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You shouldn’t have come here. Much less brought friends.

Do you want to know what happened with J? I’ll tell you, not because you deserve to know, but because this is where I tell these stories. And though your invasive audience threatens me into silence, I’ll force myself to tell it.

All week, we brushed arms in dark theaters. We locked eyes across plates of Mexican food, falafel, beer. I could smell him three or four feet away. He smells like an itch in my throat, soft, aquatic. Your body smells like gasoline, your cock like piss and curry. He smelled like homecoming. And clean and delicate. But not like a woman. Don’t even think that.

With his monkeywrench of a girlfriend situation, we put forth every valiant effort not to fuck. We did. It had been so long since I’ve had a companion who neither made me anxious that I’d lose him or anxious that he’d subsume my consciousness. I was torn; I felt relieved to be near him again but also pained that he was just outside my physical grasp. His decision, not mine. He aspires to a saner life than my libertine ways would allow. I was trying to respect that. I was.

We went out for wine after a movie. We leaned into each other from across the table and discussed his girlfriend. The sex they have. His inability to assess the depth of his feelings for her. Or hers for him. We giggled over whether men at other tables were looking at my legs. I hadn’t eaten all day. A glass and a half in, I didn’t want to drive myself home. We walked back to his apartment.

My head spun. I leaned sideways into his sofa’s pillows and he sat in a chair across the room. More than double arm’s length away– pointedly. I hadn’t planned on finding myself buzzing and alone with him. I didn’t want him to hate me for bursting through the thinly chalked boundaries delineating our fractured intimacy. I watched him across the room, sad that I wanted him even now, after so many years of separation, smelling him but willing myself not to touch him. I focused on stopping the room’s orbit.

“Well, aren’t you going to show me something? You’ve been teasing me all night.”

He started it, I swear he did. I wanted to get sober. The idea of his ensuing guilt and my role in causing it kept me in check. He started it and it surprised me.

“Are you sure?” I said. “What do you want to see?

“I don’t know. Anything.”

I lifted my breast out of my bra and held it so he could see my nipple between my fingers. He watched me so intently. In the eyes. Like he couldn’t even bring himself to see the body part he’d requested.

“Is that all?”

“I took off my panties in the restaurant. You can see that if you want.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Check my purse. See for yourself. They’re bunched up on top.”

“Why did you do that?”

I didn’t know why I’d done it. Maybe I wanted to see if the scent of uncovered pussy would affect him. Maybe I just got sick of pretending his nearness didn’t make me wet. Maybe I wanted to get really wet, as going without panties tends to make me.

“I don’t know. An impulse.”

“Show me.”

I parted my legs a little.

“You’re breathing awfully hard. Are you sure you want me to do this?”

“I think I might throw up,” he said. “This is a bad idea.”

“I know,” I said. “Don’t throw up.”

“Let me see.”

I spread my thighs wider, obscenely, so he could see deep into me, raw meat, pink and swelling. He looked. He flitted his eyes back up to mine. Held there for a few counts. I ran fingers along the inside folds of my labia. In all our years of fucking and fighting, I’d only touched myself when he was inside me from behind, when he couldn’t really observe me. But he was so intent this time, so lazer-like, on so many of my openings. I applied pressure to my clit; my eyes fluttered closed. I turned into myself for a few moments. Under his gaze, I did.

I flapped open my eyes when I felt him come closer and sit at the other end of the sofa. He was peering directly into my pussy. Instinctively, feeling a subtle rise toward orgasm clear a distant horizon, my legs clenched around my hand. Barely touching me, his fingertips all nervous electricity, he tapped my legs open. He wanted to look. To see all these musky parts of me.

I was wet and needed to touch myself. He moved my hand out of the way, to look deeper. He stood up so as to pace, to stall. He was so hard; he looked at me helplessly. I could see him hard through his clothes. He was showing me. I got wetter.

“I can’t touch you, you know.”

“I know.” I said. Heartsick-wet.

He sat back down, released his cock. It stood, presenting like a tower, pink and smooth above his fly. My mouth watered as I watched him, like he’d watched me. I hadn’t forgotten, exactly, the grace and fibrous dynamism of his pretty cock, but it inspired all manner of lustfulness anew, nonetheless.

“I can’t touch you,” he said as he pressed the flat of his thumb against the opening of my pussy. A sharp breath in and I knocked my knees together. He pushed them apart again, looking, and ran his hand up my thigh and around my ass. He put his thumb on my clit. He got up and took off his pants. He bunched the skin on the side of his cock and ran a finger down the slick sluice of me.

“You are killing me with that,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to put my mouth on it.”

“Don’t.”

“I won’t,” I said. Then I lunged for it anyway. With my nose buried in his furry groin, the head in my throat, I heard a my own voice go low. He smelled so good to me. Salt and soap, and like sand. He was so smooth, such muscularity in his cock.

I looked up. I wanted to swallow his face whole. Resolutely, I pressed my tongue into against his teeth. He didn’t kiss back. And then he did. And it was like feasting. This is that to which build-up and restraint brought us. I wanted to press myself through his skin and live in his body cavity. I kissed him like I haven’t kissed anyone in a year, at least. And he was so hard beneath me. He wouldn’t have fucked me if I hadn’t kissed him. I knew it. My mouth on his: our agreement.

And he did. He fucked me like he’d always fucked me, even though he aspires to a stricter monogamy with this other woman. He is firm and thin and he knows the exact pubic-bone-to-clit, cock-to-g-spot angle that makes me come just when he does. The precision of familiarity. It went too quickly. We rushed it, I’m afraid. I was afraid he’d back out and he was afraid of that too. But this is how it is with old lovers. The habits don’t get broken, only go dormant. We know each other so well that lingering might have bonded us together beyond the constrictions of our respective lives.

That’s what happened. I showed myself to him and he shook me from my passivity. So great was my desire for him, that I rose above my usual come-and-get-me reticence.

What am I talking about? Usual? Passive submission is a new condition of my fucking– and one I do not like. Recently, I’ve fucked too many men I have not liked very well to kiss any of them with any real commitment. Much less wake them at 4 in the morning, my hungry pussy slicking their asscheeks. I miss wanting my lovers, really desiring them, so badly. I don’t much enjoy being subsumed in others’ desire for me, rather than living in my own fuck-fog. And that’s only part of why I don’t want you.