Anna takes my hand and slides it inside her pajamas, down between her thighs, and my fingers dip into warm wetness. "It's just an idea," she says.
Five minutes later, Anna's hands are splayed up against the kitchen counter. Her pajamas are on the microwave. The taste of her is in my mouth, we're tangled up, her pale legs around my brown hips, my hands holding her up and the moment I'm inside her — fully inside her, every part of me slick and hummed with feeling — it occurs to me that this is the first moment of completely unprotected sex I've ever had in my life.
And then she lets out a low moan and we start to rock together, half-standing and urgent, and the thought slips away.
"You are so hungry," she murmurs. "My wolf."
It's a problem of the English language, which I learned when I was five, but still. The thought rises up, surprises
me. It floats above our bodies. In calling it unprotected sex, unsafe sex, those dangers taste pretty fucking delicious. A condom holds me from her, defends us against each other. The word guards us from babymaking. It beats back death. Unsafe sex assumes I need to be saved.
I've been dating Anna for five months. We met salsa dancing in East L.A., in one of those movie moments: crowd parts and there she is, this beautiful geek, except unlike in the movies she's holding a sombrero margarita glass. She's a good dancer for a white girl — it's all in the hips. During the day, Anna's an epidemiologist, which means that in between moments when we're having the best sex of my life, she's citing statistics and studies and odds about sexually transmitted diseases. In those times when I'm reminded that I'm going to die, my mouth is pulled to her throat, which I bite lightly, and she laughs and I breathe her in. She smells like ache. It's a brilliant laugh.
A week ago, Anna's at the computer. She's entering data into a calendar program, sipping her coffee. Her cats only barely open their eyes when I walk into the living room. I've got the element of surprise in my favor; I move on the balls of my feet, one foot then the next, but the floor creaks and she's on to me.
"Hey," she grins. "I have a proposition you're going to love."
"If it involves selling junk bonds to old folks, sign me up." I slide my hands over her shoulders, finger her collarbone. Yesterday's entry in the software program shows body temperature, a red circle and a red heart. Anna stretches up and kisses me, and I want her and my morning coffee in the same moment.
"So don't flinch until I'm done speaking," she says. "I've been tracking my fertility for the past three months. With this software" — and here she grabs my neck because I am indeed flinching — "I can predict exactly when it is most safe for you to come inside me. When it is medically nearly impossible for us to conceive."
I think everyone around me in the office can smell the sex we've had.
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Nearly. My girlfriend the scientist is using fertility software as a contraceptive device.
"I don't want kids yet," I say. We just started dating, I don't say.
She stands up and goes into the kitchen. "Neither do I. But I'm not going back on the pill at thirty. Just as an occasional treat. No latex, no UTIs, no yeast infections. Just you and me." Then she pulls my hand down to touch her, and we're up on her Mexican-tiled kitchen countertop, and it's like I said. I lose my mind for a second.
At work I can't think about anything else. We have a window of seven days in the month where we're in the clear, and we've just spent my lunch break in the back seat of my car in her company parking lot, fiercely fucking. I can still feel her around me.
It's the seventh and last day today. I think everyone around me in the office can smell the sex we've had when I get up to use the photocopier. I feel like I'm getting away with something; I know exactly how at risk I am, but I can't quite care as much as I should. I'm thirty years old and doing things I would've slapped myself for at sixteen.
Last night I catch myself saying what if, what if we might have a baby because of this thrust right here. Or this one. Or this one. And Anna moves faster, and I feel a flood and simultaneous tightening. It's not the idea of pushing a child through her anatomía that's getting us off, followed shortly by raising and educating that offspring for the next two decades. No, we're children of divorced Catholics; we're terrified of raising a kid, baffled by that kind of commitment. It's the notion of making a kid that's hot somehow. Conception and creation, very sacred. It also makes no sense.
I'm thinking about this when Fat Tuesday ambles into my cubicle. She says, "Check this shit out, BP," and then she pushes up her big black blouse to reveal the ever-expanding tattoo on her back. My name's Jorge, but Blanco Paco's her name for me. She claims I'm the whitest Latino she knows.
With her shirt on, Fat Tuesday is not beautiful. She's a big girl who moonlights as our receptionist, but her main expertise is instant messaging and trash talk. She's not what you expect when you walk into an H&R Block, but there she is. Tuesday wears silver hoop earrings bigger than a fist. Her lips are lined with a dark brown pencil. She likes to look sly. Her ex-husband is a tattoo artist up in Carpenteria. Every time she gets a paycheck, she comes back with more of her back fleshed out: cobalt waves and white wisps, green currents, blood-orange koi emerging from the depths of her. Golden scales rimmed with amber.
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