The Good Lover

First, find a Good Lover. You will know him because he is nothing like you expect. When you meet, your thoughts drift not to Romance, nor to other institutions in whose membership you have been trained to covet. You leave thought entirely and enter sensation, so that you understand how the barren tree mourns for the howling wind, how the black bear, torpid, burrows for the den.

Next, stand in front of the Good Lover and undo your clothing, hook by hook, until it lies in a heap. Watch your Lover watch you. The worry that your skin is too dry, your breasts too small, your thighs too fleshy has fled. Instead, your body integrates into a whole, as if your muscle and bone and fluids have merged into a precise instrument tuned, exactly, to your Lover's, as if your body is transforming from a noun into a verb.

Take one step toward your Lover, then another. Embrace. As he dips a head to suck a nipple and you drop a hand to fondle a cock, notice how your senses intermingle. His tongue probing your mouth, you begin to imagine that it is your skin smelling the detergent that lingers on the sheets, your eyes hearing you moan as your Lover inserts a finger into your cunt, your ears feeling pressure as he pushes another finger into your asshole. Your senses simultaneously expand and contract, so, as you open your eyes, you see a moistening around his as well as the pair of you tasting each other, as if you watch from the ceiling, hear both his quickening breath and the blood in your veins, feel both your arousal and his.

Then, appreciate the Good Lover's skill, which has nothing to do with the way his tongue wraps around your clit on the upstroke from your ass and along your cunt, even if the swirl is perfected, and everything to do with how he studies you, as if you are a solitary cell and he the microscope. Your Lover knows that your pupils contract as he squeezes your nipple. He waits for this contraction before plunging his tongue into your mouth, which, until that moment, you didn't realize yearned, moist and open, for the tongue, and listens for the tiny gasp which he knows collects in your breath.

The Good Lover's attention perches on the narrowest of bandwidths, and you sit beside him, so that you know if, the moment you taste salt leaking from his cock, you press your finger into his asshole, his cock seems to groan as it writhes against your throat. You, too, become a skillful lover, and you realize this has nothing to do with the way your tongue wraps around the head of his cock on the upstroke from his balls, even if the swirl is practiced.

Then, notice your heightened arousal even when you and the Good Lover are apart. At the gym, feel the sweaty heat from the man on the next treadmill, an erect nipple poking through his tank top, even as you gaze in the mirror at the man behind you, ass and thigh muscles flexing as he bends away to pick up a dumbbell. At the office, signing for your FedEx package, return the flirtation playing across the deliverer's lips as he steals a glance at your breasts which, you realize, reach up to say hello. On the checkout line, recognize hunger in the man in front of you, hunger having nothing to do with the chicken and asparagus in his basket and everything to do with desire emanating from his skin.

Take a walk in the park on a busy Sunday. Lay a blanket on a patch of green. Lie on your back and inhale. Smell pussy and cum, sweat and shit. The world is on fire and you are a critical molecule of oxygen. Then treat yourself to an ice cream cone. Licking up one side and down the other, marvel at the varieties of chocolate, every one available for you to sample. You have tasted chocolate before, but it is only now you feel its velvet on your tongue.

Now, imbibe what the Good Lover has to offer. Take a risk, maybe two. If what you have always feared is the crop, allow him, if he wishes, to paddle you, slow and methodical. Feel your skin turn pink, then red. Permit welts, literal or figurative, to form. Let your tears flow, your nose run. When you think you cannot stand another moment, feel the crop's handle along your cunt. Move toward it, as if begging it to fuck you. Your Lover is attuned to your pleasure: your cries arouse him, your emotion moves him. Treasure your welts like a prize. Days later, sit gingerly upon them and wince. Feel your cunt expand as your body remembers the attention, the reward.

Finally, understand that when you and the Good Lover part, it will be not a separation filled with anger, accusation, but a detachment notable for peace. For you and the Good Lover have shared a journey, the way trekkers share a trail. Yours is the friendship born of a meal from a tiny gas stove, cooked together, a sunset from an obscure peak, viewed in partnership. You have traveled as joyful companions. Protected each other's secrets.

And whether you have visited the place where each other lives for a decade a day, you will remember with fondness, even love, the musty smell of the Good Lover's balls, the salt taste of his cum. And he will remember you.