SALON

Tuesday, Jul 11, 2000 7:30 PM UTC

31 Ejaculations: No. 27

The first thing I did was lick her.

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Topics: Sex, Love and Sex,

I was in my last year of college. Exhausted all the time. Wasted, studying, writing the big papers, never sleeping. And of course, when it’s the last thing you should be doing, that’s the best time to fall in love. I should be studying, I should be getting that “Pass.” Or else. Or else what? Something about threatening the future makes sex so much more exciting.

I was in the library, slumped in one of those oversized chairs designed specifically for napping. I was trying to cram “Weimar Culture” into my numb brain and couldn’t do it. I kept looking up at her, across the way, looking so perfect. If I remember correctly she was pre-med, studying large molecules. We had run into each other in class a hundred times, had talked at parties. And now here we were, breathing the same dead bookish air.

I suggested we take a break and get coffee downstairs at the dumb vending machines. As we sipped the sour fluid, barely speaking, we could smell the spring air leaking in from a propped-open exit door. Spring was out there, beckoning. And I had my own apartment. We walked out, young enough to convince ourselves that we were seriously planning to go to my place and hit the books.

When we got there, the door barely closed, we dropped our book bags and I’m not even sure we kissed. A total clichi, a trail of clothes into my bedroom, then a hurtling embrace, crashing into walls, and down onto my futon on the floor.

The first thing I did was lick her. A taste, then right inside, then up onto the little bump, and then around the edges. I loved the feeling of her hands in my hair, stroking me, encouraging me. Kissed the insides of her thighs, leaned back, pulled her legs up around my face and kissed her ankles. I looked down into her eyes and she was so ready. So I dove in. Just like dropping out of an airplane, smooth and wild in the pit of my stomach.

In those days, it would all happen so fast, I couldn’t wait to do it the second time. The first orgasm was only the appetizer. And that night, I guess I didn’t want to go back to studying Brecht and Grosz. Ever again.

Sex is a journey, I don’t know what it’s like for anyone else, but for me, it’s an expedition. One thing follows the last, you never know what’s around the next corner. Oh, here are her ribs, her nipples, her armpits. Now I pin her wrists over her head, smell her hair, love her ears, her neck, never leave her neck. And down beneath these clouds of loving, PG-rated embrace, I’m in her.

I loved fucking all night when I was tired. Drifting along, now it’s fast, now it’s slow. A river with lazy shallows and rapids and weird curves.

Is there such a thing as ESP? There must be, I’ve experienced it. Suddenly everything snaps into nothing but surface, skin to skin to skin to skin and then blink, only our mouths, our lips, our teeth. Then just my prick in her, going, going, like a little animal, a weasel, burrowing desperately for all it’s worth. Then all is slow again. I’m traveling with flowing lava instead of white rapids.

Sometimes there are no images, just shadows and smells and little whispering moans and sounds. Then we shift and I’m behind her and I can see all of her, I can see all of me too. I watch myself running in and out of her body. It’s a puzzle. This is me, but it’s not me. We are figures, taut and electric, snapping into one another over and over. And then collapsing into almost nothing, almost sleep for a few seconds, and then, embracing and gently, so delicately, finding it again, the rhythm, that place, where we float along on our raft of pleasure. Eventually, we come, in a spasm, like all spasms, no different than the whip of a shrimp’s tail or the reflex knee-kick at the doctor’s office. An affirmation that, “Yeah, we have no choice, we have to come, we are animals, that’s all we are.” But it’s getting there that makes all the difference, isn’t it?

Read No. 28.

Eric Bogosian is an actor and writer. His solo shows include "Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll" and "Wake Up and Smell the Coffee." His novel "Mall" will be published by Simon & Schuster in November. More Eric Bogosian.

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