Sinning in LA

Weeks have passed and there is nothing. The ocean is still as summer creeps away to fall.  The air is stale.  It’s as if the entire city has exhaled from the chaos of summer and now is settling into its lull.  Showers don’t clean the skin anymore, but just provide respite from the endless sun. 

I weave my way through the parties of the season in all their hedonistic glory, but nothing piques my interest.  Always I turn and see the blue eyes searing into my back and skull.  I won’t speak to him but the eyes are always there watching.  Whatever.  It ended, and badly.  Attempts at conversation have failed on both ends.  I dance with Angela with my back to him.  Her voice carries over what I already know. “He is totally staring at you,” she said.  

Finally, at the end of August, I break.  “What are you doing” I text, too chickenshit to call. His response is almost instant.

“I’m actually not banging a bunch of chicks tonight, but home, just got food, and a movie, welcome to cruise by…”

Jesus.  You have got to be fucking kidding me.  I actually start getting withdrawal sweats.  My friend Ellie knows what I am doing and is on the phone instantly.  She had bailed on a glass of wine with me and now seeing the level of desperation I am at, she is running to stage an intervention.  “I will have you over, we will drink wine, I will chain you to my fucking coffee table!”

I ignore everything. I am sane, smart and healthy.  Right now all I can think about is the wanting.  It isn’t even him.  It’s not his personality, his face, or his body.  I just want.  I want what I couldn’t have.  I want the chase.  I want the hunt and bad sex notwithstanding, that couldn’t have been his best.  There is something unresolved here picking at us both.  Or he’s just alone and horny, but that’s doubtful with a black book full of willing names.   Weeks of eyeballing each other, watching leads back to where you start in the first place. 

He picks me up.  “You look really nice,” he says.

I was dressed up to meet Ellie, sheer white gauzy dress, shorter than a whisper.  My place this time, nice, low light, art, furnished, cool with taste compared to his mismatched post-dorm castoffs for a 35-year-old.  We smoke a bit and watch Jay-Z on Bill Mahr. Welcome to the grownup world, nitwit. 

 That gives way to a full-on, all-night thing.  His hand slides up my skirt, fingers loop on the lace thong and work it downward…  There on the sofa, in the living room, in the full view of God, Country and anyone walking by; we start on each other for the first time like we actually mean it.  In seconds we are both almost naked and our hands are the only things working harder than our mouths.  Time to go into the bedroom…

“I wanted to do this the first time I saw you,” he gasps somewhere between rounds two and five.  We are barely speaking but cannot stop.

It is one of those nights that you think about when your mind wanders, looking out an airplane window wanting to be anyplace else.  Now no one is in charge and the train is running down the tracks out of control.   People like us really should be kept apart from each other. 

This could be bad… or incredibly good.  I want to crawl under his skin until I am exhausted, til I’ve had enough, til I’m sick of him, but just keep coming back for more.  Rolling all over the bed, sheets stripped down to nothing and breaking after each finish then starting again. 

All night as the hours stretch by, and when an evening isn’t beginning at 2 a.m. with a drunken flailing, it is much longer I realize.  I rouse him for another round, waiting for him to cry uncle, or need rest, or sleep or intravenous fluids, even Viagra.  He doesn’t.  But I won’t stop either.  Every two hours, all night long.  Normal people would be exhausted or dead… but it’s becoming very evident that neither of us is quite normal. 

Still rational, I wonder when he is going to leave, since he was so quick to throw my ass onto the street.  I contemplate returning the favor so he can suck on the cheap used feeling, but somehow I am more curious to see when he goes on his own.  He falls asleep, hand on my back, I turn away and he rolls towards me putting the hand back. He left in the morning when it was light.  

A talent I have with this one will rear its head by Wednesday, as we fight about nothing, started by me, fueled by three bottomless glasses of wine.  I invite a repeat Friday but he has family in town.  I wonder if something is wrong.  See him the next morning when I arrive at an event we both had to attend - but not together.  His hand lightly touches the small of my back and I feel warm inside.  It’s okay.  He smiles at me and his eyes crinkle and I brush aside any worry.

As the day goes I see him.  He doesn’t come by.  I noticed him, head down, pounding away on his phone.  His face isn’t happy.  I send a playful message co-authored by my friend Heather.  She and I have been known to play advance games together and make excellent teammates.  The response comes an hour.  “What does he say!?” Heather bounds up towards the phone.  I grab it smiling, and drop it a second later.

“hey, just fyi, I have decided to start seeing someone new and out of respect to you thgt u shld know and that we will just be friends from here on out.” 

What!  Wait, it’s Saturday.  He was here seven days ago.  He didn’t mention anything on Wednesday.  Or Friday.  Or today.  What?  My stomach heaves and I literally feel the floor move for a second. 

Heather catches the phone from my falling hand and doesn’t say anything as I stumble out of the room and run my bath.  She is reading and rereading everything seeing where the warning was…  She comes in, her face dark with concern. 

Mine is apparently chalk white and the weak smile I manage betrays shock.  She helps me craft a coherent response.  “You said you weren’t looking for someone- but you were- just not me.  I liked you and wanted a real chance.  I wish you would have sent this last Friday because I had a great time and was hoping to see you again – even tho I don’t always behave like that.  My loss.”

Heather objects to the truth in the message wanting to harden and toughen the tone.  But I think he knows that I am fully capable of being a scorching bitch.  The response is instant, “Sorry, but wanted to be honest and up front and this just happened.  Still friends I hope.  Take care.”  Heather sends the second polite text confirming our mutual friendship.  I lie in the hot water with a cloth over my face.  “We are going out.” She says.  “Really, I am not up for it,” I say truthfully.  All I want is Ben and Jerry’s Cake Batter Ice Cream and Natalie Imbruglia on a continuous loop and a robe to curl up and cry…all night.

She won’t have it, taking my phone away and forcing me to dress.  Not cute enough.  Change.  Okay, better, but you still look pathetic - more makeup.  She is tolerantly pleased.  She briefed the gang on what happened – and their ire towards him is palpable,  this time the pack swirls protectively.  “That was bullshit” the guys say in disapproving guy speak.

My phone is absconded instantly.  I am drunk within an hour despite my protest to each drink poured down my throat.  The girls tuck me into bed in my Christmas nightie with long sleeves and a hood despite the 80 degree temperature in my house by one. 

The next day I sit, and my sunglasses hide both the hang over and my eyes as they watch him, and a girl.  She is tall.  Pretty-ish.  He is holding her hand.  They are walking around holding hands.  Are you fucking kidding me?  Holding hands?  Are we ten years old now?  STD wants a girlfriend?!?  I couldn’t do that.  Not with him.  Not in the open.  That could never happen.  I couldn’t be that fool.  Not like that.  I always knew that.  But never asked myself if I wanted it.  Heather grimly surveys the scene from beneath her sunglasses, her mouth drawn into a disapproving straight line.  She leans over her Texas wisdom cracking open a Bud Light Lime, and says, “Ya know what sweetie… just remember when you have to put out a fire… Stop Drop and Roll.”