I MET ERIC two years ago, when Dayna had a big party to celebrate getting a promotion at her lab, something that involved a bonus and increased time with rabbits. She told me she’d invited a couple of young guys who’d moved in across the street; one of them had a girlfriend but the other was exactly my type, and also the type who probably wouldn’t go for her, anyway. Dayna is very beautiful, she just has a way of thrusting herself at men, emotionally stripping for them on a first date. She assumes men prefer me because I’m smaller — she’s six feet tall, stunning, but six feet tall — while I think it’s just because she tries too hard, opens up too massively. She drowns you with all of herself, with a flood of vulnerability, trust, need, and I know that the success of sex depends on contrivance, in holding yourself back. It’s the tease, not the strip. You offer up your soul for a taste; it’s like an invitation to feed.
Eric turned out to be twenty-three, six years younger than Dayna and me, and striking, a wonderfully alpine six feet four, which was certainly tall enough for Dayna, but I saw what she meant by my type — tall and bold men always make me feel sexual, nymphetish — and also what she meant by he probably wouldn’t go for her, anyway. He didn’t want a drowning torrent of intimacy; he wanted to get laid. We sat on the floor of Dayna’s apartment for an hour at the party’s wane, drinking beer and making suggestive, clever comments to each other while he played Ball with Tess. He petted her and scratched her tummy, not realizing that being sweet to my sweet little dog was a litmus test of sexual acceptability, a wildly effective and endearing form of foreplay. She adored him, draped herself trustingly across his lap, her little almond eyes slanted closed in bliss. But that wasn’t why I wanted him, badly, really; it was the adamant and unabashed sex look of him, his way of dirty, lustful regard. His look said Sex, said Fuck, suck me, I’m hard, said It’s specifically, singularly, because of you. I suddenly realized I hadn’t been fully looked at that way in a while, maybe a long while. It used to happen all the time, but not so often anymore. Eric looked at me that way, and I wanted to get his cock inside me, fast, to hold on to that look. His hands stroking Tess’s tummy — I wanted them on me, working me, shoving my thighs apart, pressing me face down by my shoulders or the back of my neck into a pillow, raising my hips high from behind, guiding my head. I wanted to leave with him that second, but I knew Dayna would be upset. So I waited another half hour to suggest he show me his new place across the street, and in answer he circled me hard around the waist, leaned over, and kissed me — more gently than I’d expected, but still his arm was firm, ruling — and then we left. I took Tess with me, and her latest in the series of hard rubber periwinkle blue balls; Dayna had wanted us to sleep over, but hey, she was the one who’d tossed me this guy in the first place.
I hate fucking men who get moony or coy about it, who act as if there’s an element of accident that you’re here, doing this, as if you both tripped and wound up landing naked in bed. Eric was brusque and unsheepish, as fearless of sex as a porn star. He had the hard, tapered male torso I like, skin so fluid and seamless your hand slides, slides. My own skin is starting to dry, slightly — I shouldn’t go in the jacuzzi too often — I’ve noticed fine, thin wrinkles when I twist the loosening flesh of my upper arms, I’ve grown a little self-conscious of my babyish pout of belly. But the sex was an endlessly wet, vehement, pounded smooth kind of sex that wiped out doubt.
During the first surge of it, on Eric’s living room sofa — a velour playpen-style couch still smelling faintly of frat house joints and beer — Tess had stretched out drowsily at the far end, behind Eric’s hunching, jarring back, out of his view. We reeled to his bed afterward, while he was still solid and driven and I could still jolt at a slightest touch of his tongue, to start all over. She picked up her ball and padded after us, climbed upon a bolster we’d thrown on the floor, and went back to sleep. I’d had Tess for a little over four years by then but had never fucked anyone with her in the room before; I typically went to the guy’s house and left afterward, because, after all, Tess would be home, waiting for me, needing to go out. I liked my bed all to ourselves. After the second time, I got up, awkwardly — my legs felt permanently locked apart at the hips, hinged wide — and fumbled for clothing, but Eric grabbed an ankle and pulled me back onto the quilted bedspread. Mock-wrestle, mock-struggle, and Tess jumped up on the bed with us to play, her mouth full of periwinkle ball. He had me pinned on my side, was fumbling with himself, aiming, when Tess dropped and shoved her ball at him—Get out of here, dog, go on, he said — wedging it under his thigh—You want to play with my ball? Here, look, here’s a ball! You want to play? Please, please! — and kept shoving, desperate for his attention, his affirming and engaged throw of the ball. I tried squirming upward, trying to glide, grasp him inside me, distract him, but one more ball-shove from Tess—Would you get her the fuck out of here? he snapped at me — and he jerked out a leg, catching her just at her midsection’s arching curve, and hurled her off the bed. She yelped, I saw in the streetlamp’s light through the window an apricot blur, and heard her smack the wall, heard her flurry slide to the ground.
I was up and to her in a second—Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that, okay? — and she was fine, just bewildered. She poked her damp pink tongue in my ear and hiccupped like a little human baby, and I cradled her, rubbing her tummy. She was fine, but I wanted to cry. Eric kept apologizing, coaxing me back, and when I looked at him in disgust he finally said I was overreacting, just being neurotic, I shouldn’t indulge her so much, I was probably going to wind up some weird old lady living alone with forty-seven poodles. I carried her out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind us. Then I didn’t know what to do. It was almost three, I knew Dayna was asleep, and I didn’t want to go wake her up, explain what had happened. She’d be furious; worse, she’d be smug. And Tess’s ball was still in the bedroom with Eric; I wasn’t leaving without it. I wasn’t going to leave her without a ball.