Take the F Train

I was born and raised in New York City. Lived here all my life – well, I went off to Berkeley for college, but I couldn't wait to get back. Things out in California just never seemed real, somehow.

As for the Gotham-brand of unreality, I missed the worst of it, mostly. Too young for the disco-era gilded age, too poor (and in the wrong business) for Wolf of Wall Street-style excess. I saw some hair-raising stuff when the city was struggling with crime and homelessness and poverty. But the strangest experience I ever had here took place deep into the '90s, a transitional time in the city: Things were getting safer, better – but there was still plenty of grit on the streets.

It felt like pretty much anything could happen.

Back then, I was running the research department of a glamorous monthly magazine, and while I hadn't yet given up the notion of being a novelist, I was well on my way. I wasn't more than a few years older than the people who worked for me – mostly young women, most of them with editorial aspirations.

Amber was one of them.

As a boss, I had to learn to clamp down on sexual thoughts about my employees, but lord was it difficult when it came to Amber. She had beautiful, smooth skin, flowing blonde hair (dyed, I assumed), curves in all the right places, and slate-blue eyes. Combined with her flirtatious manner, it made the girl exude sex from every pore.

One of the highlights of my morning was looking up from my computer monitor when Amber rolled in to take in what she was wearing. It was nearly always something fun and flirty.

One particularly fine May morning, she paired cowboy boots with a light cotton floral print dress that ended at mid-thigh. It was held up on her bronzed shoulders by spaghetti straps. She was, I thought, the very embodiment of spring.

That is, if spring wore cowboy boots.

I turned back to my work as she pong-ed her computer to life. I kept her in my peripheral vision and was surprised to see her head straight to my desk.

"You going to Drex's show?" she asked when she got close enough not to yell. Our office had an open floor plan without walls or even cubicles. It was rows of desks with an occasional TV monitor hanging from the ceiling. The ambient noise could be overpowering.

"Sure," I answered. Drex was one of my best friends since forever – okay, middle school. He had met Amber at some party or another and fell in love instantly.

She, unfortunately for him, did not fall for him. But she had been new in town and was desperate to make friends, so they went to lunch, which led to drinks, which led to ... absolutely nothing, at least romantically. It did lead to a lasting – if frustrating, from Drex's perspective – friendship, and, eventually, to a job for Amber working for me.

She half-sat, half-leaned against my desk. Her position allowed me to study the swell of her breasts through the cotton of the sundress. I shrugged and added, "Gotta support the arts."

She snorted. She knew as well as I did that Drex went through ambitions faster than a man with a cold goes through tissues. I had known him during his acting, clown school, chef, singer, and fashion designer phases. None lasted more than a year. At the time, however, he was certain he wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but he was motivated enough that he had hooked up with an improv group on the west side of Manhattan.

That night was Drex's first performance with the group. Maybe this time would be different, I thought to myself.

"Are you?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered, pouting a little. "My roommate is insisting on bringing her lame boyfriend and his even more idiotic fraternity pals."

Amber and I both lived in Brooklyn, on adjacent stops of the F train, and I had run into her in the neighborhood with her roomie and the boyfriend in question. It was the snappiest of judgments, but they both struck me as thoroughly uninteresting people.

"That sounds like fun," I said sarcastically, assuming that our conversation was at an end. Apparently, I was wrong.

"Want to sit with us?" she asked, a little sheepishly. "And, you know, maybe make them think that we're on a date?"

"Excuse me?" I said. "You want me to be your beard?"

"I know," she said, bending way over, in the process pulling the hem of the sundress so it neared the bottom of her ass cheeks. When she straightened herself out again, her face was flushed a deep shade of crimson. It suited her.

"I'm sorry to ask, but you don't know these guys. They are going to keep pestering me unless they think we're together."

I hesitated, not because I wasn't totally willing to get myself into a slight entanglement with Amber that involved even just sham romance, but because I wondered what Drex would do if he thought we were seeing each other.

Amber, however, interpreted my pause as a different sort of qualm. "Look, you wouldn't have to lie," she blurted out. "Just let them make the wrong assumption."

"Okay," I said at last with an air of doing her a tremendous favor. "But I'm not paying for your drinks."

In fact, I did wind up paying for her Cosmopolitans. And my presence didn't prevent some of the guys from trying to hook up with her. It wasn't until I started holding Amber's hand and putting my arm on her shoulder – and that she appeared to respond to my attentions – that they seemed to get the message.

So did Drex. His eyes just about popped out of his head onstage. Fortunately, after the show, when the roommate and her crew had cleared out to a bar, Amber and I were able to convince him that the touchy-feely stuff had been a put-on.

Drex had performed pretty well that night – better than I expected – but he had been overshadowed by one of the other members of the troupe, who had this manic, zany performing style that reminded me of Robin Williams before he went all gooey. Drex seemed a little bummed out by the whole thing, and I pre-sentimented his soon-to-be departure from the world of comedy.

Afterward, Amber and I walked to the F train stop at 23rd Street. She was well buzzed with three or four Cosmos, and kept stumbling into me. I very much enjoyed the incidental contact with her supple skin, the feeling of her warm, living flesh at my fingertips.

On the platform, Amber couldn't stop complaining about our table-mates. One of them, she told me, had kissed her while they were waiting on the line to the bathroom – actually ramming his tongue into her mouth.

"I swear it's always the same thing," she said. "Men meet me and think they want to fuck me, but none of them is interested in more than that."

A couple of people glanced over at us and gave Amber an appraising look.

"I don't really believe that," I said.

"Why?"

I shrugged, wondering for half a moment how best to talk around her overall slutty vibe. "Well, you're beautiful and smart, and you wear your sexuality on your sleeve." That turned out pretty well, I thought. "And that's something few men would be able to resist."

"Yeah, but they're the wrong men."

I shook my head and put my hand on Amber's smooth, lightly tanned shoulder. "That's not what I mean. I think that you pretty much have your pick of guys, and those interested in having fun are the ones that you want to be with."

Amber shook her head, her long blonde hair swinging behind her. "That's not true. They think I'd be fun to sleep with, and that's it. I want a relationship that'll be about more than sex."

"I don't know," I ventured, seeing an opportunity to put in a word on my friend's behalf. "Or rather, I think you already have a relationship that's about more than just sex: with Drex."

"Eww," Amber grimaced. "He's like my brother. It'd be gross to kiss him."

By that point, I realized, we had been waiting for the train a good while — 20 minutes at least. The platform was starting to get crowded and the men around us stared at Amber. But they would look away quickly if either Amber or I looked back at them.

"That's just what I mean," I said. "If you got your wish, and a safe, loving relationship was offered to you, it would seem to you like kissing Drex."

There is a low, chink-chink that announces the eminent arrival of a New York City subway, and I heard it then. "You're wrong," She said finally.

"Well, that's just my guess," I said as the approaching train was beginning to rumble in the tunnel. Soon it whooshed past us, kicking up a windstorm that sent Amber's hair and the hem of her dress skittering in a number of interesting vectors. I shouted over the train, "Take it as the mad ramblings of a crazy bastard."

She laughed and lightly touched my arm as the train screeched to a stop. Although it was no longer rush hour, the fact that it had been so long in coming meant it was very crowded; not all of those on the platform were going to be able to board the train. Fortunately, a door came to a stop in front of Amber and me. Just before the doors opened, she glanced at me and said, "This is going to be fun."

Under the best of circumstances, our train ride would have taken 30 to 40 minutes, and this was far from the best of circumstances. Especially outside of Manhattan, the quality of subway service drops sharply after rush hour. It figured that we were looking at a long ride in tight quarters, so I assumed she was being sarcastic, but her tone was hard to read.

The doors slid open, a few people muscled their way out, and Amber and I stepped in with others pressing in behind us. We worked ourselves between the rows of seats to the left, close to one of those freestanding metal poles. Amber, in front of me, was able to grab onto it with her left hand by reaching over the shoulder of the black man — maybe 19 or 20 years old and roughly her height — facing us. I, on the other hand, wasn't within easy reach of any support and went instead to the New Yorker's last subway resort: Steadying myself by placing one hand flat on the ceiling of the car.

Even leaving a station can take forever when it's jammed. It goes a bit like this: First, there's a two-note sound that lets you know the doors are about to close, they start sliding toward each other, catch on a body, jerk back for a moment, try again, stop, and fully open. The entire sequence is repeated five, ten, twenty times before the doors shut successfully all along the train. As the door dance was happening, I was trying to give Amber some room, but it wasn't easy. There were bodies pressing in on all sides of me. Looking around, I noticed that we were in a pocket of crowd — as sometimes happens, especially late at night — that was entirely male. I'd seen a few women in the car on the way in, but they had been closer to the center of the car or were seated and were now, for all intents and purposes, invisible to me. In our immediate vicinity were an investment banker type desperately trying to read his folded up Wall Street Journal, a couple of black guys in opalescent shirts speaking to each other in Spanish — including the one Amber was reaching over — some sort of hipster/artist with a soul patch, and a man wearing a short-sleeved Oxford who might have been Indian or Pakistani.

Although the train cars have air-conditioning, it's easily overwhelmed by the heat given off by so many cheek-by-jowl bodies. I could feel sweat starting to form on my upper lip. The train doors finally shut after seven tries and the train lurched forward, impelling my groin directly into Amber's ass and lower back. I leaned my head over her right shoulder, close to her ear. Her hair smelled like ginger. "Sorry," I said.

She made an oh-please face and turned her cushiony lips my way, nearly brushing my ear. "What can you do about it?" she whispered, and I could feel her breath all the way down to my duodenum.

The train started again, and it was immediately apparent that this was one of those screechy ones that never approach anything near top speeds. I leaned into Amber's ear again, noticing this time that the way she was reaching for the pole had pressed her breast into the shoulder of the guy in front of her. "I can smell it already," I said.

"What?" she asked.

"The sexual harassment lawsuit."

Amber laughed and shook her long, straight hair into my cheek.

We rode in silence for a minute and pulled into the next station. Since no one in our vicinity got off the train, a couple of people pressed us in further. The doors did their usual dance, and we jerked forward again. Then Amber turned to me and whispered, "I'm going to assume that's you."

"You're going to assume what's me?"

"The rubbing," she answered.

"Probably," I answered. "I guess you noticed that I'm having a tough time keeping myself off you."

"Hmm," she said in flat tone. "Good."

In the tunnel between stations, our train slowed to a crawl, then a stop. With the lower background noise, I caught an "ahh" emitted from Amber's lips that could only be described as a coo.

I leaned into her and noticed her breast was now positively smashed into the shoulder of the guy in front of her. "Amber?" I asked.

With her top teeth, Amber bit slightly into her lower lip. "That feels so good," she said.

Now completely perplexed, I asked, "What does?"

Her eyes opened in alarm. "That's not your hand?" she asked. I let go of the ceiling and showed her both of mine. "Whose is it then?" she asked, though not as frantically as I would have predicted.

I looked around her body, trying to find the culprit, but it was impossible. We were too tightly jammed together. "I can't tell," I said. "What do you want me to do?"

To my surprise, Amber let out another quick exhalation, and said, "Grind against me." Those will forever, to my mind, remain the sexiest words in the English tongue.

As the train restarted, I pressed myself flush into her back. I didn't bother holding the ceiling anymore, hoping that the herky-jerk of the train would disguise somewhat what I was now doing to my employee. Instead, I hooked my hands around the front of her hips and pressed harder. In the process, my right hand slipped under her skirt.

It had some company there. I caught the eye of the young man in front of her, and he returned my look. It must have been his hand, and I also suspected that he must have a pretty good idea of what I was now doing to Amber.

At first, I was tentative, but the sexual heat in me built in a slow boil. After a few stops, I was grinding into her with an abandon that scared me. Rather predictably, my exertions kept hitching her skirt up, so that soon enough I could feel its absence through my jeans. I also let my hands drift. With one hand, I explored Amber's rib cage through the light cotton of her dress; then, inevitably, the underside of her breast. The hand under her dress hit silky panty. I hooked my finger into the waistband and eased it south about an inch.

To none of this did Amber object. In fact, she seemed to be in that simmering plateau before orgasm that women can spend an eternity in. Closing her eyes for short stretches, parting her lips and leaving them ajar, exhaling huskily.

At the next stop (2nd Avenue, I believe it was, but pardon me for being distracted) an inch or two of room opened up behind me, and I took half a step back—bringing the lower half of her torso with me. Amber's upper body went somewhat diagonal, and she placed her second hand on the pole, one arm on each side of the head of guy fingering her vagina. With her face inches from his, he kissed her hard.

Her new position also freed her breast from his shoulder, and I took the opportunity to play with her nipple through the thin cotton. It soon got rock-hard and turned out to be longer than I expected.

One of my previous girlfriends had grown up on a dairy farm, and for some reason that I can't explain – I had never done it before, and I haven't ever since – I tried out on Amber the cow-milking grip she taught me. I pinned her nipple at its base between my thumb and the side of my hand, hard, and pulled up and along her nipple, squeezing harder as I went.

It made Amber squirm and let out a squeal – I honestly had a hard time telling if in pleasure or pain. Maybe both. The noise attracted the attention of the Indian man, who moved closer to the action, and the hipster, who smiled and started playing with himself.

At about the same time, I saw the black guy in front of Amber turn his head toward his buddy and say something. Whatever was said, it resulted in the other one — taller, more muscularly built — reaching out and pulling down the top edge of her sundress so far that the other nipple popped out. It was at least an inch long.

I had had about all that I could take. I took my hand off her breast. It was immediately replaced by the manicured fingers of the investment banker, who winked at me. I unzipped my pants and pulled my stiff penis out from the flap in my briefs. I went to find the edge of her panties to pull them out of the way, but my pathway had already been made clear by the young man in front of the pole.

"Go ahead, man," he said softly.

"Yeah," Amber echoed with some desperation.

A little hand-guidance and I easily found the target. Amber was moist and warm and inviting. "Oh, God," she said as I entered, and I'm not certain, but she may have climaxed just from that.

But I wasn't inside her for her pleasure. So I drove and drove into her, sometimes swirling my hips, sometimes not. Whatever I did seemed to push her onward into the little madness that is orgasm. With each push her breasts swung forward, even with the constraining presence of other men's hands on them. Looking down, I noticed that about a dozen hands of all different skin tones were on her body, from her cowboy boots on up, caressing, gripping, pinching her bare or clothed flesh. For one hallucinogenic moment, I couldn't tell which among all of them were my own.

I stayed aware of my surroundings long enough to realize that we'd stopped, probably beneath the East River, but who could be certain? And to be honest, I was so worked up that I'm sure I didn't last terribly long.

I came in gushes as Amber's body began to shake, despite our train being stalled, and she tried to suppress a yell of climax by biting down on the black man's shoulder.

I transitioned to long, slow pumps that I always revert to at the tail-end of ejaculating. I felt a tap on my shoulder and saw that the taller black man was working his way toward me. "Step off," he said.

I was neither in a position nor in a mood to argue. I finished off with two or three more thrusts, then zipped up and let him move behind Amber. From my new vantage point at her side, I watched the two young men unfurl black penises from their loose-fitting jeans. The tall guy had a tremendously long one—much longer, if somewhat less wide, than my own. He turned Amber around to face him, then lifted her by the armpits at least a foot off the ground; as he did, the hands on her body rose up to maintain their contact with her, reminding me of the summer camp attempts to lift a person using only fingertips.

What was that game called? I asked myself mildly, and then it came to me: Stiff as a board, light as a feather. Appropriate, somehow, for this train ride.

The shorter guy leaned back into the metal pole and grabbed both of Amber's arms, pulling them slightly behind her torso. Then the taller one started lowering her slowly, and it became clear to me what the two of them had in mind: The tall guy's penis was aimed at her front porch, while the smaller one was headed in the back.

I felt myself getting hard again. Amber's left boot — the one closest to me — slipped off her foot and thunked on the ground. The sound brought me back to the realization that this sort of penetration might be more than Amber had been bargaining for. But by the time I managed to open my mouth, the tips of their penises were nudging their way into her orifices.