ALAN, YOU didn’t have to sell me on anything. You were the warmest man I had ever met, the first man that was unafraid to talk about love, although now I know if men offer it up so easy, they’re not usually sincere. I didn’t care that you were absurdly close to your mother. Or that you frequently went on vacations to Florida without me because they were “family-only” trips. Or that on most weekends, you disappeared into the warm, all-consuming bosom of your parents’ home in Highland Park, far, far away from me. What time I had with you I treasured. I loved it, in fact. Even if it wasn’t real. Even if it was temporary. Even if I wasn’t myself. Because I never got to feel like that again.
HE STARTED unbuttoning my blouse at the kitchen table, kissed my breasts through my bra, then pulled one out and kissed it some more. “It tastes like sugar,” he said, and I moaned. I moved onto his lap and he gripped my ass firmly with his hands, then gave it a good slap. “Uch. You,” he said.
I kissed his forehead, and then his lips. His soft beard felt nice on my chin, like one hundred tiny scratches. “What happened with Wolfowitz?” I said.
“Screw Wolfowitz,” said Alan, and then he took me to bed.
In bed he was like a wolf, all hairy arms and legs, howling at the moon. He pawed at me and held me tight. He held me down, hands on my breasts, and pinched and nuzzled them. He squeezed my hips and ass right before he put his heavy cock in between my legs, and then in me, as deep as he could go. And then he forced me to look at him, not through any words or actions, but through a magnet stare. He locked me, and then I was stuck there, for as long as he liked, in his arms.
This was different for me, this link with another. I had always felt a divide between myself and other men in bed, and it was easy to shut down, look above and around, at anything else but them. (Jesus, he’s got a Grateful Dead poster. But we met at a Pavement show. And, oh my, there’s a tapestry on the wall. Is it too late to ask him to pull out?)
I could disconnect and reconnect at will. I would check out for as long as it took, let my body warm up from their heat. And then when they were done, I would demand some attention until I was done, too. Bite my nipples until I tell you to stop. Do it harder. All right. Now you can stop.
Alan, however, required attention. Alan wanted ownership. No problem. He owned me. From the minute we had met—an accident, I walked into the wrong apartment, the expensive one featuring four bedrooms and a balcony with a view and light, light everywhere, that he was showing, not the sullen one-bedroom I eventually took—I liked him, with his grownup suit and his quick mouth and his big, hungry lips. He thought I was someone special, so he showed me around the apartment, and for a little while, I let him believe it because I wanted to keep talking to him. He had me in his clutches, he was thinking, but it was really I who did not want to let him go.
At the end of the tour, after he knew everything about me in ten minutes flat—Single? Right now, yes. Jewish? Sort of, half, once removed on my father’s side. A scientist? Yes, you’re right, I am a very smart young lady—he asked me what I thought of the apartment.
And then I touched his shoulder and said, “Actually I think I’m lost.”
He shook his finger at me, and stretched out his lips, revealing two rows of large, clean white teeth. I bet he had braces forever, I thought. “I had a feeling you weren’t looking in the right place,” he said.
And then he put his hand on my shoulder, and we stood like that, hands on shoulders, until he asked me out to dinner. Even after I said yes, we still held on for another minute, finally interrupted by a knock at the door, a gasp of air between us, and then the entrance of the next client, a divorce lawyer from Minneapolis who was moving on up in the world, taking his wife and two daughters and leaving the Twin Cities behind for a big Chicago paycheck.
Boy, have I got a view for you.