Sunday
I meet her at a barbecue. We discover that we are friends of friends or maybe neighbors of friends of friends, or it could be friends of neighbors’ friends. I am struck stupid by lust the second I see her. The moment is one that I am familiar with, but the intensity makes it different. I can’t tell you what she likes to drink or what she does for a living. The problem is I don’t remember those details, but I can tell you that we both like the old Dashboard Confessional albums and that I must have her. Regardless of, well, anything. When I approach her she smiles at me like she has been waiting for me her whole life. She lights up from the inside, just because I am there. I think maybe that’s where the intensity comes in. I make my play for her just like I have made these plays before, but this isn’t preseason or even the playoffs. Here and now, I’m going for a title.
We spend the night on the beach and though we talk, sharing certain little bits and pieces of ourselves, the conversation isn’t what holds me. It’s the magnetic pull of her body and her mouth. I don’t want her to use it for speaking anymore. And then as if she knows the exact direction of my thoughts, she’s done talking too. We taste each other, making sounds that are not words but older than time. Hunger fuels me. Like I haven’t eaten in weeks and she is a perfectly prepared rib eye. I know I probably shouldn’t liken her to a piece of meat, but for a carnivore like me, that is the ultimate compliment. A really good steak compares to little else, and she is making me lose my taste for anything but her.
She isn’t skinny like the girls I usually go for, like my ideal “on paper” woman, but curved and soft and she fits me just right. Her breasts are big with a delicious slope to them, and I know they will overflow my grasp. I could bury my face in the valley between them and never come up for air. I could have seconds and thirds and fourths of her and die a gluttonous happy man. She does everything I lead her into. I don’t ask—words are still lost to us. The first time I lower my hand to one of those gorgeous mounds, hidden beneath a thin blue cotton shirt, she doesn’t protest or push me away—she arches into me, into my touch, and makes the most beautiful noise in her throat. That moment, those moments, are all that I can feel. The future is as unreal to me as a unicorn on the planet Saturn. That place where names and phone numbers matter is at least a world away.
Monday
I wake up before the alarm, still sandy and sticky from her. After finally getting home, I hadn’t showered, refusing to rinse away that last tactile reminder. I hope that she still smells like me, covered in my sweat and saliva and semen. I spend a long time staring at the ceiling. I lick my lips and call to mind the texture of her pebbled nipples, the taste of her swollen, beer-rinsed pussy after she had stretched and flexed around me. I am hard but can’t even bring myself to move, sure that will break the spell of my reverie. It’s a weird sort of paralysis. Wanting to fuck my hand but knowing that stroking my dick will be a shadow of what I am imagining, what I am remembering. So I just stare at the dingy white above me until my erection subsides a little, until my alarm goes off and I have to shower because I need a paycheck and people need their packages.
Tuesday
I wish I had never met her. Especially now at 3:18 a.m., when the last thing I should be doing is ceiling gazing. I wake up with my cock like stone and my dreams suffused with her scent. I wish I could identify that smell. If she smelled like citrus and I could eat an orange, maybe I could get my head clear. Clearer at least. I can’t place it, though. Or straighten any of it out.
She smells like summer, like sweet salt sweat and something that blooms, like the ocean and the sun. I have only seen her in sixty-watt fluorescents and slightly waning moonlight, and I actually have no idea what the sun smells like, but I bet it smells like her. Just pulsing and hot.
This morning the touch of my own hand isn’t seeming so uncalled for. An unworthy substitute, yes, for the soft, moist clutch of her cunt, or her mouth—but sleep will be impossible until my wayward appendage is at least appeased. And so I do what I must, and take myself into my rough palm. My hand doesn’t feel anything like hers, but I know exactly what to do and so it works in the way Ramen noodles can still fill you up and taste okay. One hand tugs while the other cups my balls, pulsing my index finger very slightly into my asshole. Jesus, what a gorgeous sensation when she did that to me. The memory pushes me over and once I shoot on my chest and stomach, I pause for breath and rub the come into my skin in lazy circles, feeling momentarily less urgent but still lacking.
I know the planes of my body well but feel oddly detached from my own touch, remembering how filled up my hands were when I rubbed it into her. I bring a thumb to my mouth and run my tongue over it. I had never tasted my own semen before that night, never been compelled to, but my mind is making the same lazy circles my hands were a moment ago, reminding me of when three of my fingers had been inside of her, how she brought them to her mouth and the sound she made as she sucked.
I think about how I lifted her skirt and rubbed handfuls of wet sand over her upper thighs as she shuddered too. About how by the time I poured my warm beer over the swollen satin folds of her sex and the revitalized length of my dick to rinse away the sand, by the time I was finally inside of her, we were gritty and dirty and so hot for each other that nothing else mattered. I jack off again and fall back into restless dreams of summer sun and warm welcoming skin.
Wednesday
My sleep is no better, but now my work is beginning to suffer. Also, I am surprised there is any skin left on my palm—or my penis for that matter. I am an hour and a half behind schedule and almost deliver three separate packages to the wrong addresses. Thank god I catch the mistakes before driving off.
The strange thing is I’m not just thinking about the fucking anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there is still plenty of that carnality roiling around up top, but I find myself also pondering the fate of our meeting. I haven’t been able to track her down, even after more phone calls than I am willing to admit. I am not even sure if I am describing her well. If I could tell any of my friends or friends of neighbors or neighbors of friends about the perfect roundness and dusky pink of her nipples or the rippling sheath of her vagina, I could distinguish her from all the other pretty girls with blue eyes and a long brown ponytail.
Foolishly I want to make them understand, to tell them how open she was to me, to every whim or manipulation I coaxed her body into, every thought in my head met with instant compliance, with greedy acceptance, with a matching hunger all her own. I am achingly aware of the difference between want and need now.
Thursday
Sleep is impossible. I am experiencing a masturbation fatigue that I don’t remember being a problem in my teens, which was the last time I had spent so much time with my tool in my hand. I can’t jerk off after, well, jerking off and off and off. I just stare and stare and stare instead. I see the ceiling, but I also see the vast open nothingness of the rest of my life without ever finding her.
I have the day off so there is a lot of staring happening. My mom calls and that conversation will forever be confined to the far reaches of the 90 percent of gray matter I don’t use because all I could think about was slickness and sweat and sand and the scent of the sun. It reminds me, though, how she told me that night on the beach that she was raised by a single mom too, and now instead of hapless despondency, I am beginning to feel something like panic.
I am wondering what she is doing at this moment. I am wondering what she looked like when she graduated high school, and what she does for a living. Because now I am not just thinking about her body, about wrapping my prick in her long brown hair or sliding it between her breasts or inside, god, inside of her—any way inside, all the ways I can put my body into hers. Now I am needing to know who she is too. I am listening to Swiss Army Romance nonstop.
Friday
I am obsessed; I am questioning my sanity. No sleep, or if there are small snatches of it, nothing restful. I can’t eat now either. Screw steak, just give me her. I would happily sacrifice food forever for just one more taste, hell, just one more glimpse of her. What have I become?
I am step-step-stepping my way door to door and leaving packages of this and packages of that but my mind is trapped in that same spiral of images and memories and imaginings of her.
That’s when the proverbial “it” happens, when I find my unicorn on the planet Saturn, the gift that fate never actually bestows upon anyone in real life. I climb the stairs to apartment 16F of Fairfield Place and she opens the door in a loose white T-shirt and some type of plaid pajama pants.
“You,” she says, looking breathless and a little strung out, and also like the most brilliant thing I have ever set eyes on. I hold the lightweight brown cardboard box out to her, and she steps back and opens the door wider.
She is against the wall of her tiny entry before the door has swung shut, and the first thing I do is press my nose hard into the pulse of her throat. I want to actually eat her, ingest her into myself. I am incoherent but try to speak anyway, try to tell her that I need her and have been crazy since we met, but she just shakes her head and kisses me with answering ardor. The clack of our teeth, the simultaneous urgent sounds we make when she presses her tits frantically into me, our shared rapid breathing, they are a symphony of relief. So close, so close. She is right here and I almost can’t believe it. I tug her shirt up and over her head, pulling the rubber band from her hair and groaning deep when I can take those hard pink nipples in my hands again. Somehow, I remember my idling truck in the parking lot and try to break free. It’s like trying to pry electromagnets apart.
“I’ll be right back, right fucking back, I promise,” I tell her, but she shakes her head no.
“Quickly,” she counters, unbuttoning my shorts and sliding them down with my boxers as I yank at her pants. The next second I have her pinned against the wall again with my cock inside her and this artless coupling is better than my memories or anything my imagination had conjured. I feel like weeping with the sheer satisfaction of having found her. She is grabbing me in rough handfuls as I pump, pump, pump. Her vagina is tight but slick, and she is bucking against me as best she can without losing her footing. In a deft motion that I probably could never again duplicate, I move her to the patchy vinyl tile floor, on her hands and knees, and shove back into her. I want her to really, really feel me. I want to reach as deep as possible. I would worry about our knees except I know that I won’t last very long.
I seize the mass of her hair right at the scalp, pulling her head back so that I can lick her sweat-dampened neck, then reach around with my other hand to pinch her clit, distended from its little hood. I am overcome with the smell of sun. It seems to burst around us, radiating as she cries out her release and I flood her pussy in jerky snaps of my hips. Before letting go, I growl into her ear, “I’m not even close to done with you.”
“Good,” she manages to murmur as she collapses to the floor in a panting puddle of perfection.