Compatible Bedfellows

---

Neither of us was much into cooking, but sometimes she'd make enough for two or sometimes I would. She got me to go in with her on a juicer. They'd had one at her old place, and now that the farmers markets were starting back up she was really missing it. She'd tote home big bags of fresh fruits and vegetables, and it got to be a ritual that every morning she'd juice us up two tall, glowing, luscious glasses of whatever she had handy.

She was always doing little things around the apartment. She hung a big, burgundy tapestry thing on the wall behind the bed, which I kind of liked. She got a wicker basket to pile her books in. She got a colorful rug for the bathroom. She changed the shower curtain to one that was less plasticky.

Her lack of a car never seemed to inconvenience her, although she was glad for us to go together to do the grocery shopping, and I started going along with her to the farmers market as well. Sometimes if there wasn't anything in the fridge we'd go out to the taqueria or maybe the sushi place. A couple of times we went to the movies, although we didn't always watch the same show. Some evenings instead of reading she'd sit beside me on the futon and we'd watch a video on my laptop. Roommate stuff.

---

One night I awoke to the sound of someone shrieking. It was Magda! She was out of bed, out in the room somewhere. I got up, wary for an intruder, looking around in the dark, trying to figure out what was going on. I switched on the light. She was standing on the counter, stooped against the ceiling.

"What is it?" I asked, my heart pounding like crazy.

"A mouse," she squeaked.

I looked around, blinking against the light. There was a motion along the wall. Sure enough, there it was, a tiny little creature, as frightened by the encounter as Magda had been. I picked up my pants and used them to shoo him along away from the bed. I thought I could shoo him out into the hallway, but he ran under the door of the utility closet. I laid the pants down to block half the crack and quickly moved a box from the clothes closet to block the rest.

"Maybe there's another one," she wailed. She was still on the counter, on her tip toes practically, trying to get as far off the floor as she could get. I could see long swaths of smooth pink skin. She had one hand over her chest and one hand over her crotch. I was suddenly very aware that I was walking around in front of her wearing nothing but my underpants.

I looked under the pillows and in the bedding. I shook my undershirt, her robe. I looked along the base of the counter around into the kitchen. She pivoted to follow what I was doing.

"No others," I said, coming back into the living/bedroom. "He must have come in through the utility closet. There's probably a hole in the wall. We'll tell the landlord in the morning."

I could see clearly now that Magda was completely naked, standing on the counter without a single stitch on, crouched against the ceiling, with one hand over her boobs and one hand over her crotch. Venus on a formica half shell.

I tried to hand her her robe.

"Ewww," she said, pulling back.

"Did the mouse go on it?"

"He might have."

"Well, come down anyway. He's back in his hole now. He can't get out."

She couldn't figure out how to get down without moving at least one of her hands. I held out my hand to help her. She finally took it with the one that had been covering her crotch. She crouched and hopped down to the floor, flashing a trim patch of pubic hair and a smoothly shaven vagina.

"We've got to change the sheets," she said.

"You really think so?"

"I'm not going to sleep in them."

I took off the blanket and stripped off the sheets. She helped me put the new ones on, no longer even trying to keep anything hidden. It was kind of a lost cause, anyway. She played it as if it wasn't really anybody's business what she wore in her own bedroom. I tried not to stare.

Her pussy was smooth and feminine, her breasts trim and sporty, each one punctuated with a perky, erect nipple. Her bottom was round and perfect.

Of course I was pretty exposed myself, puttering around in my underpants, my bulge on full display. All the excitement had kept me from getting a hard on so far, but I could feel one coming on.

I tossed the blanket across the bed. She got in on her side, still as naked as the day she was born. I turned off the light and got in on my side, my boner now pretty hard to miss.

We lay there beside each other. Ostensibly, things were back to normal. We'd repelled the enemy, repaired the damage, beefed up our defenses. But if we'd gotten rid of the mouse from the room, there remained the elephant. I now knew what Magda wore to bed. Nothing! And she was wearing it right now, right there beside me, right under the same blanket, just an arm's length away. I could hardly pretend I hadn't noticed. It seemed almost insensitive not to bring it up.

"You don't wear much to bed."

"Is that a problem?"

"Not a problem, just an observation."

"I knew you'd make a big deal about it."

"I'm not making a big deal."

"It's the way I sleep, OK?"

"So you move into a studio apartment with a guy, move into the same bed with him, all the time knowing that you'll be sleeping in the nude?"

"Look. I don't expect any privacy in the kitchen, or in the 'living room.' But when I'm in bed, under the covers, on my own side, I kind of wish I could just sleep the way I want."

"Nobody's saying you can't sleep the way you want."

"What are you saying, then?"

It was a good question. I wasn't exactly sure what I was trying to say. It had something to do with my hard on, and something to do with the way she had the blanket pulled up under her chin, and something to do with the fact that we were only an arm's length apart. But how to put that into words?

"It's kind of late," she said. "Can we talk about it tomorrow?"

She was right. It was late. We turned our backs and just let the elephant lie there between us. I don't know how long it took for her to get back to sleep, but it took me quite a while.

---

"It's your apartment," I told her the next evening. "You can sleep however you want."

"I just have to do it in front of you. Is that it?"

"Well. it's my apartment too. What do you want me to do? Wear a blindfold? Put up a partition?"

Neither of us said anything for a while. I still wasn't exactly sure what my point was.

"Look," she said at last. "We both knew there would be privacy issues. Or at least we should have known. Roommates are sometimes going to see each other naked. I'm sorry if you got all scandalized. I'll go back to sleeping on my mat."

"I didn't get all scandalized," I said. "It's just that a guy has certain responses, and he can't just turn them off."

"Well, I'm sorry about that too. But what do you want me to do?"

"Why do you sleep that way, anyway?"

"It's healthier. Your body can breath. It's less constricting. It just feels more natural."

How could I argue with that? She had the right to sleep the way she wanted, didn't she? This current difficulty wasn't her fault. She'd never been the least bit provocative. On the contrary she'd always been perfectly modest. It was only because of the damn mouse.

"Look," I said. "It's your apartment. You can sleep however you want. I'm sorry I made such a big deal. Can we just try to go back to the way things were before the mouse?"

We tried, but we couldn't, of course. I couldn't, anyway. Now that I knew she was lying there naked, I could hardly go back to not knowing. I couldn't figure out why it made such a difference. Girls were naked under their clothes all the time, and you never thought about that. But if one was ever naked under a sheet you couldn't think of anything else.

---

The weather kept getting warmer. Like a lot of the other older buildings in town, ours didn't have air conditioning. There were usually only a few days a year when you really needed it, and people were just used to putting up without it.

One night the apartment was stifling. We had the window open but there wasn't even a hint of a breeze. Magda came out in her kimono. "Look," she said, in a frazzled tone, "it's too hot to sleep under the sheets tonight. I'm going to sleep on top. I'm just letting you know. You go ahead and do whatever you need to do, but I'm sleeping on top of the sheets tonight."

When I came out of the bathroom she was lying on the futon, naked and fully exposed. She'd turned the light off, but there was enough illumination coming through the window to see everything there was to see. She was lying on her back, her arms to her sides, her legs slightly spread to minimize skin-to-skin contact. She had her eyes closed, pretending, I suppose, that that made her invisible. Her breasts were somewhat flattened against her chest, but her nipples were just as perky and beguiling as I remembered. The lips of her vagina were plump and smooth, with just a hint of the inner ones peeking out.

She just lay there, not even trying to hide anything. It was too hot. I took off my pants and tee shirt and lay down beside her. I didn't permit myself another look. I felt pretty exposed myself and started to get hard. I kept thinking back to what she'd said, that I should do whatever I needed to do. What had she meant by that? My forbearance was sorely tested.

The two of us lay there, side by side, motionless in the heat. I was pretty sure she was still awake. It didn't seem fair that she could be naked and I couldn't. I wondered if it would actually be cooler if I took off my underpants. Half a degree, maybe, but my state of arousal would be all the more blatantly obvious. The two of us naked in the same bed! I got more and more fidgety, which didn't help a bit, either with the heat or with the arousal. Finally I just got up, went into the bathroom, jacked off, and ran cold water over my wrists. When I came back I could tell that her eyes weren't completely closed.

I lay back down. I tried to concentrate on anything other than her naked body there beside me. I tried to imagine myself in a sauna and to pay attention to the heat soaking into every square inch of my skin. Eventually I must have fallen asleep. Sometime during the night I woke up to find that it had cooled off a bit and someone had pulled the sheet up over us.

---

When Magda and I had first gotten the apartment, we'd believed ourselves to be reasonably agreeable and reasonably competent. We knew that sharing a place took a certain amount of give and take, a certain amount of cooperation and compromise. We both knew people who had lived together in non-romantic, mixed-gender situations. We took it for granted that we could too.

But, in fact, all those mixed-gender situations had involved two-bedroom apartments, not studios. All those mixed-gender couples were apartment mates, not roommates and certainly not bedmates. When they came out of the shower, they didn't have to wait for someone to leave the room before they could get into bed. When they shut down their laptops, they didn't have to turn off the light before they could take off their pants. When confronted by the occasional wayward rodent, they'd had time to put on something decent before help arrived. If by some odd chance they happened to catch the occasional glimpse of naked flesh, they were able to laugh it off and go back to their own separate rooms. They didn't have to lie there beside each other, under the same blanket, less than an arm's length apart, night after night.

In short, our problems went beyond matters of simple housekeeping. They involved sex.

Yeah, it seems pretty obvious. Yeah, we should have known. Yeah, it was our own damn fault. But here we were. And something had to be done.

Option one. We could pack it all in and admit defeat. Admit that our adventure had been misguided and unrealistic. That we were just a couple of naive kids who had been asking for trouble. Not really a very practical option, though. Our lease still had four months to go and both our names were on it.

Option two. We could try to soldier on the way things were. Maybe Magda could pick up a book on ascetic celibacy. That we could meditate on. As we lay there beside each other. Night after sweaty night.

Option three. We could put up a partition. Divide the studio into a de facto duplex. Two pigeon holes about the same size as those personal sleeping pods at the Tokyo airport. A blanket, probably, would do the trick. Block our lines of sight. Though probably not her soft nocturnal purr.

Or . . . option four. We could just give in to those primal urges. We were grownups. We'd been around the block. We were lying there right next to each other. We could turn our cohabitation into a shacking up. Our monasticism into pleasure-domery. Our lose-lose into win-win . . . In theory, at least. No gentleman could ever propose an option like that.

---

The next evening was somewhat cooler. I tried to work out how the blanket would go. It made me sad. Even if we hadn't been thinking straight when we first moved in, everything we'd done had been with the best of intentions. Even if our adventure had been doomed from the start, it had had its moments. And now it was over.

Magda was quiet too. Was she embarrassed that I'd seen her naked again? Was she creeped out by what I'd done in the bathroom? Or was my glumness just contagious?

Finally I mustered up my nerve. "Can I ask you something?"

She looked up from her book.

"Do girls ever get horny? Doesn't it ever make you horny, the two of us sleeping together in the same bed?"

The directness of my question took her somewhat aback.

"Because it makes me horny as hell. And that's making things tense around here. And I think we've got to do something about it."

She was giving me her full attention now. "What do you mean?"

"If we rig up a blanket from here over to there it might give us each a little more privacy."

She looked, glumly.

"Suboptimal, I know, but . . .."

"It would turn the place into a refugee camp," she said, frankly. "Look, I know it's kind of tight quarters. I wish we had more space. But does it really bother you that much? OK, you had to see me naked. But we're roommates. It kind of goes with the territory. Is it really that big a deal?"

"You don't mind guys seeing you naked?"

"If we're living together it's just going to happen."

"But we're not really 'living together.' I mean . . . you know what I mean."

She looked at me with a sincere and somewhat tremulous openness, her book long forgotten. "Well maybe we should be then."

Should be 'living together?' Is that what she was saying?

She went on. "I know it wasn't part of the original arrangement, but if it's getting us so bent out of shape . . ."

I wasn't quite sure what to say.

"It would be better than hanging a blanket, anyway." She got up from her chair. "At least as far as I'm concerned." She stretched. "I'm going to get ready for bed."

What was she saying? Was she proposing the fourth option? Giving in to our primal urges? Did she feel them too? She took a bit longer getting ready than usual. She ran the shower. She came out in her kimono, her hair still a bit damp. She knelt down on her side of the futon. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

She made things seem so simple. She could assess a situation and just know what needed to be done. She didn't weigh endless possibilities, she didn't cross tabulate likely outcomes. She just knew.

But there was a logistical problem. "It's just that . . . I hadn't really . . . that is . . . I don't have any protection."

"I'm on the pill."

My ears grew even redder. "Oh."

"You didn't think I'd move into a studio apartment with a guy and not be on the pill?"

My ears were burning. I went to get ready myself. I hopped into the shower, my cock as hard as a pistol. I took a swipe at my five o'clock shadow. "Shouldn't we think this through?" asked the fellow in the mirror. I didn't pay him much attention. I was in kind of a hurry.

I came out in my towel, not that it managed to hide anything. Magda had left on a softer light from the kitchen. She was lying under the sheet, her kimono neatly folded on the floor beside her. She looked up at me shyly. My towel came unhitched. My hard on stretched halfway across the room, as rigid as a neoprene barbell. She didn't look away.

I knelt down. I gently pulled back her sheet. There she was, her soft curves, her rosy pinkness, her budding nipples, downy tuft, bashful inner lips. Just like last night. Except that her eyes were open. And she wasn't the only one naked.

"Have you ever done this before?" I asked.

"Had sex?"

"With someone you weren't really going with."

"Not really."

"Me either."

I touched her shoulder, ran my hand down the length of her arm. She caressed my knee, my lower thigh. I stretched out alongside her, she turned to face me. Her contours were smooth and voluptuous, her hands agile and confident. We edged into a fuller embrace. I tumbled us over onto her back. My barbell found its opening. I came on the third thrust. Magda had a washcloth. She cleaned us both up.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's all right."

"But you didn't . . ."

"Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't."

"But . . ."

"Shhh."

She turned out the lights. I put on my underpants. We settled into our usual spots, a city bus lane apart.

---

It took me six blocks to get to work the next morning instead of the usual three. Six blocks to get home that night. The guy from the mirror just didn't let up. I was nothing but a selfish prick. Harping on my horniness until I got what I wanted. And what had I given her? Twenty seconds? Barely. I was a premature ejaculator! A roommate fucker! An apartment wrecker! An incompetent lover!

By the time I got home, I was all set to apologize, to beg her forgiveness, to let her know that I'd be moving out. But I was too ashamed to bring it up. We ate. She read her book. I did my laundry. It was getting toward bedtime. I was all tied up in knots.

And once again, she deftly put things right with one friendly, unaffected glance. "Want to try it again?" she asked.

This time we just undressed in front of each other in the living/bedroom. She looked so sexy in her underwear, then taking off her bra, then slipping off her panties. We hugged. She stood on the futon to better match my height.

I bent and kissed her nipple, brushing it with my lips, running my tongue back and forth as it swelled and stiffened. Then she bent and sucked mine, drawing out an unexpected sweetness that made my cock twitch in her hand.

We got down on the futon. She maneuvered herself on top this time. She rubbed my cock up and down her slit like a tube of chapstick, then squatted herself down onto it.

There she was, right there astride me, her most private parts on full display: her jaunty breasts, her trim waist, her hungry cunt, now split and stretched tight by my swollen cock. She shook her hair and returned my gaze, both of us incestuously aware of whose roommate's hungry cunt it was and whose roommate's swollen cock, and how exquisitely the one split and filled the other.

There she was, right there in my hands, the pliant fullness of her hips, the encirclable slenderness of her waist, the frank corrugation of her ribcage, the proud juttings of her chest. I reached around and felt the dark side of her back, following the muted infrastructure of her spine down into the alluring crevasse of her bottom. I caressed her outer thighs, gliding my hands seamlessly over their full round flare. I caressed her pale inner thighs, right up into the creases, right across her smoothly shaven groin, right around the juicy rim of her pussy, tracing the taut split pink juncture of our coupling.