was crying, I kept pulling down the hall and toward the couch. Fuck it. Fuck it. I finally pushed my weight up. I rolled onto my back on the couch and sunk in. Pain kept coming and going in waves through my chest. Pain throbbed down the backs of my thighs, it burned my knees, it prickled all through my ribs. I’ll never be with you again. That was pain. My body was tight and packed into a tube. Over and over in my head it was playing: I don’t want this. You don’t love me. God I wanted it to stop. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to get rid of myself, alone like a fool at his chest.
TWO
Jupiter laughed aloud: ‘We have the answer.
There is a fellow called Tiresias.
Strolling to watch the birds and hear the bees
We came across two serpents capitulating.
He took the opportunity to kill
Both with a single blow, but merely hurt them –
And found himself transformed into a woman.
‘After the seventh year of womanhood,
Strolling to ponder on what women ponder
She saw in that same place the same two serpents
Knotted as before in copulation.
‘If your pain can still change your attacker
Just as you once changed me, then change me back.’
She hit the couple with a handy stick,
‘And there he stood as male as any man.‚Äô
‘He’ll explain,’ cried Juno, ‘why you are
Slave to your irresistible addiction
While the poor nymphs you force to share it with you
Do all they can to shun it.’
– Ovid, The Metamorphoses
MAN NO. 1
It was just turning light in the room. I saw her lying there, dead to the world. Her head was hanging off the dirty beige couch. I walked up. I stood over her. I touched her breast, it was heaving up and down. My finger sunk in and I gripped my cock.
Her cheeks looked puffy. Her eyelids were dark. I pulled up her skirt. I was breathing so hard that I thought I might wake her. I started peeling down her underwear. My finger got stuck around the elastic. She was shifting around. I knew I had to go faster. I pulled her underwear down to her knees. I felt like I was running without moving. I thought she was going to wake up. I held the head of my cock, put it right where she was splitting. I spread her lips with two fingers.
Then I climbed onto the couch and grabbed her thighs with my knees. I pushed my cock up her. Fuck, I couldn’t help it. She started making these grunts. My heart was pounding.
I dropped so my palms ended flat on the couch beside her tits. There was a coffee stain beside her neck that looked like a smeared star. I felt her warm jiggling against my wrists. I was sliding my dick in and out of her now, it was going all the way in, my cock hard inside her. I couldn’t stop doing it, grunting with her. She felt like she was coming through the back of me. Every time I pumped toward her head it made her boobs shake more. I saw the slits of the whites of her eyes. I didn’t know if she knew it was me. I couldn’t stop fucking her body. And her insides were getting hotter, her hips pushed up to meet me. She was breathing faster than me now. Her lips were limp, I saw her tongue.
Moving in and out, I wanted to finish, I wanted to come, my cock was going in and out and she was whipping her head side to side. On one stroke, we stuck together with my dick pushing up in her before bursting, and I toppled to pull out, my come shooting on her stomach.
I lay there breathing heavily, flat on her flesh. I wanted to say something to her, my lips were near her neck. I could smell food behind her in the cracks of the pillows.
These little whines were curling out of her mouth. I wanted to say something to make her stop. I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I wanted to say something like that, I’m sorry. But I felt a stem in my throat and I started coughing. The next thing I knew I was pushing off her completely. Standing over her. She was still lying there dead to the world. The smell of something humid, that dirty beige couch, the smell of her was all over me.
‘I can’t open my eyes!’ she whispered.
I felt sick to my stomach. She was scaring me now. The whites of her eyes were flickering under her lids. It was like she was watching me from the window of a train. I’d pushed off her too roughly. I walked out of the room, fast, down the hall. I shut myself in her bathroom. The bath mat was burgundy, shaggy and wet. I heard her yelling after me, ‘You fucked me in my sleep! You fucked me in my sleep!’ I knew that if I stayed in there long enough, she would fall back asleep so I could leave on my own.
MAN NO. 2
My friend knew that I hadn’t been with anyone in a while. He told me about this girl at the bar where he worked who’d been coming in for about a year. He said she always came alone, and she almost always left with someone different. He said she was really good-looking. My friend told me he thought that she’d just broken up with someone, because she’d hadn’t come in for a couple months and now she was back, a few nights a week, sitting alone. She hadn’t let anyone take her home yet, my friend said, but I bet if you came you’d get her.
The night I decided to go, I was feeling pretty good. I remember the second I walked into the club I saw my friend and her talking already. He saw me right away too. He pointed to me and she turned around and smiled. She was really good-looking. Her hair was long and dark and kind of wild at the bottom. Her breasts were large. She was wearing a short skirt, bare legs. Her legs were uncrossed. We didn’t talk so much right away. I felt like I couldn’t really speak to her. We just sat beside each other and drank. I saw her hands were gripping her wineglass and rubbing up and down the stem. I moved in a bit closer to her so that our arms were touching. She didn’t pull away.
Then my friend started giving us a bunch of drinks on the house. We began talking, I don’t even remember about what, and I let my hand go under the bar. My fingers started touching the top of her thigh. She was letting me, I mean she relaxed into it, and I could feel that feeling of knowing in us both. I wasn’t used to that kind of knowing in a girl. And she was smiling, pretending like it wasn’t even happening, which was turning me on more. I began rubbing her thigh, feeling up the crack of her legs pressing together.
When I got up to her panties she turned to me and her eyes were glassy.
‘I’m going home now. You want to come with?’
We were drunk. I grabbed her hand and we left the bar fast together. I’d forgotten to say goodbye to my friend. While we were sitting in the cab on the way to her place, I started feeling up in the exact same place on her thighs. This time she spread her legs open a bit for me. I slid my hand under the bottom of her skirt. My fingers dug into her thighs. Her relaxation was tightness now, it was amazing, it was like she knew how to play with that line. I felt this heat coming from her pussy. Her panties were wet. She was squirming for me.
When we got to her building, she led me up two flights of stairs. I watched the parts of her
