Anticipation
by Joshua Furst
September 26, 2007
Claire and I have only known each other a month. We've seen each other six times and two of them don't count: the first being the day we met at a dinner party where the host had pressed the assembled into a game of Pictionary — we'd both been caustically skeptical, drawn together by our disdain for the too-eager responses of our fellow guests' to the forced atmosphere of innocent fun; I'd gotten her number on my way out the door — and the second being an aborted meeting two days before she went home to Ohio. We were supposed to see a free play in the park, but her mother had called in hysterics as we were walking toward the bandshell, revealing in fits and starts that Claire's Great Aunt Rose had died. Claire had never met Aunt Rose, but the news rattled her anyway. Her mom's tears were infectious. We cancelled the date so she could go home, compose herself, and talk her mother through her grief.
In between, I called her as often as I could without coming across as aggressive and greedy. She was warm with me on the phone, encouraging, as though she was clueless about — or willfully ignoring — the rules of engagement, all those protective maneuvers that slow intimacy down, and this made me wonder if maybe I was just a helpmeet to her, like a gay friend who happened to be straight.
When we've seen each other, the things we've done have been charmingly wholesome — a bike ride along the river, an animated movie, an afternoon stroll through Chinatown. Not one bar. Not a single swank restaurant. Nothing that might imply either of us is after anything more than a sympathetic friend with whom to talk about our mutually degraded and disastrous love lives. Each of us has recently excised ourselves from ugly relationships, mindfucks that lingered raw for months after the breakups. There've been four a.m. phone calls and gross accusations and soul-sucking nights of drinking at bars alone, or in my case, with girls whose sole attraction is how much they repel me.
During the bike ride, she told me she wished she could be a virgin again. "The things I know now, I don't want to know them. I wish sex and love were still mysteries, or at least that I could still think they were connected. Does that make any sense?"
I said it did. I wanted it to.
"The things he did to me. He left me feeling, I don't know, rotten. Like I reek. Like I'm a smell that won't go away no matter how hard you scrub."
Since she didn't go into the details of what he'd done, I've had to fill them in myself. But the only torments I can imagine her going through are mildly heartbreaking, never any darker than bittersweet, like the quaint longings of early Motown tunes. I just can't see her allowing herself to be treated in a truly debased manner.
Part of this has to do with the way she looks. There's a preciousness to her appearance, like she's been protected from experiencing too much of the cruelty the rest of us too often face. She wears Mary Janes and bobby socks, sweaters with pearl buttons. She never slouches or carries herself in a way that betrays her essential self-respect. And beneath her long clipped-back curls, her face has an openness, a wholesomeness, that makes me think most men would feel the urge to shelter her and those who don't would steer clear assuming she doesn't put out. Everything about her says she's a nice girl.
This is in many ways why I'm so attracted to her. It's been a long time since I've felt worthy of the affection of a nice girl.
She still hasn't seen my apartment, and I hadn't seen hers until the night before she left. This was last Wednesday. She made me dinner, a chicken and wild rice concoction that wasn't very good — the chicken was dry, the rice was chewy, the complicated vegetable soufflŽ she'd attempted had burned in the oven. But that she'd tried so hard was sweet. We listened to records on the turntable her ex-boyfriend had abandoned with her and talked about her trip: Ohio, Aunt Rose's funeral, then an extended spell in the purgatory of her mom's home in Cleveland. She wasn't sure how long she'd be gone. She had obligations. Plans had been made for her. She was going to have to help redo the kitchen wallpaper, for one thing, and who knew what else. It was going to be torture. "If you knew my mom, you'd understand," she said. "I don't even want to go. But. And right when I'm getting to know you and everything."
The expression on her face at that moment was uncommon, utterly defenseless, and I couldn't help it, I leaned in and kissed her.
Which, maybe I shouldn't have. I shocked her, I think. Anyway, she looked shocked, though I don't know why. She must have known I'd been yearning to do this since the day we'd met.
"I didn't think you were that kind of guy," she said. "I thought you were shy."
"Somebody had to make — "
She didn't let me finish my sentence. She was pressing herself on me, her kisses carnivorous, wildly punctuated by nips and bites. Her hands were on my chest, pushing me back on the couch. Then she was straddling me, holding my waist immobile between her thighs. But still kissing, my chin, my neck, my chest. A new person, someone I hadn't expected, someone not at all demure or naive or wholesome had leapt up in her, someone wild and slippery, a creature of lust.
The knee-length skirt she was wearing had ridden up her legs. It was now bunched around her hips. I massaged her ass, slid my fingers under her panties. They were childish and cotton, just like I'd imagined them. When I'd tried to visualize them before, I'd seen unicorns and rainbows — she'd seemed to be that kind of girl. Now, though I still couldn't see them, I thought I felt coy words of come on — naughty, can't touch this — imprinted on the fabric in a gothic script.
Add to this the fact that she was gushing. Even through my pants, I could feel the dampness spreading around my crotch.
When I tried to sneak my hand around, to slip a finger inside her, she collapsed against me. "Don't be a bad boy," she said. Something deep inside me winced, not because she'd stopped me but because hearing this corny phrase come out of her mouth seemed somehow wrong; it felt forced, undignified. "That's enough fun for tonight, I think," she said. She'd crossed her arms over my chest and she was holding herself up so she could look at me. I must not have been hiding my confusion well because then she said, "Sorry."
For a while after that, we both just lay there, lost in each other's faces. Hers was raw and flushed. Curly locks of her brown hair had pulled loose from the band she'd tied it back in. Her eyes were dilated. There was a tiny pinprick in her left nostril like she'd had a nose ring a long time ago but had taken it out and the hole had healed over.
I could feel the desire wavering between us, pulling sometimes at me and sometimes at her and then finally at both us simultaneously. We made out again, as fiercely as we'd done before.
"Stop it," she said. "You need to go home now."
We disentangled ourselves from each other. She reined in her hair, smoothed down her skirt. I tried to subtly adjust my erection so it was less painfully caught in the fabric of my pants.
"So, tomorrow, huh?" I said.
She nodded. "By the time I get back you'll probably have already forgotten my name."
"I doubt that."
Neither of us quite knew what to do next. It was time to say goodbye. I had to get myself out of her apartment. She still had to pack for her eight a.m. flight. We both knew this was what was supposed to happen, but something was blocking us from taking the steps that would put it in motion. We just sat there, awkwardly.
Then a thought rippled past behind her eyes. She bit the corner of her lip. "Will you wait for me?" she said.
"Yeah. Of course. You're not going to be gone forever, right?"
"But, I mean, really. Tell me you'll wait until I get back. Don't fuck anyone else. Don't touch yourself, not once. Don't even have a wet dream. Think you can do it?"
"Sure," I said, because, what else could I say?
"I want your sperm all for myself," she said.
And I thought, wow, that was quick. "Is that a promise?"
"I guess we'll just have to see," she said, taunting me with the dare in her eyes.
Later, at home, I lay on my single bed and tried to put the evening in perspective. The various assumptions I'd made about her — and that I'd been cultivating, tricking toward myth — were gone, buried under the mulch of new experience. I'd have to readjust and I'd have to do this without her, with only this night and the way it clashed with everything that preceded it to go on. That someone so outwardly demure, so conservative in manner and dress, could contain such a typhoon of sexual energy nicked at the cognitive nodes in my brain. It overwhelmed me, left me sweating, even with the air on.
The erection I'd had when I left her place returned. It refused to recede. As I struggled with the dark my hand found its way there, wrapping around it. I could taste her skin again, feel the weight of her breast on my cheek. But then I stopped like she'd asked me to.
Wisps of memory, fragrances and textures from the things we'd done on her couch kept coming back throughout the night. My dick pulsed with blood. Shivers rolled down my body. The experience was weirdly exquisite, like I was entering a new physical realm, and by the time I got to sleep, I was worn out with yearning. Though I hadn't come, I felt oddly sated.
The next day, I felt like myself again. I went to work, nodded through a few meetings, wrote a slew of tag lines for the new fabric-softener company we'd taken on as a client. The women in the office seemed prettier than usual, glowing skin, sparkling eyes. The sexual creatures wrapped deep beneath their business clothes seemed to be pressing toward the surface in ways I hadn't noticed before. I chalked this up to June and the freshness of summer. I did my work. I thought about Claire.
During my lunch hour, as I walked through the farmers market in Union Square, a slight breeze kicked up, blowing through the linen pants I was wearing. The hair on my legs tingled. I imagined Claire blowing ever so lightly on my inner thigh. I felt myself becoming slightly hard. Then the breeze died down and the sensation went away. It was nothing, I figured, a happenstancial thrill.
"Have you touched yourself yet?" she asked when we spoke that night.
I told her I hadn't.
"Neither have I. It's been hard, hasn't it?"
"Do you mean difficult or — "
"Sure, both. I haven't been able to think about anything else."
Then she went on to describe in luscious detail the tingles and squirms of her flight to Ohio, the half dream she'd had while twisted in her seat — arms and legs splayed and bound in leather restraints, head pitched back and bobbing, water gushing behind her like her naked body was a hydro dam, the only thing holding the mighty river back. She told me about the afternoon she spent with her mother, listening, or anyway acting like she was listening, to the stuporous, encyclopedic wanderings of her mom's gossip-filled consciousness, all the while unable to stop her mind from floating back to the moment the night before when she'd measured the contours of my cock through my pants — that, or the final second, as we stood in her doorway and my body swayed fractionally toward her heat like I was being sucked in, like she was sucking me in, before I jerked away and disappeared down the stairs. She said she still wasn't sure when she'd be back, but she'd call me with updates, she'd call to hear my voice. Just the sound of my voice on the other end of the line made her feel like she was going to explode. "I almost feel like a virgin again," she said.
"Me too," I said, though I wasn't sure if this was true.
Since then, I've come to understand what she meant. We've talked everyday, sometimes three, four, five times, and with each conversation, my desire has spiked higher. It's omnipresent now. My five senses are more alive than they've been since I was a child. Textures and tastes and the folds of sound in the air convey mystery and erotic potential. My sense of smell, dulled by years of smoking, has reawakened. Everything reminds me of her. The polished steel of subway cars conjures her patent-leather shoes. The blue sky in the photo on an ad wheat-pasted outside a construction site reminds me of her eyes and how they looked at me that last night before she left. The calves on the woman in front of me at the deli call out to be caressed, to be raised above her head; I want to whisper Claire's name in her ear. I catch a glimpse of a glossy magazine at the newsstand and wonder if Claire might be reading it right this second. Each passing taxi might be carrying her toward me. I see a woman nursing her baby in the park and think that could be Claire, that could be our baby.
In withholding herself, she's brought me back to the world. I walk around with a perpetual hard-on and all I can think of is her. I don't know how it happened. I don't want to analyze it.
Claire.
She's coming home tonight, taking the Super Shuttle straight from the airport to my apartment. When she arrives, I'll tell her, "I know what you mean about feeling like a virgin." Then I'll wait to see how she responds. I'll wait for us to become whoever we're going to become next.
©2007 Joshua Furst and Nerve.com