Note: this is NC-17, and should not be read by children or people upset by portrayals of sex and self-loathing. Do not click through the ‘read more’ link unless you really think it’s a good idea. This hasn’t been edited or rewritten at all, and was written somewhat manically over the course of an hour (with an hour and a half of break in between). All apologies if I offend someone.

She eyes him from the passenger seat, with her legs up and slightly crossed, back rested against the door, and her skirt riding up slightly and he thinks he can tell that she isn’t wearing any underwear. He is quiet, reeling slightly from the absolutely incredible high he is experiencing from the weed she brought over from her work, on top of already feeling completely uncertain about what he seemed so certain of earlier. “If you could do anything right now, what would he be?” she asks him.

He knows what she meant, what she wants him to say. What he really thought of was his ex-girlfriend, and he thought of her immediately and without thinking. It brought his feelings into a harsh relief at a time in which he was trying to ignore them. He tried to think of things along the lines of what she wanted, like, “I want to thrust my fingers into you,” or, “I want your hand down my pants, and your lips on mine,” but they seemed like such blatant lies. What he really wanted was for her to transform into his ex-girlfriend before his eyes. He closes his own and says, “I don’t know, I don’t really know anything.”

“OK, OK,” she retracts. “If you could have anything right now, what would it be?”

He thought: My ex, oh Jesus. He says, “I don’t know, like what?”

“I don’t know, don’t say something like the lottery, you know.”

“Oh, money, that’s a good one.” He feels deeply sorrowful, suddenly, sitting in this car with this girl undoubtedly wet with anticipation, which actually makes him feel worse when he thinks it. He wants to tell her, the truth is, I’m not interested in you, I don’t love you, you and I have nothing in common and the thought of having sex with you makes me feel ill. He doesn’t, though, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if sex will make him feel better or worse, and he wants to find out. He wants to chase that miracle cure, that magic action that will bring him relief from the incessant longing. He continues, “I could use a million dollars, or something.”

“That’s not a good answer!” she laughs, hiding her annoyance poorly, but better than she ever has in the past. She adjusts her legs in the chair, all but placing them in his lap. He leans his head back against the window and keeps his eyes closed. She puts her hand on his forearm and runs her fingers up and down. He starts to get turned on and hates himself for it, but figures that he might as well run with it. She puts the pipe they were sharing to her lips and lights the bowl, taking a long slow inhale. He looks at her as she does this, and then moves toward him and presses her lips to his and instinctively he inhales the smoke she exhales. She begins coughing, and when he exhales slowly, he too begins coughing.

“Hot,” he says, between choking sputters. “Real hot,” he is being sarcastic, as her cough is the kind you expect in people with pneumonia, wet hacking half-wheeze coughs. The touch of her lips against his summoned a full erection and at this point he somewhat falls out of sync with himself. He moves a hand between her legs and starts clumsily rubbing unexpected fabric. He leans over her face and kisses her back, deeply. He rubs and rubs, not really knowing where he is, and she slides a hand down herself and moves his fingers a little over and a little up and things start to feel a little familiar. Every couple of kisses he gets confused by the presence of her tongue, the texture and feeling of it, and is shocked, thinking he is tonguing her chin.

He pulls her panties aside, and just like he expected, she is so wet he momentarily fears staining the seats. He slides two fingers into her and she gasps, arching her back. He bites her neck and she utters, “I want to fuck you.” He withdraws slightly; feeling like the word fuck sums up so much he doesn’t like about what is rapidly becoming his former perspective on sex. He doesn’t want to fuck someone, not right now, not while he feels like this. She puts a hand over his cock, rubbing it through his jeans, and he thrusts into her hand involuntarily. He wants to have sex, he knows this, and he’ll admit this to himself. He wants to know what it is like, to fuck. He’s forgotten, it hasn’t been that long but he has forgotten what it was like for him at one time, to be inside this girl he’s known but hardly knows.

He asks, “Do you want to go inside?”

“I feel like going inside will kill the mood. I kind of like it out here.”

“I don’t have any condoms in here.”

“I can’t really imagine the logistics of trying to do that in here, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Once inside, he’s on her immediately and without thinking, grinding himself into her. He leaves her skirt on, but pulls her panties off, and slides off his pants and underwear. He presses himself onto her, not inside of her, and grinds his cock against her clit. She moans between kisses, placing her hand between her legs and gripping his penis. She strokes it against her, and looks up at him. “Condoms?”

He gets up and goes across the room to grab a condom and a small bottle of lube from behind a copy of Women by Charles Bukowski. He climbs back between her legs and puts her hand back on his cock. She strokes it while he uses his teeth to tear open the condom wrapper. He pushes her hand aside and puts the condom on, struggling a little to get it down and over his semi-flaccid erection. He looks down at it and sighs internally. He’s worried that he’s not going to be able to do this, but he’s been trying to operate with enough of a frenzy that he hopes he can get inside her and it’ll fix all his problems in such a way that he’ll be able to make it the rest of the way.

When he finally slides himself part way inside her, he discovers that she is far tighter than anyone he’s ever been with. She’s tighter than she’s ever been, actually, and he’s shocked. He hasn’t ever had this much trouble just getting inside a woman, but between her tightness and his lack of rigidity, he looks down at her and wonders if she can tell that this situation just isn’t working itself out. She looks up at him and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“You’re really tight. Like, ridiculously tight.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“I don’t know. You didn’t have vaginoplasty or something did you?”

She laughs, which he feels as even more excessive tightness around the half of his cock currently inside her, “No, I haven’t had vaginoplasty!”

He puts her legs up and holds them vertically and starts fucking her with short little thrusts, slowly working more and more of himself into her. Now it’s just something he has to do, something he has to accomplish. You can’t get your cock half-inside a girl and then just walk away defeated, no matter how wrong you feel. She starts to moan louder, uttering unintelligible affirmatives. He’s almost fully inside her now, the short thrusts becoming more rapid and violent. He gets a stitch in his side, a small sharp pain, but keeps at it. She cries out in a high voice and spreads her legs away from his hands and blocks him from thrusting into her any more. “Oh my god,” she sighs.

He keeps working himself further into her as her legs slowly give way to his pushing. He lets her legs drop and pushes himself fully inside her, and watches her eyes roll back into her head briefly. “Oh, no, not again,” she says. He smirks at this, and lies himself down partly on top of her, his arms along the sides of her head, his face down near her neck and ear. He bites her neck and pumps himself in and out of her, slowly building in momentum. “You’re going to make me come again, fuck,” she hisses in his ear, biting his earlobe.

He pumps away into her, slowing down and speeding up, until he feels his own orgasm approaching. He quickens the pace and her moaning becomes louder. He begins moaning, to let her know he is about to come, and she gets louder in response. She grips his sides and slides a hand over his ass, pushing on him with every thrust. He grits his teeth and lets out a low, deep moan as he comes. She comes with him, writhing and digging her nails into his skin.

When the wave of pleasure finally breaks and slides back, away from him, he is left with a hand on one side of her neck and his face on the other. He is suddenly overcome by the realization that the whole time he had his face in her neck, he was imagining that he was with his ex-girlfriend. It didn’t even occur to him while it was happening, one second he was in bed with the woman who was under him, and the next he could smell her, his ex, and taste her on his lips. The sudden shock, the realization that he was in bed with this woman and not that one, is so jarring that he clenches his eyes shut and pauses for a second, fighting back a nearly uncontrollable urge to weep.

He sits up, pulls out of her, and promptly runs to the bathroom without an announcement. When he comes back into the bedroom, he sits on the end of the bed, away from where she sits partly naked on the side of the bed. “I have work tomorrow, man, I am so tired,” he looks at her. “Was that alright?”

“It was great,” she looks sincere and he appreciates that, but he can’t really believe what he just did; what he did with her, no less. “Do you want me to go?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, but he does know. He wants her out of here as soon as possible. He can’t even look at her. He closes his eyes and lies back on a pillow. She reaches out and places a hand on his chest and he jumps, unprepared for the hand on his chest. He thinks that she must think he recoiled from her touch, and doesn’t mind her thinking that so he says nothing. He keeps his eyes closed while she runs a hand over his chest. She’s never wanted to cuddle after sex before, so he doesn’t think she does now, but he’s not sure why she’s still sitting on his bed next to him.

He thinks that was a waste of time, and that he might actually feel worse for doing it. He lies still, with his eyes closed. He can hear her breathing, still slowing. He wonders what is on television, and worries about work. He imagines the future, one completely devoid of the fear that usually consumes him. He sees himself sitting in the office of a two-story house, working at his computer. He looks at the photographs arranged around his desk, the frames are a mahogany stained a deep red. There is one photograph of him and his wife on their wedding day; one of his wife in a wicker basket with nothing but blue sky framing her; and, in a small frame off to the side, a silhouette of her in a window seat reading a book with an orange blaze of a sunset exploding across the sky behind her. He wonders if they’ll have time to take a hike into the woods tomorrow, to take some photos and maybe have a small lunch among the mushrooms and undergrowth. His wife comes in with a glass of water and some toast. She leans over him and kisses him lightly on the lips, and he can smell her shampoo, the same kind she’s used since the day he met her. It smells like home, and he smiles.