the face. “What are you going to do now?” he says. We’re all wards of the court. We have nothing to lose. We shuttle from homes to institutions, between mental hospitals and jails. The staff stays seated, watching to see how this plays out. I could use some help.

“Look at me,” I hear. My eyes have been closed. Her face is there. Still kind. I don’t even know what’s happening. “Keep your eyes open.” Her hand is still on my cheek. I can’t seem to keep my eyes open. When I do, I keep crying. I want to scream and keep screaming. I want to say No! I try to close my eyes, to find my own head.

What happened? I ask myself, but I know perfectly well what happened to me. I keep waiting for it to not have happened. Eden keeps saying she wants to give a space to that little boy inside me. Last time I spoke with my father, he said that was eighteen years ago already. It’s time you get over it. I don’t get over anything. I’m staring at Eden and I’m cracked into a million pieces. I want to do something for her. I don’t even know what I could do.

I cry for so long. She has a gas mask in her bag. “I want to put this on you,” she says. I push my face up toward it. I have rope burn between my legs. “I’m not going to put this on you yet, but I will soon.” So I cry for a while longer but eventually I stop, and then the mask comes on. I can’t tell when she’s holding the mask closed except when I exhale and can’t breathe back in. She keeps doing this until I’m panicking. We’ve been going for hours now. She holds her breath with me. She knows I should be able to hold my breath longer.

We don’t know that her husband has been leaving messages on my phone. Her mother is OK. Her mother doesn’t have cancer. It’s just scar tissue. The phone is turned off. I can’t breathe and I’m shaking my head, no no no no. And she’s saying, “Are you saying no to me?” and I’m saying no, I’m not saying no to you. So I lie still and take what she wants to give me, which is what I always do when I think she’s going too far: stretch myself out, take more, just to hear her say “Good boy.” It’s the only thing in the world worth hearing.

And when she’s done she finally unties me, and I am stiff and sore and we lie in bed together. “It makes me wet to hit you,” she says, and I slide my hand inside her pants to feel where her panties are damp. I rub her there. “I was so far gone,” I say. “I was totally gone.”

Since meeting her I’ve wondered what it would have been like if I had met her earlier. Would I have been ready to accept what she offers? Would I still have been raped in a hotel room; done coke off a table while a man dressed in a nurse’s outfit went down on three homeless men near Lake Michigan. Would I have accomplished anything; would I have needed to?

Eventually we go to dinner, but first we check my phone and find that her husband has called, and her mom, and the boy she owns, whom she takes to the clubs while he carries her things. They’ve all called. How strange, I think, to be part of this family. They’re all calling with the good news.

I’ve given her the top drawer of my dresser and she keeps an extra shirt in there, a box of latex gloves, my collar, a large bottle of lube, rubbers, dental dams, a bracelet I made her from amber. I don’t cry when she pushes her finger into my ass. I’ve written love stories before but they’ve never been happy. I wrote a whole book about the urge to substitute abuse for affection. The last girl I dated had me call her Daddy, hit me from anger when we were walking down the street, kicked me out of her apartment in the middle of the night, and I walked home from there and witnessed a car crash while standing beneath the overhang of a convenience store wondering what I should do.

I try to talk to her more but I can’t. In the morning my flight is so early and I’ll be gone for so long. Twelve days. It seems forever, but I’m almost feeling like I can make it, and I know it’ll only take me a day to change my mind about that. But there are no options. Even if I stayed she’d have to spend the next two days with her son and husband and then on Sunday she leaves for a week. I could stay but I can’t make her stay.

“You have garlic cooch,” I say. She hasn’t shaved her legs, her armpits. I think of Frank Zappa singing “Give me your dirty love.” This is not something I would have done—joked about body fluids, made love in the morning before brushing my teeth—but this is what I do now. I don’t care anything about who I was before. That person is gone.

She drives me to the airport. The highways are clear across the bay, and I stroke her leg while crossing the bridge. We’re early, so we sit in the short-term parking lot. “Imagine a lake in front of us,” I say. “We’re on a cliff, surrounded by trees. The sky is like velvet, covered in stars.” She reaches across my waist, slides my chair back, climbs into my lap.

She has rings. She has a wedding ring, an engagement ring. Last night in the restaurant we were talking about the war, and I told her I was a British citizen and that when it came to it we’d move somewhere in the Commonwealth, keep her safe. I wasn’t talking about her husband, but she thought I was. “We’d have to get married for that to be true,” she said. I wanted to tell her I was only joking, but I didn’t. I said, “I could marry you.” And what I meant was that maybe, if we were together five years from now, we could have a ceremony, or something. It didn’t matter. “I don’t believe in divorce,” she said, sticking her fork into her food. “For me I don’t believe in it, I mean.”

I feel clear, stepping through the checkpoint. The plane is already boarding. The truth is that everything is fine. Even Eden’s husband has grown comfortable with the situation. He’s agreed that Eden can sleep over at my house once a week starting when I get back. The future is bright. This is a happy story.