When I last left Nerve readers, I'd just tried tantric sex for science with a new lover named "Alex." As is often the case when two people bone nonstop for hours, we fell in love. This was a variable I never expected, but one that's not surprising given the amount of fucking required to write a monthly sex column.
Alex was shyer than my previous lovers, and wasn't comfortable with me sharing the details of our sex life with the internet. Because of this, and the fact that there are only so many stories one can write about masturbation, my editors decided the column had run its course. They asked me if I wanted to file one last dispatch, to end on a bang. I didn't. I was tired. I wanted to have sex for the sake of sex again. After all the experiments I'd tried, all I really wanted was to lie down in bed and fuck the man I loved. I'd done so much weird shit that a penis and a bed seemed like a novelty.
The fact that I was now jobless and broke hardly mattered, because I had Alex, and together we had New York in the summer. We rode the Coney Island Cyclone and climbed trees in Central Park. We made love from dusk till dawn, and each time we boned it was as if the mists of Avalon had risen and we were suddenly in elfland. "You're like an ambassador to the otherworld," he said to me as we lay in bed, bathed in sweat and female ejaculate.
promotion
At the Met, we lay down on a bench in front of Picasso's "Gertrude Stein" and kissed. "I want to feel you kiss my cheek forever," Alex said.
Forever, as it turns out, is forty-eight hours in dude years, because two days later he dumped me.
"It's not about you," he said.
"It's not about you" is code for, "It is about you." It's code for, "Can we still be friends because I don't think I EVER WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU AGAIN." It's code for, "Remember that awesome blowjob you gave me last week? I don't want one of those EVER AGAIN." It's code for, "You are not good enough for me for whatever reason, so I'm throwing you out like the used condom I filled with seminal fluid after penetrating you last Tuesday."
This kind of rejection is known as heartache.
I dealt with my heartache by drinking Budweiser and listening to tragic country music while wearing the extra-large wifebeater Alex had left draped over my door. It held the last vestiges of his scent, along with a tiny marijuana burn hole over the left breast. Inhaling the fabric deeply, I longed for some kind of Proustian reverie of his body against mine.
I wasn't sure I was "in love" with him either, but I didn't see why this should interfere with us "fucking for hours."
Instead, it seemed everything reminded me of the space Alex wanted — the vast, cold, empty space outside of my hot, pink, tight, nurturing, squirting, multi-orgasmic vagina that had never asked him for a fucking thing.
Because the Lower East Side is a small town and because Alex and I are both borderline alcoholics, it wasn't long before we ran into each other at a party, got drunk and fucked. This led to more fucking coupled with romantic dates, and I entered a delusional state wherein I believed he had let me back into his heart. But I knew pain was on the horizon. I was learning to sense heartache the way elephants can sense a tsunami.
We were invited to a friend's wedding in the Catskills, which I saw as an opportunity for a romantic getaway, and which Alex saw as the perfect opportunity to dump me one final time with one final cliché: He "loved" me, but he was not "in love" with me.
I wasn't sure I was "in love" with him either, but I didn't see why this should interfere with us "fucking for hours."
With the open bar at close proximity, I downed several Budweisers and wandered into the dark forest in five-inch heels. Moments later, I found myself splayed on my back in the bottom of a ditch. For a minute I thought about taking a nap, but a concerned wedding attendee noticed me there and lent me a hand. I emerged from this indignity with a lump the size of a baseball on my coccyx.
"Maybe you're finally growing the tail you always wanted," said my friend George.
