For Me, She Says, and Not for Him

There she is, a languid Sunday afternoon and he’s coming over, the man she met last night who made her drop her inhibitions in the house of the woman who’s birthday they were celebrating, where she kissed him hard, straight, full on, no holding back, not caring that her friends were peering in from the sidelines, not caring that they were in the way of guests trying to grab another beer from the fridge, not caring about the thump-thump-thump of the music coming at them from the overhead speakers. No, there wasn’t much to keep her from reaching towards his mouth and wrapping her arms around the full, gorgeous span of his back, no real sandbagging effort on her part to control what was the first animalistic urge she’d had in months, she was so fucking grateful she still had it in her, that something had been bubbling all along, quiet as a quiche approaching finish. Because there was a heat there in the kitchen, all hers, unmistakable, mitigated by nothing, decorumless, and thank goodness for such pheromone precision.

And of course he didn’t seem to mind at all that she’d turned primitive right there on the linoleum floor, in the high-wattage, faintly zinging fluorescence of that woman’s kitchen, didn’t seem to care that she, with nary a warning signal save the swiftest of flirtations, launched into him hungry and unapologetic, extracting a kiss she hadn’t quite gotten permission for, then a tongue, but then hey, no protest at all as the tango between them unfolded among the Black & Decker appliances. She had her back against the Magnetic Poetry on the fridge door, his 6'5"” frame an impervious blockade of noise and stares and they made out like a couple of teenagers, undistractable, everything above the belt but just, hips close though, close enough for her to feel his rising erection, close enough to feel that she was already wet, cunt slippery and solicitous.

Later, she drove him back to his apartment, and God let me tell you it would not have taken much to lead her in, no, not much, it was difficult enough with her car straddling his driveway and the engine sputtering a “please park me I’m done for the night” but something told her to wait, that time-sensitive, health-respecting conscience of hers probably, always lying dormant wouldn’t you know it until it was time to revisit all the sex ed literature she’d gathered since high school, and it wasn’t much of a surprise, really, it was always like this when it came to fucking, she could never just do it, too many rules one had to follow these days. And so her goodbyes stayed in the car, her mouth sore already from kissing, and then there was a very sensible “Why don’t we meet up tomorrow afternoon?” and he agreed, said “How ‘bout 3” and of course she liked that even more, capping her evening on a high like that, thighs quivering, him ready for anything else she might have wanted to spring on him, but acquiescent, not pushing, a good boy. And her wanting, oddly enough, now that the initial buzz had cleared a bit, to go to bed alone and dream a little less abstractedly about fucking someone again.

Once home and under her covers, she thought she’d sleep in the heat and sprawl of a woman getting herself ready for sex, body pancaked on the mattress, mind wild with possibility. An urgency, an impatience. It had been months since her last legitimate fuck but who’s counting, who’s doing the math, she was done with that, it wasn’t like there was some universal metronome she was supposed to keep time to, no, it didn’t work like that, not for her, it was more like earthquakes, yeah, a seismic surprise shaking the dishes at some unexpected hour, rattling the cabinets. And yet, a hesitation now, waiting for sleep to come. What if this wasn’t it after all? Who knows who this guy turns out to be, and what if that was all she wrote, messy makeout session in the kitchen, no tomorrow after all, that “3 o’clock” some phantom promise? oh, God don’t let this be, don’t let this be it. She didn’t want to keep track, no, didn’t want to think how a season had passed, that’s right a whole season, and nothin’ much goin’ on down there, no sirree, and dear God am I breaking some kind of record here? She didn’t know how to hope for sex without being a little conservative, oddsmaker that she was. And so she fell asleep a little uncertainly, wishing she could abandon herself to the cinematography of her desire, not quite knowing how to clear the psychosexual decks and begin again, unsullied by her own censors.

Then, before she knows it, it’s 3 p.m., Sunday, and the doorbell rings. It’s him, he’s here, exactly when he said he’d be. And when she lets him in, and after they kiss each other’s cheeks, exchange pleasantries, she doesn’t want to waste another minute thinking about the rules of attraction, the protocols of behavior she’s so aware have been keeping her sidelined, doesn’t want to listen anymore to the voices inside her saying no just to hear themselves, and so she leads him brazenly up the stairs to where her room is, leads him to her featherbed mattress and the mountain of pillows and the hazy, subversive-feeling sexiness of an August Sunday afternoon.

But she doesn’t rip his clothes off, no, they start off slow instead, real slow, the best kind of slow. A kiss, gentle, to his eyelids. A careful trace of her hip. Movements so slow her eyes flutter into a kind of half-sleep, and her body millimeter by millimeter begins to feel its own architecture. She is spooned into him, now, having curved herself into two, he is just barely grazing her breasts from behind, the fabric of them at least, her shirt’s still on, and somehow he intuits that place on the back of her neck she never tells anyone about, intuits the hidden gear shift there and kisses it, and the skin of her stomach goose pimples, the backs of her knees start sweating, and then her hips are buzzing like the bulbs in that kitchen last night, her ass arching involuntarily in the direction of whatever’s lying beneath the safety of his buckled jeans.

It is an hour of this at least, an hour of this subsonic tingle and jitter, of his mouth and hands proffering their butterfly kisses, and her vibrating just enough to let him know he shouldn’t stop, or slow, or speed, or change direction. And of course she wants this, wants this more than he could know, she’s so ready, wet and so utterly fuckable by now you wouldn’t believe, mind gone, just body, just body now, just a body arcing itself towards pleasure and the gratuity of release. And though she could stay like this for so much longer, it’s that good, could stay shimmying to the whispers of his attention, something inside of her bucks a little, grinds perceptibly, can’t help it, and then he’s saying something in her ear, she feels his cock against his jeans, against her backside, he’s asking “What can I do for you?”

Oh my, what’s this, so generous he is, so attentive, so unselfish, so not “Oh baby, suck me hard,” no, none of that, none of those porn-influenced invectives she’s heard before that make her shudder, so ill-timed and misfired she wonders how anyone would have thought she’d cozy up to that? But no, all he says is “What can I do for you?” and somehow that throws her over some kind of irretrievable edge, she is so close to coming, now, so close without him even touching her down there, and something inside her squirms and spasms and she surprises herself by saying “Nothing, you don’t have to do a thing, just stay where you are” and instead she’s the one, she’s the one who snakes her right hand behind her, sneaks it under her pants, past her underwear, curls her fingers around the southern end of her cunt, dips her left hand to her front, finds her clit, the heartbeat of it all, and gets going.

And then she loses all track of him, loses the sensation of his touch against her nipples, loses the cock shape behind her, loses his voice, his hair, his arms, his chest, his frame against her, and she is for a moment, for that exquisite moment just before orgasm, entirely alone. Beautifully, exuberantly alone. Because she is rocking there, cupped into the cradle of her own hands, entwined, electric, impermeable, and her body forgets about the old order of things, forgets who’s supposed to do what and why and where and how, and it is just this, it is just her, she is riding this wave by herself, emblazoned with it, a luminescent wave-rider hurtling towards shore, and he pipes up, can’t help it, wants something of this she’s sure, he’s saying “Are you gonna come for me?” all eager timid schoolboy again and she knows it’s not for him, not for him exactly and certainly not for him entirely, she’s in charge now, for a kind of first time, and she wants it, and likes it, and she’s saying this as she plunges into the crescendo of her final ecstasy, soaring into the sweet, pointillated thrum of climax, “No baby, no,” she breathes. “I’m coming for me.”